Retraité de l'administration indienne, le squire Vane vit retiré dans son domaine de Cornouailles. Un soir, il s'enfonce dans un bois aux prétendus pouvoirs maléfiques et ne reparaît plus. Ses invités, le poète John Treheme et le critique américain Cyprian Painter, vont mener l'enquête.

Les arbres d'orgueil

The Napoleon of Notting Hill is G. K. Chesterton's first novel. Published in 1904, it is set at the end of the twentieth century. London is still a city of gas lamps and horse-drawn vehicles, but democratic government has withered away, and a representative ordinary citizen is simply chosen for a list to be king.

Le Napoléon de Notting Hill

«Si le privilège des poètes est d'exprimer le mystère, ne l'expriment-ils authentiquement qu'ils ne réfutent du même coup l'ordre quotidien des choses comme arbitrairement établi et ne prennent parti pour le "désordre" ? Ou tout au contraire la quotidienneté des choses, soit la "banalité", ne constitue-t-elle pas en soi le mystère trop apparent pour qu'il soit seulement reconnu ?"Le rare, le merveilleux, c'est d'atteindre le but ; le vulgaire, le normal, c'est de le manquer."»

Le Nommé Jeudi : Un Cauchemar

The flying ship of Professor Lucifer sang through the skies like a silver arrow; the bleak white steel of it, gleaming in the bleak blue emptiness of the evening. That it was far above the earth was no expression for it; to the two men in it, it seemed to be far above the stars. The professor had himself invented the flying machine, and had also invented nearly everything in it. Every sort of tool or apparatus had, in consequence, to the full, that fantastic and distorted look which belongs to the miracles of science. For the world of science and evolution is far more nameless and elusive and like a dream than the world of poetry and religion; since in the latter images and ideas remain themselves eternally, while it is the whole idea of evolution that identities melt into each other as they do in a nightmare.

The Ball and the Cross

THE suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical. It was described with some justice as an artistic colony, though it never in any definable way produced any art. But although its pretensions to be an intellectual centre were a little vague, its pretensions to be a pleasant place were quite indisputable. The stranger who looked for the first time at the quaint red houses could only think how very oddly shaped the people must be who could fit in to them

The Man Who Was Thursday

Hérétiques

Le Poète et les lunatiques

THE human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called, "Keep tomorrow dark, " and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill

La Croix Bleue est le premier récit que Chesterton consacra à son grand personnage, le père Brown, dont la condition de prêtre catholique, rompu aux confessions du tout-venant, lui assure les meilleures dispositions pour la résolution des affaires criminelles. A la différence d'un Sherlock Holmes, aux méthodes fièrement scientifiques, le père Brown fait preuve d'humilité et d'un raisonnement davantage intuitif, qui lui permet de se glisser "dans la peau" du criminel. Par l'empathie et l'amour du prochain dont son héros fait preuve, Chesterton sait muer les enquêtes du père Brown en de véritables essais sur la nature humaine. A ce titre, Le Secret du père Brown renferme une thèse essentielle : "Nul homme n'est véritablement bon tant qu'il n'a pas compris combien il est mauvais, ou combien il pourrait l'être."

Les arbres d'orgueil

Résumé

Plus de livres de G.K. Chesterton

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