When a stone has been tossed into a pond, the ripples gradually and symmetrically grow smaller. A Chesterton novel is like an adventurous voyage of discovery, which begins on smooth water and is made with the object of finding the causes of the ripples. As ripple succeeds ripple--or chapter follows chapter--so we have to keep a tighter hold on such tangible things as are within our reach. Finally we reach the centre of the excitement and are either sucked into a whirlpool, or hit on the head with a stone. When we recover consciousness we feebly remember we have had a thrilling journey and that we had started out with a misapprehension of the quality of Chestertonian fiction. A man whose memory is normal should be able to give an accurate synopsis of a novel six months after he has read it. But I should be greatly surprised if any reader of _The Ball and the Cross_ could tell exactly what it was all about, within a month or two of reading it. The discontinuity of it makes one difficulty; the substitution of paradox for incident makes another. Yet it is difficult to avoid the conviction that this novel will survive its day and the generation that begot it. If it was Chesterton's endeavour (as one is bound to suspect) to show that the triumph of atheism would lead to the triumph of a callous and inhuman body of scientists, then he has failed miserably. But if he was attempting to prove that the uncertainties of religion were trivial things when compared with the uncertainties of atheism, then the verdict must be reversed. The dialogues on religion contained in _The Ball and the Cross_ are alone enough and more than enough to place it among the few books on religion which could be safely placed in the hands of an atheist or an agnostic with an intelligence.
If we consider _Manalive_ (1912) now we shall be departing from strict chronological order, as it was preceded by _The Innocence of Father Brown_. It will, however, be more satisfactory to take the two Father Brown books together. In the first of these and _Manalive_, a change can be distinctly felt. It is not a simple weakening of the power of employing instruments, such as befell Ibsen when, after writing The Lady from the Sea, he could no longer keep his symbols and his characters apart. It is a more subtle change, a combination of several small changes, which cannot be studied fairly in relation only to one side of Chesterton's work. In the last chapter an attempt will be made to analyze these, for the present I can only indicate some of the fallings-off noticeable in _Manalive_, and leave it at that. Chesterton's previous romances were not constructed, the reader may have gathered, with that minute attention to detail which makes some modern novels read like the report of a newly promoted detective. But a man may do such things and yet be considered spotless. Shakespeare, after all, went astray on several points of history and geography. The authors of the Old Testament talked about "the hare that cheweth the cud." And, if any reader should fail to see the application of these instances to modern fiction, I can only recommend him to read Vanity Fair and find out how many children had the Rev. Bute Crawley, and what were their names. No, the trouble with _Manalive_ is not in its casual, happy-go-lucky construction. It is rather in a certain lack of ease, a tendency to exaggerate effects, a continual stirring up of inconsiderable points. But let us come to the story.