Books in Brief: Daylight and Nightmare: Uncollected Stories and Fables

Daylight and Nightmare: Uncollected Stories and Fables, by G. K. Chesterton, edited by Marie Smith (Dodd, Mead, 144 pp., $14.95)

Culled from the pages of G. K.’s Weekly, the old Daily News, and several other hard-to-obtain sources, 32 of Chesterton’s short works of fiction, few of them previously collected, are brought together in Daylight and Nightmare. And to the reader’s delight, most of these pieces bear the postmark of their author’s undisputed domain, Topsy-Turvydom. Mooncalves, dragons, and galloping nightmares appear herein, as do sword-wielding cavaliers, medieval knights, and Chesterton’s favorite modern grotesques: the vapid, complacent English aristocrat (in “Dukes”) and the pushy American go-getter (in “The Paradise of Human Fishes”). Mere creatures of appetite, devoid of faith, hope, and charity, these last two stand in marked contrast to the perfectly sane man, who, as Chesterton presents him in this collection and throughout his canon, will appear to the great mass of men as a threat and a lunatic. Refusing to worship the spirit of the age, he is at sword’s point with the ruthless innovator and the snuffling votary of what Owen Barfield has called “chronological parochialism”—the belief that all preceding eras of history and culture were not only vastly different from one’s own, but vastly inferior as well. In “A Nightmare,” the narrator records how a gathering of such self-appointed sages contrives to “straighten” the dome of St. Paul’s. Having seen this architectural feat accomplished, the narrator hears the gripe of the perpetual reformer: “ ‘Do you not see,’ he whispered, ‘the sky is crooked?’ ” Here and throughout the book are distant but delicious rumors of themes addressed more fully in Chesterton’s better-known books, notably The Man Who Was Thursday and The Everlasting Man. And all the familiar thematic threads lead to that central paradox that awed Chesterton to the end of his days: “that it is he who has really gone round the whole world who is anxious to come home; that the end of wisdom is the beginning of life; and that God Himself bowed down to enter a narrow door, in the hour when the Word was made flesh.”

About the Author

James E. Person Jr.

Mr. Person is the author of Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind and Earl Hamner: From Walton's Mountain to Tomorrow.

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Daylight and Nightmare: Uncollected Stories and Fables, by G. K. Chesterton, edited by Marie Smith (Dodd, Mead, 144 pp., $14.95)

Culled from the pages of G. K.’s Weekly, the old Daily News, and several other hard-to-obtain sources, 32 of Chesterton’s short works of fiction, few of them previously collected, are brought together in Daylight and Nightmare. And to the reader’s delight, most of these pieces bear the postmark of their author’s undisputed domain, Topsy-Turvydom. Mooncalves, dragons, and galloping nightmares appear herein, as do sword-wielding cavaliers, medieval knights, and Chesterton’s favorite modern grotesques: the vapid, complacent English aristocrat (in “Dukes”) and the pushy American go-getter (in “The Paradise of Human Fishes”). Mere creatures of appetite, devoid of faith, hope, and charity, these last two stand in marked contrast to the perfectly sane man, who, as Chesterton presents him in this collection and throughout his canon, will appear to the great mass of men as a threat and a lunatic. Refusing to worship the spirit of the age, he is at sword’s point with the ruthless innovator and the snuffling votary of what Owen Barfield has called “chronological parochialism”—the belief that all preceding eras of history and culture were not only vastly different from one’s own, but vastly inferior as well. In “A Nightmare,” the narrator records how a gathering of such self-appointed sages contrives to “straighten” the dome of St. Paul’s. Having seen this architectural feat accomplished, the narrator hears the gripe of the perpetual reformer: “ ‘Do you not see,’ he whispered, ‘the sky is crooked?’ ” Here and throughout the book are distant but delicious rumors of themes addressed more fully in Chesterton’s better-known books, notably The Man Who Was Thursday and The Everlasting Man. And all the familiar thematic threads lead to that central paradox that awed Chesterton to the end of his days: “that it is he who has really gone round the whole world who is anxious to come home; that the end of wisdom is the beginning of life; and that God Himself bowed down to enter a narrow door, in the hour when the Word was made flesh.”