Sunday looked at Ratcliffe, whose clear voice said:
‘It seems so silly that you should have been on both sides and fought yourself.’
Bull said:
‘I understand nothing, but I am happy. In fact, I am going to sleep.’
‘I am not happy,’ said the Professor with his head in his hands, ‘because I do not understand. You let me stray a little too near to hell.’
And then Gogol said, with the absolute simplicity of a child:
‘I wish I knew why I was hurt so much.’
Still Sunday said nothing, but only sat with his mighty chin upon his hand, and gazed at the distance. Then at last he said:
‘I have heard your complaints in order. And here, I think, comes another to complain, and we will hear him also.’
The falling fire in the great cresset4 threw a last long gleam, like a bar of burning gold, across the dim grass. Against this fiery band was outlined in utter black the advancing legs of a black-clad figure. He seemed to have a fine close suit with knee-breeches such as that which was worn by the servants of the house, only that it was not blue, but of this absolute sable. He had, like the servants, a kind of sword by his side. It was only when he had come quite close to the crescent of the seven and flung up his face to look at them, that Syme saw, with thunderstruck clearness, that the face was the broad, almost ape-like face of his old friend Gregory, with its rank red hair and its insulting smile.
‘Gregory!’ gasped Syme, half rising from his seat. ‘Why, this is the real anarchist!’
‘Yes,’ said Gregory, with a great and dangerous restraint, ‘I am the real anarchist.’
‘ “Now there was a day,” ’5 murmured Bull, who seemed really to have fallen asleep, ‘ “when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them.” ’
‘You are right,’ said Gregory, and gazed all round. ‘I am a destroyer. I would destroy the world if I could.’
A sense of a pathos far under the earth stirred up in Syme, and he spoke brokenly and without sequence.
‘Oh, most unhappy man,’ he cried, ‘try to be happy! You have red hair like your sister.’
‘My red hair, like red flames, shall burn up the world,’ said Gregory. ‘I thought I hated everything more than common men hate anything; but I find that I do not hate everything as much as I hate you!’
‘I never hated you,’ said Syme very sadly.
Then out of this unintelligible creature the last thunders broke.
‘You!’ he cried. ‘You never hated because you never lived. I know what you are, all of you, from first to last – you are the people in power! You are the police – the great fat, smiling men in blue and buttons! You are the Law, and you have never been broken. But is there a free soul alive that does not long to break you, only because you have never been broken? We in revolt talk all kind of nonsense doubtless about this crime or that crime of the Government. It is all folly! The only crime of the Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme. I do not curse you for being cruel. I do not curse you (though I might) for being kind. I curse you for being safe! You sit in your chairs of stone, and have never come down from them. You are the seven angels of heaven, and you have had no troubles. Oh, I could forgive you everything, you that rule mankind, if I could feel for once that you had suffered for one hour a real agony such as I—’
Syme sprang to his feet, shaking from head to foot. ‘I see everything,’ he cried, ‘everything that there is. Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does a dandelion have to fight the whole universe? For the same reason that I had to be alone in the dreadful Council of the Days. So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter. So that the real lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this blasphemer, so that by tears and torture we may earn the right to say to this man, “You lie!” No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this accuser, “We also have suffered.”
‘It is not true that we have never been broken. We have been broken upon the wheel. It is not true that we have never descended from these thrones. We have descended into hell. We were complaining of unforgettable miseries even at the very moment when this man entered insolently to accuse us of happiness. I repel the slander; we have not been happy. I can answer for every one of the great guards of Law whom he has accused. At least—’
He had turned his eyes so as to see suddenly the great face of Sunday, which wore a strange smile.
‘Have you,’ he cried in a dreadful voice, ‘have you ever suffered?’
As he gazed, the great face grew to an awful size, grew larger than the colossal mask of Memnon, which had made him scream as a child. It grew larger and larger, filling the whole sky; then everything went black. Only in the blackness before it entirely destroyed his brain he seemed to hear a distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard somewhere, ‘Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?’6
When men in books awake from a vision, they commonly find themselves in some place in which they might have fallen asleep; they yawn in a chair, or lift themselves with bruised limbs from a field. Syme’s experience was something much more psychologically strange if there was indeed anything unreal, in the earthly sense, about the things he had gone through. For while he could always remember afterwards that he had swooned before the face of Sunday, he could not remember having ever come to at all. He could only remember that gradually and naturally he knew that he was and had been walking along a country lane with an easy and conversational companion. That companion had been a part of his recent drama; it was the red-haired poet Gregory. They were walking like old friends, and were in the middle of a conversation about some triviality. But Syme could only feel an unnatural buoyancy in his body and a crystal simplicity in his mind that seemed to be superior to everything that he said or did. He felt he was in possession of some impossible good news, which made every other thing a triviality, but an adorable triviality.
Dawn was breaking over everything in colours at once clear and timid; as if Nature made a first attempt at yellow and a first attempt at rose. A breeze blew so clean and sweet that one could not think that it blew from the sky; it blew rather through some hole in the sky. Syme felt a simple surprise when he saw rising all round him on both sides of the road the red, irregular buildings of Saffron Park. He had no idea that he had walked so near London. He walked by instinct along one white road, on which early birds hopped and sang, and found himself outside a fenced garden. There he saw the sister of Gregory, the girl with the gold-red hair, cutting lilac before breakfast, with the great unconscious gravity of a girl.
Appendix
Extract from an article by G. K. Chesterton concerning
The Man Who Was Thursday published in the
Illustrated London News, 13 June 1936
… I recur here to my personal point about the tendency to miss what the title means; or even what the title says … In a rambling column, whether because it is personal or impersonal, it is permissible to introduce personal trifles about oneself, as well as about other people, so long as it is made sufficiently obvious that they are trifling. And I may remark in this connexion, or disconnexion, that I happen to have a very strong objection to that trick of missing the point of a story, or sometimes even the obvious sense of the very name of a story. I have sometimes had occasion to murmur meekly that those who endure the heavy labour of reading a book might possibly endure that of reading the title-page of a book. For there are more examples than may be imagined, in which earnest critics might solve many of their problems about what a book is, merely by discovering what it professes to be.
… It is odd that one example occurred in my own case … in a book called The
Man Who Was Thursday. It was a very melodramatic sort of moonshine, but it had a kind of notion in it; and the point is that it described, first a band of the last champions of order fighting against what appeared to be a world of anarchy, and then the discovery that the mysterious master both of the anarchy and the order was the same sort of elemental elf who had appeared to be rather too like a pantomime ogre. This line of logic, or lunacy, led many to infer that this equivocal being was meant for a serious description of the Deity; and my work even enjoyed a temporary respect among those who like the Deity to be so described. But this error was entirely due to the fact that they had read the book but had not read the title-page. In my case, it is true, it was a question of a subtitle rather than a title. The book was called The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. It was not intended to describe the real world as it was, or as I thought it was, even when my thoughts were considerably less settled than they are now. It was intended to describe the world of wild doubt and despair which the pessimists were generally describing at that date; with just a gleam of hope in some double meaning of the doubt, which even the pessimists felt in some fitful fashion.
Notes
DEDICATION
1. Edmund Clerihew Bentley: E. C. Bentley (1875–1956), a lifelong friend of Chesterton, who first met him at St Paul’s School, was a journalist, poet and novelist. As a poet, he is chiefly remembered for devising the ‘clerihew’, an epigrammatic verse form comprising two rhymed couplets, in his Biography for Beginners (1905). His fiction included Trent’s Last Case (1913), an influential novel that Chesterton described as ‘the best detective story of modern times’. In his Autobiography (1936), Chesterton celebrated Bentley’s talent for constructing ‘strategic maps of nonsense’ and ‘preposterous plots’.
2. Whistler: James Abbott McNeill Whister (1834–1903), an American painter who moved to London in 1859 and then became the most celebrated exponent of aestheticism in the visual arts, was for many of his contemporaries the embodiment of dandiacal decadence (he was a close friend of Oscar Wilde, who admired his mordant wit). In 1877, the influential critic John Ruskin, appalled by Whistler’s ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold’, accused him of ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’; Whistler successfully sued Ruskin, but in the process ruined himself financially.
3. showed their own white feather: white feathers, which are characteristic of fighting cocks that are cross-bred rather than pure-bred, were, in the nineteenth-century British army, emblems of cowardice. Chesterton might have two recent novels in mind: A. E. W. Mason’s The Four Feathers (1902); and P. G. Wodehouse’s The White Feather (1907).
4. Baal: in the north-west Semitic language, this was a generic term applied to gods associated with particular cities, such as Carthage and Tyre, though it could also be used to refer to Hadad, the lord of heaven. In Christian demonology, the name became associated with Satan, especially in the shape of Beelzebub.
5. Paumanok: the Algonquian name for Long Island, New York, meaning ‘fish-shaped’. Long Island was the home of the American poet Walt Whitman (1819–92), an important influence on Chesterton, who refers to ‘fish-shape [sic] Paumanok, where I was born’ in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass (see Dedication, n. 7).
6. Green Carnation: The Green Carnation (1894), an anonymous novel by Robert Smythe Hichens (1864–1950), which featured characters manifestly based on Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, caused a scandal when it was first published, and was subsequently cited as evidence in Wilde’s trial of 1895. Chesterton uses it in this context to emblematize Wildean aestheticism.
7. leaves of grass: the American poet Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, written in a form of free verse, was published in a series of ever-expanding editions from 1855 to 1891. According to his brother Cecil, Chesterton first read Leaves of Grass at about the time he was leaving school, and its spirit of democratic optimism had ‘a profound and decisive influence on the growth of his mind’ (this formative impact is evident in The Wild Knight, a collection of poems published in 1900). In The Thing: Why I am a Catholic (1929), Chesterton reflected that his entire youth had been ‘filled, as with sunrise, with the sanguine glow of Walt Whitman’.
8. Tusitala: a Samoan name, meaning ‘Teller of Tales’, adopted by the Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94), who died of tuberculosis on the island of Upolu, where he had bought an estate in 1890. Stevenson, who had himself praised Whitman’s optimism in Essays in the Art of Writing (1905), also exercised a decisive influence on Chesterton’s intellectual development. In the final chapter of Robert Louis Stevenson (1927), Chesterton predicts that the novelist’s importance will ultimately be understood when the contemporary modernist novel reaches its limits: ‘The story, the first of childish and the oldest of human pleasures, will nowhere reveal its structure and its end so swiftly and simply as in the tales of Tusitala.’
9. Dunedin to Samoa spoke: ‘Dunedin’ is the Gaelic name for Edinburgh, where Stevenson was born, so this phrase alludes to his passage from Scotland to Samoa.
10. the City of Mansoul: the site of a battle between Satan and Emmanuel in John Bunyan’s The Holy War (1682). William Oddie has commented in Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy (2008) that Chesterton’s interest in this spiritual allegory was probably prompted by the fact that ‘it is about the struggle for the salvation of a whole culture as much as for the salvation of individual souls’. In his edition of The Man Who Was Thursday, Denis Conlon observes that ‘the image of Mansoul (Man’s Soul) being relieved from siege was suggested to Chesterton by the sieges of Ladysmith and of Mafeking during the Boer War of 1899–1902’.
1
The Two Poets of Saffron Park
1. Saffron Park: a barely disguised portrait of Bedford Park, close to Turnham Green in west London, an almost self-contained community consisting of affordable red-brick houses built by Richard Norman Shaw (1831–1912) and other architects in the 1870s. This attractive tree-lined suburb, with its atmosphere of respectable bohemianism, became closely associated with aestheticism in the 1880s, when a number of artists, authors and intellectuals, notably the Irish poet W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) and the Russian anarchist Sergius Stepniak (1851–95), lived there. In the autumn of 1896, Chesterton became a member of a debating club that met in Bedford Park at the family home of Frances Blogg, whom he married in 1901. In the sixth chapter of his Autobiography, entitled ‘The Fantastic Suburb’, Chesterton describes seeing it for the first time after an aimless walk across London: ‘it was evening, and I think it was then I saw in the distance of that grey landscape, like a ragged red cloud of sunset, the queer artificial village of Bedford Park.’ He goes on to discuss ‘the manufactured quaintness’ of the place: ‘Bedford Park did look like what it partially professed to be; a colony for artists who were almost aliens; a refuge for persecuted poets and painters hiding in their red-brick catacombs or dying behind their red-brick barricades.’ The ‘speculative builder, faintly tinged with art’ to whom Chesterton refers in the succeeding sentence is Jonathan Thomas Carr (1845–1915), the cloth merchant who masterminded the construction of Bedford Park (he was assisted in this by his brother, J. W. Comyns Carr (1849–1916), the art critic and co-director of the Grosvenor Gallery).
2. new women: this refers to late nineteenth-century feminists, who were caricatured in the conservative press, from the second half of the 1880s, as aggressively masculine women who wore rational dress, rode bicycles and smoked cigarettes. The term was finally coined in an article on ‘The Social Standing of the New Woman’, published in the Woman’s Herald in August 1893: ‘Without warning, woman suddenly appears on the scene of man’s activities, as a sort of new creation, and demands a share in the struggles, the responsibilities and the honours of the world, in which, until now, she has been a cipher.’
3. pre-Raphalite picture: the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), an attempt to develop a pictorial aesthetic shaped both by naturalism and symbolism, was formed in 1848 by the painters William Holman Hunt
(1827–1910), John Everett Millais (1829–96) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82), among others. For a concrete sense of Chesterton’s allusion, see for instance Rossetti’s ‘The Girlhood of Mary Virgin’ (1849), the first picture to be exhibited with the initials of the PRB. Incidentally, compare the description of ‘dark red hair’ in this sentence to Chesterton’s sketch of ‘the Diabolist’, ‘a man with a long ironical face, and close and red hair’, in his article of that name, printed in the Daily News on 9 November 1907.
4. the end of the world: this recalls the apocalyptic conclusion to The Time Machine (1895), by H. G. Wells (1866–1946), when the Time-Traveller is transported into an entropic, far-distant future: ‘At last, some time before I stopped, the sun, red and very large halted motionless upon the horizon, a vast dome glowing with a dull heat, and now and then suffering a momentary extinction.’
5. local patriotism: from the time of the Boer War (1899–1902), when jingoism was rife in England, Chesterton argued energetically for a form of patriotism that was committedly anti-imperialist. In ‘A Defence of Patriotism’, published in The Speaker in 1901, he referred with characteristic passion to ‘this strange and perverted fact that, while a unifying vision of patriotism can ennoble bands of brutal savages or dingy burghers, and be the best thing in their lives, we, who are – the world being judge – humane, honest, and serious individually, have a patriotism that is the worst thing in ours’. Chesterton’s first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), is an elaborate celebration of ‘local patriotism’, or, as Chesterton came to call it, ‘distributism’.
6. the name of Gabriel Syme: as a number of critics have pointed out, this name confers an archangelic identity on Syme, just as the name Lucian implicitly confers a Luciferan one on Gregory.
The Man Who Was Thursday (Penguin ed) Page 21