3. Argus: in Greek mythology, Argus Panoptes, often depicted as possessing up to one hundred eyes, was a giant employed by Hera to guard Io.
4. Mâcon: a red or white wine produced in the Mâconnais region of Burgundy in France.
5. the false pig in Aesop: probably a nonsense formulation, though in his edition, Stephen Medcalf identifies the phrase with ‘the fable of the Buffoon and the Countryman, actually by Phaedrus but ascribed by him to Aesop’: ‘A Buffoon at a theatre imitated a pig’s squeak so perfectly that the audience insisted he must have a pig hidden about his person, but applauded him deafeningly when he convinced them he had not. A countryman claimed he could do better, and made a pig which he had beneath his smock squeak. The audience unanimously declared that the buffoon’s imitation was much more true to life. The countryman, producing the pig, said “that shows what sort of judges you are”.’ In 1912, Chesterton provided the Introduction to V. S. Vernon Jones’s translation of Aesop’s Fables, illustrated by Arthur Rackham. There he insists that, in contrast to fairy tales, fables like those for which Aesop was famous are premised on the idea ‘that everything is itself, and will in any case speak for itself. The wolf will be always wolfish; the fox will be always foxy.’ According to this theory, the idea of a ‘false pig’ is completely incompatible with Aesop.
6. the hedgehog in Montaigne: another nonsense formulation, as Chesterton indicates in the succeeding sentence, though Medcalf observes that ‘there is actually a hedgehog in Montaigne, which forecasts changes of the wind’. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–92) was a French humanist philosopher famed for his essays.
9
The Man in Spectacles
1. a tyrant once advised us to eat grass: in his edition, Medcalf notes that ‘Joseph François Foulon (1717–89) was alleged to have said this when minister of the king’s household in France, probably untruly: but grass was thrust into his mouth when he was hanged on 22 July 1789, a story which fascinated Chesterton’.
2. Acheron: in the Aeneid, Charon ferries the dead across the Acheron to reach the Underworld.
3. Marat or a more slipshod Robespierre: along with Georges Danton (1759–94), Jean-Paul Marat (1743–93) and Maximilien Robespierre (1758–94) were the most important leaders of the French Revolution. Robespierre’s appearance was notoriously neat, even at the height of the Terror in 1793 and 1794.
4. Jacobins: radicals belonging to the Jacobin Club, led by Robespierre, Marat and Danton, the most influential of the political clubs to appear during the French Revolution.
5. golliwog: a black-faced minstrel doll made famous by Florence Kate Upton (1873–1922) in the children’s stories she published from the mid-1890s.
6. Bogy: a term either for ‘the evil one, the devil’ or for ‘a goblin; a person much dreaded’, apparently in use in children’s nurseries since the 1820s (see OED). Interestingly, the OED claims that, at least from the 1920s, it was also criminals’ slang for a detective.
7. the Savoy: a grand hotel on the Strand in London, designed by Thomas Edward Collcutt (1840–1924) and opened in 1889.
8. blue devils in blue hell: the phrase ‘blue devils’ is proverbial for a state of depression; in ‘Half Hours in Hades: An Elementary Handbook of Demonology’, composed in 1891 when he was seventeen, and published in The Coloured Lands (1938), Chesterton taxonomizes the ‘Blue Devil (Caeruleus Lugubrius)’ thus: ‘These creatures are gregarious, being usually seen and spoken of in the plural. Though formed by super-Nature in their habits and exterior apparently for the filling of waste moors, mountains, churchyards and other obsolete places, these animals, like the Red Devil, have frequently been domesticated in rich and distinguished houses, and many of the wealthiest aristocrats and most successful men of commerce may be seen with a string of these blue creatures led by a leash in the street or seated round him in a ring on his own fireside.’
9. the British Constitution: in The English Constitution (1867), Walter Bagheot (1826–77) began by observing that ‘the British Constitution has continued in connected outward sameness, but hidden inner change, for many ages’, comparing it to ‘an old man who still wears with attached fondness clothes in the fashion of his youth: what you see of him is the same; what you do not see is wholly altered’.
10. josser: slang for ‘a simpleton; a soft or silly fellow’ (OED).
11. the Grey Nose: the Cap Gris-Nez, a cape on the coast of northern France to the south-west of Calais, is the closest point of France to England.
12. the Romans who held the bridge: this refers to the legend, narrated by Livy and others, of the Roman soldier Horatius Cocles and his comrades, who heroically defended the Pons Sublicius, the oldest recorded bridge across the Tiber in Rome, against the Etruscans. In ‘Horatius’, from his Lays of Ancient Rome (1842), Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59) described this incident: ‘Haul down the bridge, Sir Consul, / With all the speed ye may; / I, with two more to help me, / Will hold the foe in play. / In yon strait path a thousand / May well be stopped by three. / Now who will stand on either hand, / And keep the bridge with me?’ See also Chapter 12, note 6.
13. Bruce at Bannockburn: on 24 June 1314, Robert the Bruce (1274–1329), King of Scotland, defeated Edward II (1284–1327), in spite of the fact that the former’s army was far smaller than the latter’s.
14. ‘argent a chevron gules charged with three cross crosslets of the field’: a silver coat of arms consisting of a red chevron bearing three silver crosses each limb of which terminates in a smaller cross.
10
The Duel
1. Saumur: a sparkling wine from the Saumur region of the Loire in France.
2. café chantant: a café in which music is performed, associated especially with the belle époque.
3. Legion of Honour: the Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur, a decoration founded by Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) in 1802.
4. décoré: decorated.
5. Peste: an expletive, meaning ‘Plague!’
6. Going to Jericho to throw a Jabberwock: in his edition, Conlon notes that this is equivalent to ‘going to Hell’, and adds (a little dogmatically) that ‘Jericho in this case is not the city to the north of the Dead Sea in Palestine but a country estate of that name where Henry VIII had assignations with young ladies’. The ‘jabberwock’ is the fantastic beast described in ‘Jabberwocky’, a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll (1832–98), which appeared in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871): ‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son! / The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!’ See also Chapter 13, note 10; and Chapter 15, note 2.
7. paper-chase: ‘a cross-country race in which the runners follow a trail marked by torn-up paper’ (OED).
8. blind man’s buff: a game in which a player in a blindfold attempts to capture other players who deliberately poke at him and provoke him.
11
The Criminals Chase the Police
1. cinematograph: the cinématographe was the means of producing motion pictures first patented, used and exhibited by Auguste (1862–1954) and Louis (1864–1948) Lumière in 1895. In 1896, the Daily News reported on the first exhibition of the cinematograph in London: ‘The “Cinématographe” is an invention of MM. Lumiere, and it is a contrivance by which a real scene of life and movement may be reproduced before an audience in a life size picture.’
2. Impressionism: Chesterton’s most significant encounter with Impressionism came in 1893, when he enrolled at the Slade School of Art, where Whistler was especially fashionable. He identified its aesthetic with the extreme philosophical relativism that, in opposition to his deepest spiritual convictions, seemed characteristic of the fin de siècle. In his Autobiography, he attacked Impressionist painting in passionate tones, adducing it as an example of ‘scepticism in the sense of subjectivism’: ‘Its principle was that if all that could be seen of a cow was a white line and a purple shadow, we should only render the line and the shadow; in a sense we should only believe in the line and shadow, rather than in the cow. [�
�] Whatever may be the merits of this as a method of art, there is obviously something highly subjective and sceptical about it as a method of thought. It naturally lends itself to the metaphysical suggestion that things only exist as we perceive them, or that things do not exist at all.’ See also the Introduction to this edition.
3. Lancy: probably Bourbon-Lancy, an ancient town close to the Loire in Bourgogne, eastern France.
4. barons’ wars: the civil war, from 1264 to 1268, between Henry III (1207–72) and the rebellious barons led by Simon de Montfort (1208–65), who were determined to enforce the limitations on royal power set out in the Provisions of Oxford (1258) and the Provisions of Westminster (1259).
5. dévot: devout.
6. Le Soleil d’Or: The Golden Sun.
12
The Earth in Anarchy
1. Attila: Attila (406–53) was emperor of the Huns, a people whose impressive incursions into the Roman Empire from the East were achieved by armies on horseback.
2. Musée de Cluny: the Musée de Cluny, the Musée National du Moyen Age in Paris, which was originally built by the abbots of Cluny in the fourteenth century, contains a rich collection of mediaeval manuscripts, sculptures and tapestries.
3. Peabody Buildings: the capitalist and philanthropist George Peabody (1795–1869) had founded the Peabody Donation Fund to build housing for the poor in the east end of London in the 1860s.
4. Hanwell: the Hanwell Insane Asylum, to the west of London, was opened in 1829. Note that in Chapter 2 of Orthodoxy (1908), ‘The Maniac’, Chesterton illustrates his opening argument, that so-called worldly people do not understand the world but rely instead ‘on a few cynical maxims which are not true’, by relating an anecdote about a publisher who pompously announces of a common acquaintance, ‘That man will get on; he believes in himself.’ Chesterton continues: ‘And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught an omnibus on which was written “Hanwell”. I said to him, “Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.”’
5. navvy or counter-jumper: manual labourer or shop assistant.
6. Horatius and his bridge: see Chapter 9, note 12.
7. the Dunciad: these are the final lines of The Dunciad (1743) by Alexander Pope (1688–1744), and should read: ‘Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine; / Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine! / Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! Is restor’d; / Light dies before thy uncreating word: / Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; / And Universal Darkness buries All’ (Book IV, lines 651–6).
8. Judas before Herod: Judas is led before Herod and humiliated by him in the Gospel of Barnabas, an account of the life of Jesus recorded in sixteenth-century manuscripts composed in Italian and Spanish.
13
The Pursuit of the President
1. Tree of Life: the ‘tree of life’ appears in numerous different ancient religious and folkloric traditions, but presumably Chesterton is above all thinking of its importance in Genesis, and especially in the account of the Fall. See Genesis 3: 22–4: ‘And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: / Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. / So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.’
2. like some huge orang-outang: perhaps an allusion to Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), often regarded as the first detective story, in which an escaped orang-utan violently kills one Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter and flees through a casement.
3. a great ball of india-rubber: in Chapter 9 of Charles Dickens (1906), Chesterton writes that Dickens’s life was full of the ‘unexpected energies’ of a pantomime clown: ‘He liked high houses, and sloping roofs, and deep areas. But he would have been really happy if some good fairy of the eternal pantomime had given him the power of flying off the roofs and pitching harmlessly down the height of the houses and bounding out of the areas like an india-rubber ball. The divine lunatic in Nicholas Nickleby comes nearest to his dream.’
4. Martin Tupper: Martin Tupper (1810–89) was the author of Proverbial Philosophy: A Book of Thoughts and Arguments (1838), a collection of commonplace poetic aphorisms which proved an immense popular success in the mid-nineteenth century. In the later nineteenth century, under the impact of scientific advance in particular, Tupper’s Christian platitudes became to some the embodiment of an empty and outdated ideology of progress.
5. goloshes: an over-shoe, made of leather or (from the late nineteenth century) india-rubber, designed to protect the shoe itself from damp and dirt.
6. The elephant: in Chesterton: Man and Mask (1961), Gary Wills noted that ‘the final chase through monstrous scenes, thronged with trumpeting and incredible beasts, is a glimpse of [the] animal world which Jehovah called up for Job. Syme is answered by the elephant, as Job was by Behemoth.’
7. pelican: the pelican, a common heraldic device, is the Christian symbol both of charity and of Christ crucified because, according to legend, it savaged its own breast in order to feed life-giving blood to its hungry young.
8. the Albert Hall: the Royal Albert Hall, a vast amphitheatrical concert hall dedicated to Queen Victoria’s late husband Prince Albert (1819–61), who had helped organize the Great Exhibition of 1851 in nearby Hyde Park, was opened in 1871. It is approximately two kilometres, across the park, from Paddington.
9. Wheel of Earl’s Court: the Great Wheel, a ferris wheel modelled on the Chicago Wheel, was opened in 1895 at the Empire of India Exhibition in Earl’s Court, an event devised by the impresario Imre Kiralfy (1845–1919). It was demolished in 1907. In his Descriptive Album of London (c.1896), the architect George Birch (1842–1904) wrote that ‘the big wheel always has its crowd of patrons who like to experience the exhilarating effects of an ascent into the air, minus the dangers attending a balloon and the probability of making an ascent rather higher than they originally intended, and the improbability of landing on the earth again in a perfect condition’.
10. Snowdrop: in his edition, Gardner points out that ‘it may not be a coincidence that Snowdrop was the name of Alice’s kitten, as we learn from the last chapter of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass’. See also Chapter 10, note 6; and Chapter 15, note 2.
14
The Six Philosophers
1. Why leap ye, ye high hills: see Psalm 68: 16: ‘Why leap ye, ye high hills? this is the hill which God desireth to dwell in; yea, the Lord will dwell in it for ever.’
2. bounder: Chesterton probably has three associations in mind: someone who leaps about; someone characterized by objectionable or anti-social manners; and, to cite the OED, someone ‘who sets or marks out bounds or limits’ (‘All my life I have loved edges,’ Chesterton writes in his Autobiography; ‘and the boundary-line that brings one thing sharply against another’).
3. the deep sea-lumps and protoplasm: this recalls ‘the Thing’ sent from Mars in H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), and the Martians that emerge from it: the first of these is described as ‘a big, greyish rounded bulk, the size, perhaps, of a bear’, which ‘glistened like wet leather’ and ‘heaved and pulsated convulsively’. It also evokes the end of the penultimate chapter of The Time Machine, where the Time Traveller, briefly marooned in the far-distant future, glimpses life on earth beginning again (see Chapter 1, note 4).
4. Barnum’s freak: Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810–91) was an American impresario and circus-owner, famous in England for his ‘Barnum and London Circus’, the central attraction of which was an ele
phant called Jumbo, which he bought from London Zoo in 1882. The roster of ‘freaks’ who performed for Barnum included, most famously, General Tom Thumb.
5. Pan: Pan, who has the hooves, legs, hindquarters and horns of a goat, is in Greek mythology the god of shepherds and of all things pastoral. In the Greek language, pan means ‘all’.
6. ottoman: ‘a low upholstered seat without a back or arms, typically serving also as a box, with the seat hinged to form a lid’ (OED).
7. domino: ‘a kind of loose cloak, apparently of Venetian origin, chiefly worn at masquerades, with a small mask covering the upper part of the face, by persons [im]personating a character’ (OED).
8. a passage in the first chapter of Genesis: see Genesis 1: 14–18: ‘And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: / And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. / And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. / And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, / And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.’
15
The Accuser
1. a man rampant: in heraldry, this generally refers to a four-legged animal standing on its hind feet with its forepaws in the air; applied to humans, as in this rather mischievous image, it signifies a fierce disposition.
The Man Who Was Thursday (Penguin ed) Page 23