The Literary Relationship Between G. K. Chesterton and Karel Čapek

University College London
The Literary Relationship between G. K. Chesterton and Karel apek

Author(s): B. R. Bradbrook
Source: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 39, No. 93 (Jun., 1961), pp. 327-338
Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London,
School of Slavonic and East European Studies
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The Literary Relationship
between G. K. Chesterton
v
and Karel Capek

B. R. BRADBROOK
'INFLUENCES, influences-it makes me embarrassed, if I am to

admit them; it is a matter of embarras de richesse. . . . I have no great
opinion about originality.'" Karel Capek expressed this view in the
year I925, when he was already well known both in Czechoslovakia
and abroad after having produced some of his most original works,
such as 'R.U.R.', 'The Insect Play', 'Krakatit', 'The Absolute at
Large', 'The Macropulos Secret', 'Painful Stories' and the charming
travel-sketches from Italy and England. Capek's opinion about the
nature of literary creation could mean that he doubted his own
originality; retrospectively, however, one cannot but take his view
as an expression of his great modesty. Capek did not mind being
influenced by good writers; he said2 that he liked to learn from them
in order to enrich Czech literature-and yet, there is no mere
imitation in his work.
It is known that Capek admired English writers, especially G. K.
Chesterton, H. G. Wells, and G. B. Shaw. His correspondence
testifies to his delight in reading the works of G. K. Chesterton, but
the differences between these two writers are obvious. Chesterton's
exuberant carelessness about the verisimilitude of his characters and
his paradoxically pointed situations seem unlike Capek's striving
after logic and reality, with or without paradox. One cannot help
wondering how the sober, well-balanced, and sometimes even
moralising Capek could possibly have so much admiration for the
rather undisciplined English writer, to whom a teetotaller was
absolutely abhorrent.3 Yet, there are some very strong links between
them.
Capek's admiration for Chesterton's wit, fantasy and eccentric
conservatism appeared in print already in I 920 in his review of the
Czech translation of The Flying Inn.4 Later, whenever he asked his
friend Dr 0. Vocadlo for English books, those by Chesterton came
high on the list.5 It is almost certain that Capek did not read all
1 Karel Capek, Pozndmky o tvorbe (Notes on Creative Writing), Prague, I959, p. 79.
2 Ibid.
3 G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography, London, 1952, p. 37.
4 Ndrodni Listy, 2I May I920.
5 Letter from Dr. 0. Vocadlo to B. R. Bradbrook, spring 1955, undated.
328 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW
Chesterton's works, but he must have come across quite a number,

so that he would have known Chesterton well before he wrote the
majority of his own works. However, the fact that both Capek and
Chesterton were journalists and that they had some personal
characteristics in common accounts for many resemblances in their
works.
Their natural curiosity and interest in all sorts of things found an
outlet in journalism. Wit and the gift of observation even of little,
insignificant things, were common to both writers. Capek's attention
to detail is striking from the very beginning of his creative activity.
His collections of essays, 'Intimate Things', 'Calendar', 'How They
Do It', 'Concerning People', dealing in a light manner with such
deliberately miscellaneous subjects as dreams, melancholy, the barrel-
organ, names, the post, cats, etc. would have been written even
without his knowledge of Chesterton.
The affinity between these two writers is so close, that many of
their essay subjects are the same or similar; Chesterton's 'On Leisure'6
and Capek's 'In Praise of Leisure'7 even start in an almost identical
manner, but the development is different. Capek's essay was pub-
lished eight years before Chesterton's and it was translated into
English seven years after the publication of Chesterton's work.
Similarly, their criticism of cliches and meaningless phrases used in
everyday life8 does not suggest Chesterton's influence upon Capek:
the main instigator for Capek's 'Criticism of Words' was neither
Chesterton nor the long Czech puristic tradition, but Capek's
sincere love and admiration for his rich native tongue.
On the other hand, one can almost certainly say that Capek had
Chesterton's The Defendant in mind, when writing certain parts of
his book 'Marsyas, or on the Margin of Literature'. Chesterton's
gentle anarchism was admired by Capek: he applauded Chesterton's
defence of penny-dreadfuls, nonsense, useful information, ugly
things, farce, slang, and detective stories, because 'it does him good
to find pleasant things in the realms of bad reputation'.9
Penny-dreadfuls, probably not quite so popular at that time in
Czechoslovakia as in England, did not attract Capek to such an
extent as to make him write about them, but they drew his attention
to more modest forms of art, such as popular poetry, calendar
literature,'0 proverbs and sayings, suburban songs, novels for maids,
6 Generally Speaking.
7 'Intimate Things'.
8 Chesterton, 'On Maltreating Words', Capek, 'Criticism of Words'.
9 K. Oapek, 'In Praise of Newspapers', London, 1951, p. 122. This collection,
containing most of Capek's essays translated from his Marsyas, is called after the first
essay 'In Praise of Newspapers'.
10 Some popular Czech calendars contain also short stories and light reading for
peasants and people who are not likely to read books.
CHESTERTON AND CAPEK 329
and also detective stories, a genre which then belonged to the

proscribed kinds of literature. The first part of Capek's Marsyas,
called 'In Praise of Newspapers', proves that Capek had Chesterton
in mind when writing some of these essays. Describing the character-
istics of newspapers, Capek selects the same two features as
Chesterton does in his essay 'A Defence of Useful Information',
namely the exceptional nature of the events and their topicality:
In the papers you won't ever find that a cat has caught a blackbird or
given life to three kittens; you will always meet them there in a special,
unusual and frequently even in a sinister light, as, for instance, that a
mad cat has bitten a postman ... that in Plymouth, or some other
place, a cat with nine tails has been born, or something like that.11
And Chesterton:
By this essential taste for news, I mean the pleasure in hearing the
mere fact that a man has died at the age of i Io in South Wales, or that
the horses ran away at a funeral in San Francisco. Large masses of the early
faiths and politics of the world, numbers of the miracles and heroic
anecdotes are based primarily upon this love of something that has just
happened, this divine institution of gossip.12
About the topicality:
You will read about a gory fight between three locksmiths in Ste'panska'
Street, but you are not told about the gory battles that Caesar had with
the Gauls. For a thing to be gory or to be on fire is not enough; it must
be recent.13
And Chesterton:
When Christianity was named the good news, it spread rapidly, not
because it was good, but also because it was news.14
In the same essay, in fact, nearly on the same page as the two other
examples, Capek gives a direct reference to Chesterton:
By all this I mean to say what Chesterton already worried about, that is,
that the newspaper world is made up of exceptional events, unusual
cases ... .15
It might have been because of Chesterton's hint that 'epics were

only fit for children and nursemaids'16 that Capek wrote the charm-
ing essay in Marsyas, 'The Last Epos, or Novel for Maids'. Chesterton
pointed out that popular creations are written by nameless poets,17
11 K. Capek, 'In Praise of Newspapers', p. 8.
12 G. K. Chesterton, The Defendant, London, I 90I, p. 98.
13 'In Praise of Newspapers', p. 9.
14 The Defendant, p. 98.
16 'The Defence of Farce' (The Defendant, p. I 23).
17 Ibid., p. 142.
and Capek speaks about the same subject in his 'Last Epos' at greater
length; Chesterton's remark that 'all slang is metaphor and all
metaphor is poetry'18 probably led Capek to study the suburban,
rough songs, and to write his essay 'Songs of the Prague People' in
the same collection. Capek's Marsyas can be called Chestertonian,
for the influence is more obvious here than anywhere else, and yet,
Capek's individuality of expression does not suffer. No doubt
Chesterton himself would have found Capek's Marsyas engaging and
witty.
II
The detective story has no tradition in Czech literature and it was

known only from translations. Capek certainly knew Conan Doyle,
but it was again Chesterton to whom he was indebted for his interest
in this genre. Since Chesterton considered that the detective story
needed a defence, when he wrote his 'Defence of Detective Stories'
in The Defendant, it must have appeared all the more proscribed to
Capek whose Marsyas contains among others a witty and more
elaborate essay than Chesterton's, called 'Holmesiana, or about
Detective Stories'. Sherlock Holmes's power of deduction did not
dazzle Capek, who preferred Father Brown's intuition and common
sense, when he was creating his two unprofessional detectives,
Dr Mejzlik and MrJanfk, for his 'Tales from Two Pockets'. However,
though they possess the gift of intuition and other good qualities,
Capek's detectives are far from being copies of Father Brown. They
are acute and penetrating, but without the miraculous insight of
their Chestertonian colleague. Altogether, they are more realistic
than he is: they have not the ability to be on the spot at the very
moment, or even before a crime is committed, like the absolutely
infallible Father Brown, who, with his omniscience and almost
superhuman capabilities seems too perfect to be true. This is probably
what makes The Father Brown Stories slightly tedious in the long run,
while Capek's more realistic tales are fresh and lively from the
beginning to the end. However, it must be pointed out that none of
Capek's short stories is a real detective story, no matter how much
they may appear so. The preoccupation with the human soul and its
problems is inevitably neglected in detective stories and therefore this
genre in its proper sense was not suitable for Capek, for whom the
human soul was of supreme interest. His stories, dealing primarily
with the psychic problems of the people involved, transcend the
limitations of a proper detective story. Because of his preoccupation
18 Ibid., p. 146.
CHESTERTON AND CAPEK 33I
with the human soul, Capek reminds us,19 Dostoyevsky's name is

not mentioned among the writers of detective stories.
Chesterton's and Capek's attitude towards criminals is very much
the same; both of them believe that nobody is altogether bad, that
there is something good in every criminal. Chesterton expressed his
sympathy with them in The Man Who Was Thursday:
... burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out
to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it
wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to
become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.20
For Capek
a criminal is something like a hero: he is shrouded with romanticism, he
is an outcast, an outlaw: pulling the henchmen's noses as well as those
of the court and of the law he enjoys secret popular sympathy.21
Chesterton's Father Brown fulfils his mission without preaching a

moral, by bringing criminals to repentance through kind treatment.
Capek goes still further. His trespassers against the law are gifted
with a strong sense of justice; most of them plead guilty without
trying to shrink from responsibility. They receive a good deal of
sympathy from the instruments of justice, who consider them as a
part of their daily life. It would be easy enough to conclude that
Capek's attitude towards criminals was influenced by Chesterton,
but it is just on this point that Capek's debt to Chesterton is most
doubtful. Chesterton's sympathy with them is one of the features
of his anarchism, while Capek's attitude originates rather in his
pragmatic conception of truth and justice, according to which one
can never know the whole truth, and therefore from a certain point
of view even crime is defensible.
Several motifs from The Father Brown Stories can be traced, un-
consciously reshaped, in Capek's 'Tales from Two Pockets'. For
instance, the idea of an incredible, physical achievement, stimulated
by moral indignation, which cannot be repeated in a normal
emotional state. In Chesterton's 'The Hammer of God' the curate
roused to indignation by his brother's behaviour, kills him with a
light hammer thrown from the belfry; this seems absurd, as the size
of the hammer does not correspond to the blow that hit the victim
on the head and the culprit is looked for among other people. There
is a suggestion of a supernatural force, but the infallible Father
Brown proves that this achievement is possible, considering the
force of gravitation and the curate's emotional state, which both
20 The Man Who Was Thursday, I7th ed., Penguin Books, 1938, p. 46.
21 'In Praise of Newspapers', p. I 72.
work here as instruments of God's will. An exceptional achievement

as a result of moral indignation plays the main part in Capek's
story 'Record', where a simple labourer throws a heavy stone
across the river and hits a rich farmer who is striking a boy, and
beats the world's record in throwing. The judges do not believe his
plea of guilt, as, naturally, he cannot repeat his feat without the
former stimulus.
Although the motif of Capek's 'Record' was most likely taken from
Chesterton, the story illustrates Capek's individuality, as the differ-
ence between the two writers is here strongly marked. There is a
murder in Chesterton as opposed to a light injury in Capek; the
search for the culprit is the core of the story in Chesterton, while
Capek's hero commits his misdeed in the presence of a witness, the
boy who was being beaten by the plaintiff; besides, the accused
has no intention of denying his deed, in fact, he persists in con-
fessing his guilt, even though he is not believed. The curate Bohun in
'The Hammer of God' cannot bear the kindness of Father Brown,
who wants to keep his secret under the seal of confession, and goes
to denounce himself. Capek's guilty labourer in 'Record' accepts his
punishment, because, after all, he has caused injury, although he
does not regret his deed, done under the influence of righteous anger.
As there is no need in 'Record' to look for the culprit, the main part
of the story solves the problem of whether he should have pleaded
guilty or not; this piece contains some of Capek's best comical scenes,
and shows the real contrast with Chesterton's gravity and seriousness.
Strangely enough, this contrast applies mainly to Capek's and
Chesterton's tales about detectives and law-breakers; obviously, both
writers used a humorous and serious mood for different purposes.
Dealing with murderers was, naturally, a serious matter for Chester-
ton, so serious that the crimes had to be treated by a priest, God's
representative on earth; Capek, the pragmatist, preferred to describe
lighter offences, in situations amusing rather than tragic.
The difference is particularly apparent in four of their stories,
Chesterton's 'The Arrow of Heaven' and 'The Curse of the Golden
Cross', and tCapek's 'The Stolen Cactus' and 'The Troubles of a
Carpet Fancier'. In these stories the authors describe characters who
are passionate collectors of rarities. In Chesterton's stories these
hobbies degenerate into eccentricities. The protagonist of 'The
Arrow of Heaven' is possessed by the desire to get hold of the Coptic
cup, that of 'The Curse of the Golden Cross' must acquire a golden
cross from the neck of a mummy; the desires of Capek's collectors
are not so ambitious: one steals cacti from a famous collection, the
other tries to steal a rare carpet after many unsuccessful attempts to
buy it. Chesterton's gravity and solemnity here are the very opposite
of the humour and benevolence with which Capek treats his charac-
ters. There is something insane and mysterious about Chesterton's
collectors, who are put on the same level as criminals, while 6apek's
characters, apart from their weakness for collecting, are quite
respectable people in everydcay life and their desire to collect is no
more than a hobby. Capek has not the heart to punish them: the
owner of the famous cactus collection appreciates the love and
admiration of the little thief for cacti and employs him; the eager
carpet fancier fails to commit the theft, being prevented by a dog
who considers the carpet as its property. What is then the connexion
between Capek and Chesterton as regards these four stories? No
doubt the psychology of collecting was a subject of great interest for
Capek; but again, even if he had borrowed it from Chesterton, his
own imagination and originality in the treatment of the idea must be
appreciated.
'The Experiment of Professor Rouss' is also Chestertonian, but
Professor Vey's suggestion,22 that Capek may have used an idea of
O'Henry's as a source for this story, is perhaps relevant too at other
points. Considering Professor Vey's interesting analysis and com-
parison of 'The Experiment of Professor Rouss' with O'Henry's
short story 'Calloway's Code', it seems that Capek's tale is an example
of his artistic skill in creating an original work out of motifs used by
other writers. Like Chesterton's 'The Mistake of the Machine', 'The
Experiment of Professor Rouss' is based on research in experimental
psychology in the service of justice. In both cases the criminals are
being examined, Chesterton's by means of a psychometric machine,
Capek's by a new method of questioning, in principle very similar
to the technique of the machine. In both cases the experimenters are
Americans. Correct in theory, both Chesterton's and Capek's
methods fail finally to a certain extent. It seems obvious that Usher,
the operator in Chesterton's story, is right, having caught the
murderer of the missing Lord Falconroy by means of the machine
registering the erratic pulsation caused by the reaction of the
accused to certain words, but Father Brown has another explanation,
namely, that the suspect is the disguised Lord Falconroy himself.
He also proves that, although the machine cannot make a mistake,
wrong conclusions may be drawn by the operator, an imperfect
mortal. Capek's, or rather his hero's, experiment works satisfactorily
in the first part of the story when a murderer is proved guilty, but
it fails in the second, in the case of a journalist who reacts to the cue
words with journalistic cliche's instead of immediate psychological
associations. The journalist is not a criminal, but his journalistic
cliche's are ridiculed by Capek. Here O'Henry's influence on Capek
22 'Une source de Karel Capek?' Revue des etudes slaves, Paris, I959, pp. 59-63.
may play its part, assuming that Capek, who was fascinated by
words and enjoyed playing with them, knew the story 'Calloway's
Code', the only story by O'Henry, Professor Vey asserts, which
suggests some similarities between the Czech and the American
author. How far can the connexion between Chesterton, O'Henry
and Capek be proved in the case of 'The Experiment of Professor
Rouss'? Since Chesterton was Capek's favourite writer, one can
almost assume that Capek knew 'The Mistake of the Machine' and
may have used it, unconsciously or deliberately, in the first part of
his story and possibly developed it independently in the second (if he
had not read O'Henry's story). Whether Capek read 'Calloway's
Code' is difficult to prove, but, apart from Professor Vey's argu-
ment, the likelihood is strengthened if one considers the fact that
Capek knew personally Josef Mach, the translator of O'Henry into
Czech,23 who could have lent or recommended the story to Capek,
either in the original or in translation. If this was the case, it could
have happened during or after I927, when Josef Mach returned to
Prague after his fifteen years stay abroad. 'The Experiment of
Professor Rouss' was written in I 928; if Capek had known 'Calloway's
Code', the influence of this story might have been immediate,
possibly even direct, and might have been exerted also in another
story by Capek, namely, 'The Death of the Baron Gandara'. In the
conclusion of this story and of 'Calloway's Code' the gift of imagina-
tion is praised in a very similar way. In O'Henry's story the
imaginative person is the 'rewrite' man Ames, in Capek's the
detective Mejzlik.
Chesterton's 'The Mistake of the Machine' may have equally
influenced another story by Capek. In his tale 'Coupon' a maid is
robbed and murdered by her lover; Chesterton's villain is a similar
kind of criminal, specialising in the robbery (and in one case murder)
of shop-girls and barmaids. This is, however, a type of murder which
could be based on an incident in actual life and it is possible that
this was the case with Capek's story.
Comparing Capek's Dr Mejzlik with Father Brown, in the tale
'Dr Mejzlik's Case', one might think that Capek borrowed from
Chesterton not only Father Brown's quality of intuition, but also the
idea that a criminal can be proved guilty by means of a bit of ash.
When Dr Mejzlfk sees ash on the shoe of a man, walking in the rain,
he follows him and finds out that he is a cracksman, while Father
Brown in 'The Crime of a Communist' is led by some ashes to
conclude that they came from poisoned cigarettes which caused the
very strange death of two people. Yet this similarity in ideas does
not prove more than the fact that Capek's imagination was so
23 Prof. Vo6adlo confirms that J. Mach used to visit Capek at his Friday meetings.
much like Chesterton's, that there was frequently a close resemblance

between the themes of his stories and those of Chesterton even when
there was no specific indebtedness. There is no question of Chester-
ton's direct influence in this case since Chesterton's story was
published later than Capek's.
However, in Capek's tale 'The Disappearance of an Actor' there is
some likelihood, though no certainty, that Capek expressed his
admiration for Chesterton by accepting his defence of a great, but
morally corrupt, artist. Chesterton excuses a murderer:
Horne is a sneak and a skunk, but do not forget that, like many other
sneaks and skunks in history, he is also a poet.24
The hero of Capek's tale discovers the murderer of an actor, but

as he cannot prove his guilt, he threatens to be his living conscience:
Till your dying day I'll keep on reminding you: Remember Benda the
actor. I tell you, he was an artist, if ever there was one.25
The similarity between these two stories is the more striking since
both end with these eulogistic closing passages.
Some of Capek's short stories testify to their author's delight in
paradox which, most likely, originated in Chesterton. However
clear the development of the plot may seem in the early stage, yet a
sudden turn brings quite an unexpected denouement. Such is 'The
Selvin Case' or 'Proof Positive'; in fact, Capek's amiable unpro-
fessional, but most successful detective, Mr Janik, is the victim of a
paradox: after several brilliant cases of detection he finds out that his
own secretary has been cheating him of money for a long time
without arousing any suspicion. This convinces Mr Janik that his
gift of intuition is rather erratic and he gives up detection for ever.
Yet paradox never became a literary mannerism for Capek as it was
for Chesterton.
In his fiction Chesterton seems to have liked big men, perhaps
because of some affinitywith himself. One of these characters, Sunday,
in The Man Who Was Thursday, must have impressed Capek very
much and led him to create two strikingly similar characters, one in
'Krakatit', the other in the short story 'The Last Judgment' in the
'Tales from Two Pockets'. Like Chesterton's Sunday, these two
unusually big, old men are personifications of God. Naturally, human
imagination would hardly personify God as a small or a young man
and the external appearance of these characters does not necessarily
testify to Chesterton's influence on Capek in these two cases; the
similarity between Sunday and Capek's God-like hero, especially
24 The Father Brown Stories, 'The Ghost of Gideon Wise', 5th ed., London, 1951, p. 458.
25 K. iapek, 'Tales from Two Pockets', 2nd ed., London, I944, p. I 22.
the one in 'Krakatit', lies in the embodiment of the supernatural in

an almost superhuman, undefined figure, who appears at critical
moments during the action. There is, however, something more
terrestrial in Capek's God-like hero. He does not appear on the
balcony like Sunday, exhibiting his vastness against the sky, neither
does he disappear and reappear in another place at the same time, nor
does he fly like a magician; he only turns up as if by mere chance at
the right moment to meet the titan hero and give him a lesson in
humility. He is, in fact, almost like an old Czech peasant, with great
experience and common-sense. His wise talk and the quiet country-
side setting reflect and represent the peace of mind one can find in
God. The fact that both Capek and Chesterton introduce God into
their works mainly when they are uncertain how to get their heroes
out of situations half-way between reality and fantasy, is probably
not very significant for their literary relationship. For is it not rather
natural to seek God's help where human power fails?
III
Capek's style is indebted to Chesterton in a number of ways. He

admired Chesterton's light, witty, colloquial fluency, a gift he
himself also possessed. Journalism was such a strong element in the
artistic composition of both writers that it appeared even in their
works of fiction. In The Napoleon of Notting Hill,
The writer appeared to have attempted the article in several journalistic

styles;26
In the end, he was still not satisfied:
I am losing the style. I should have said 'Curving with a whisk' instead
of merely 'Curving'. Also I should have called the hyacinths 'sudden'. I
cannot keep this up. War is too rapid for this style of writing. Please ask
the office boy to insert mots justes.27
Similarly, in Capek's 'The Absolute at Large' two editors of a

Catholic newspaper are trying to insert mots justes:
'There's just a word I can't get. Have we already had "satanic machina-
tions ?" '
'The day before yesterday.'
'Aha, and has "treacherous onslaught" been used, too?'
'Yes, we've had that.'
'Knavish imposture?'
'We ran that today.'
26 3rd ed., London, I 947, p. 148.

27 Ibid., p. 149.
'Impious fabrications?'
'At least six times,' said Kost'al.
'That's a pity,' sighed Father Jost. 'I think we've been a bit lavish with
our ideas....'28
Capek's essays have the same lightness as Chesterton's and his

travel-sketches also sound Chestertonian:
Oh yes, I saw the Escorial. Yes, thank you, I visited Toledo ...29
Before I forget: of course, I went to look at Baker Street . . .30
Well, I have seen everything; I have seen the mountains .... 31
Well now, with my own eyes I have seen how Holland is being pro-
duced.32
In one sense Capek surpassed his English teacher: his use of synonyms
and long enumerations of expressions of similar meaning is still more
frequent, becoming almost a stylistic mannerism, though, very
likely, based on previous examples by Chesterton:
(Wayne) was writing and sketching and dotting and crossing out with
unconceivable rapidity....33
(an old man) was wearing a green frock-coat and round his neck a red
muffler, and he wheezed, coughed, sneezed, snuffled, sighed, snivelled
and mumbled....34
Occasional paradoxical metaphors in Capek may be modelled,

unconsciously, on Chesterton who, however, used them much more
frequently, for instance, in his 'Paradoxes of Christianity',35 where
the whole structure of the essay is based on them. The achieving of
contrasts also leads both writers to use images or ideas from quite
a different field than the text itself. When buying a revolver and
cartridges to take on his honeymoon, Chesterton makes the following
comment:
If the bride had known less of him, I suppose she might have fancied
that he was a suicide or a murderer or, worst of all, a teetotaller.36
In a similar manner Capek could smuggle one of his ideas of God into
a paragraph dealing purely with business; describing different name-
plates on doors, he closes the paragraph:
And God has no label in the sky, or on the earth. You must find out for
yourself, my friend, that he lives here....37
28 K. (:apek, 'The Absolute at Large', London, 1927, pp. 176-7.
29 Chesterton, Autobiography, p. 315.
30 K. Capek, 'Letters from England', London, I925, p. 25.
31 [bid. p-I156.
32 K. 6apek, 'Letters from Holland', London, I933, p. 38.
33 Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, p. 104.
34 K. Capek, 'Fairy Tales', London, 1933, p. 277.
35 Orthodoxy.
36 Chesterton, Autobiography, p. 37.
37 K. Oapek, 'War with the Newts', London, I937, p. 41.
These haphazard quotations stand as examples of others of their

kind, which were written unconsciously under Chesterton's influence.
Several critics have suggested that reading Capek has reminded
them of Chesterton, but no comparative study has been made. What
is the result of a closer look at these two writers? There is no doubt
that Capek was greatly indebted to Chesterton, but in most cases the
influence was only unconscious. Yet, considering Capek's admiration
for Chesterton and the fact that he published forty-six works in all
literary genres, an even greater number of examples of borrowing
from Chesterton might have been expected. Chesterton's influence
on Capek was beneficial, even if it aroused the displeasure of the
severe Czech critic F. X. Salda, who called Capek 'a Chestertonian
conservative'.38 In spite of his debt to Chesterton, Capek remained
completely individual and never became a mere epigone.
38 F. X. galda, Kritick6 glosy k nove poesii leski, Prague, 1939, p. 28I.

The Literary Relationship Between G. K. Chesterton and Karel Čapek

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The Literary Relationship Between G. K. Chesterton and Karel Čapek

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University College London

The Literary Relationship between G. K. Chesterton and Karel apek

and Karel Capek

'INFLUENCES, influences-it makes me embarrassed, if I am to

Chesterton's works, but he must have come across quite a number,

and also detective stories, a genre which then belonged to the

About the topicality:

It might have been because of Chesterton's hint that 'epics were

The detective story has no tradition in Czech literature and it was

with the human soul, Capek reminds us,19 Dostoyevsky's name is

Chesterton's Father Brown fulfils his mission without preaching a

work here as instruments of God's will. An exceptional achievement

much like Chesterton's, that there was frequently a close resemblance

The hero of Capek's tale discovers the murderer of an actor, but

the one in 'Krakatit', lies in the embodiment of the supernatural in

Capek's style is indebted to Chesterton in a number of ways. He

The writer appeared to have attempted the article in several journalistic

In the end, he was still not satisfied:

Similarly, in Capek's 'The Absolute at Large' two editors of a

26 3rd ed., London, I 947, p. 148.

Capek's essays have the same lightness as Chesterton's and his

Occasional paradoxical metaphors in Capek may be modelled,

These haphazard quotations stand as examples of others of their

38 F. X. galda, Kritick6 glosy k nove poesii leski, Prague, 1939, p. 28I.

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