Against the background of all these activities the books went on pouring out as fast from Overroads as they had from Overstrand. A town full of friends forty minutes' journey from London was not exactly the desert into which admirers had advised Gilbert to flee, but he would never have been happy in a desert: he needed human company. He also needed to produce. "Artistic paternity," he once said, "is as wholesome as physical paternity." And certainly he never ceased to bring forth the children of his mind. Within two years of the move seven books were published:
The Ball and the Cross, February 1910,
What's Wrong with the World, June 1910,
Alarms and Discursions, November 1910,
Blake, November 1910,
Criticisms and Appreciations of Dickens, January 1911,
Innocence of Father Brown, August 1911,
Ballad of the White Horse, August 1911.
Of these books, Alarms and Discursions and the Dickens criticisms are collections and arrangements of already published essays. Meanwhile other essays were being written to become in turn other books at a later date.
The Blake is a brilliant short study of art and mysticism. After reading it you feel you understand Blake in quite a new way. And then you wonder—is this illumination light on Blake or simply light on Chesterton? It must never be forgotten that the writer was himself a "spoilt" artist—which means a man with almost enough art in him to have been in the ranks of men consecrated for life to art's service.
"Father Brown" had first made his appearance in magazines and these detective stories became the most purely popular of Gilbert's books. It was a new genre: detection in which the mind of a man means more than his footprints or cigar ash, even to the detective. The one reproduced in most anthologies—"The Invisible Man"—depends for its solution on the fact that certain people are morally invisible. To the question "Has anyone been here" the answer "No" does not include the milkman or the postman: thus the postman is the morally invisible man who has committed the crime. A thread of this sort runs through all the stories, but they are, like all his romances, full too of escape and peril and wild adventure.
Life on several occasions imitated Gilbert's fancies. Thus the Azeff revelations followed his fantastic idea in The Man Who Was Thursday of the anarchists who turn out to be detectives in disguise. The technique of Father Brown himself was imitated by a man in Detroit who recovered a stolen car by putting himself imaginatively in the thief's place and driving an exactly similar car around likely corners till he came suddenly upon his own, left in a lonely road. He wrote to tell Gilbert of this adventure.
From Chicago came an even odder example. "It is extremely difficult," wrote the Tribune, "to determine the proper relationship of the Chiesa-Prudente-Di Cossato duels to Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton's book, The Ball and the Cross" . . .
The flight in search of a duelling ground; the pursuit by the police; the friendly intervention of the anarchist wineshop-keeper, Volpi; the offer of his backyard for fighting purposes; the unfriendly intervention of the police; the friendly intervention of the reporters; the renewed and insistently unfriendly intervention of the police commissioner; the disgust of the duellists; the extreme disgust of the anarchist; the renewed flight of the fighters, seconds, physicians, reporters, and the anarchist over the back fences—all these and other incidents are essentially Chestertonian.
The Di Cossato affair was carried off with fully as much spirit and dash; with fully as many automobiles, seconds, physicians, reporters and police, all scampering over the country roads until the artistic deputy and the aged veteran of the war of 1859, outdistancing their pursuers, could find opportunity in comparative peace to cut the glorious gashes of satisfied honour in each other's faces.*
[* Chicago Tribune, 12 March 1910.]