Walking last week in a cold frosty twilight under a full moon, I was reminded of this passage that concludes one of G.K.Chesterton’s ‘Father Brown’ stories, ‘The Dagger with Wings’. I must admit that just as I read Sherlock Holmes for the ambience and the characterisation rather than for the actual puzzles, so I read Father Brown stories for their descriptive passages rather than for their implausible solutions to improbable crimes. Chesterton’s prose does tend to the purple, but at its best has a luminous, otherworldly quality that encourages one to view the familiar with new eyes, using what Chesterton in his study of Charles Dickens calls the Mooreeffoc effect. This is based on an anecdote of Dickens in which Dickens describes seeing from the wrong side the words COFFEE ROOM painted on an oval glass plate, leading him to a realisation of how fantastic even the commonplace may appear when viewed at great distances of time and space, or simply from an unusual angle. Chesterton describes this as ‘the principle that the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact’, and certainly in that cold twilight it did suddenly for a moment seem strange to me, to be alive on a spinning globe in the void, walking under a great silver rock suspended in the sky.

From ‘The Dagger With Wings’

When the priest went forth again and set his face homeward, the cold had grown more intense and yet was somehow intoxicating. The trees stood up like silver candelabra of some incredible cold candlemas of purification. It was a piercing cold, like that silver sword of pure pain that once pierced the very heart of purity. But it was not a killing cold, save in the sense of seeming to kill all the mortal obstructions to our immortal and immeasurable vitality. The pale green sky of twilight, with one star like the star of Bethlehem, seemed by some strange contradiction to be a cavern of clarity. It was as if there could be a green furnace of cold which wakened all things to life like warmth, and that the deeper they went into those cold crystalline colours the more were they light like winged creatures and clear like coloured glass! It tingled with truth and it divided truth from error with a blade like ice; but all that was left had never felt so much alive. It was as if all joy were a jewel in the heart of an iceberg. The priest hardly understood his own mood as he advanced deeper and deeper into the green gloaming, drinking deeper and deeper draughts of that virginal vivacity of the air. Some forgotten muddle and morbidity seemed to be left behind, or wiped out as the snow had painted out the footprints of the man of blood. As he shuffled homewards through the snow, he muttered to himself: ‘And yet he is right enough about there being a white magic, if he only knows where to look for it.’

G.K.Chesterton