by Ian Ker
Looking back, Chesterton thought that the most brilliant’ of the Fleet Street journalists who kept their intellectual independence’ was Keith’ Jones, ‘the Queen of Fleet Street’, who was ever ready to try her hand at any sort of journalism, including melodramatic romances for women readers. The story was told that, having driven whole teams of plotters and counter-plotters successfully through a serious Scotch newspaper, she was pursuing one of the side-plots for a few chapters, when she received a telegram from the editor, “You have left your hero and heroine tied up in a cavern under the Thames for a week, and they are not married.”’Chesterton suspected that the same lady was involved with his brother in a spoof correspondence in the Eye-Witness, when Cecil was editor. It began, he thought, with his brother writing an article about a meeting between H. G. Wells and Brooker Washington, a black American publicist, in which Cecil suggested that Wells failed to understand the situation in the segregated South. In response, a letter from Bexley was published warning of the dangers of racial mixing and intermarriage, signed White Man’. Wells replied in a letter headed ‘The White Man of Bexley’, ‘as if the man were a sort of monster’ saying that he did not know what life was like “among the pure Whites of Bexley”, but that elsewhere meeting people did not always mean marrying them; “The etiquette is calmer.”’ Next there appeared a letter signed Black Man’, and then a more detached query, I should guess from some Brahmin or Parsee student at some college, pointing out that the racial problem was not confined to the races of Africa; and asking what view was taken of intermarriage with the races of Asia. He signed his letter “Brown Man”.’ Finally, appeared a letter, ‘almost every word’ of which Chesterton remembered, for it was short and simple and touching in its appeal to larger and more tolerant ideals’:
Sir,
May I express my regret that you should continue a correspondence which causes considerable pain to many innocent persons who, by no fault of their own, but by the iron laws of nature, inherit a complexion uncommon among their fellow-creatures and attractive only to the elite. Surely we can forget all these differences; and, whatever our race or colour, work hand in hand for the broadening of the brotherhood of humanity.
Yours faithfully,
Mauve Man with Green Spots.54
Although no book appeared in 1907, the journalism of course continued apace. And in November Chesterton published one of his handful of good serious poems, The Secret People’, which contains the well-known lines: ‘But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet. | Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.’ The beginning of the plight of England’s poor Chesterton laid squarely at the door of the Reformation that destroyed the monasteries that provided free food and lodging. Then the lords, who ‘had eaten the abbey’s fruits’, came to be more powerful than the king, whom they killed’ in league with the men of the new religion, with their bibles in their boots’.55 The poem could hardly have been more Catholic in its view of English history. In December 1907, Chesterton also wrote two letters to the Nation, in the first of which he accused the paper of a ‘strange irritation’ with Catholicism that struck him as rather ‘a tribute to its strength than as any evidence of its decline’ and of pathetically’ clinging to ‘one last Protestant doctrine’, having ‘openly abandoned all the others’. When the editor demanded to know if he was a Roman Catholic, Chesterton replied, I am not. I shall not be until you have convinced me that the Church of England is really the muddle-headed provincial heresy that you make it out.’ He followed these letters up with an article defending sacramental confession in the Daily News in January 1908.56
4
February 1908 saw the publication of Chesterton’s most successful work of fiction apart from the Father Brown stories, as well as one of his two apologetic masterpieces. The dedication to his friend Bentley made it clear that The Man who was Thursday was born out of the nihilism of the 1890s:
A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather,
Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.
Science announced nonentity and art admired decay…57
The novel’s subtitle A Nightmare’ is the key to understanding why this novel is more successful than the other novels. Here Chesterton’s medium’ is the message’—the nightmare of nihilism is evoked precisely in and through a fictional nightmare, a Kafkaesque surrealist nightmare, but where there is at least as much hilarity as there is terror.58 As we have seen, Chesterton did not consider himself a real novelist, as he liked to see ideas or notions wrestling naked … and not dressed up in a masquerade as men and women’.59 But in a nightmare the lack of characterization is not important or even relevant: the faces of friends may appear as the faces of friends.’ Nor is narrative a problem, as it is in the other novels, since in a dream events happen without any logic or reason. Both these points are also very relevant to the Father Brown stories, whose brevity obviously does not raise the problem of narrative,60 and, where characterization again is not relevant, or rather not desirable, since in detective stories the reader must not be told too much about any character, except the detective, but where instead the reader expects the faces of friends will turn out to be the faces of fiends and vice versa. Or, as Chesterton himself put it, ‘the detective story is … a drama of masks and not of faces…’. The author cannot tell us until the last chapter any of the most interesting things about the most interesting people.’61
This novel of nightmare begins with Gabriel Syme appearing in the artistic colony of Saffron Park (Bedford Park) as a rival poet to Lucian Gregory. Syme, with his angelic first name, stands for law and order; he is in rebellion against his parents’ rebellion against convention and stands for common sense and sanity. Lucian, with his satanic first name, is on the contrary an anarchist—but in real life quite harmless, as Syme assures his sister. However, in Syme’s nightmare Gregory introduces Syme to the Central Anarchist Council, having first sworn him to secrecy. The members of the Council are called after the days of the week, the President being Sunday. There is a vacancy for the member called Thursday, for which Lucian Gregory is standing. But Syme manages to get himself elected in order to infiltrate these anarchists, who are intent not just on throwing bombs but upon abolishing Right and Wrong’, having in his turn sworn Gregory to secrecy about his own identity as a detective ‘philosophical’ policeman.62
Syme has been recruited into this special corps’ by its chief, a man of massive stature’ with his ‘back to him’—a significant oddity in view of the author’s fascination with the human back that he had expatiated on in his book on Watts (and to which he had returned in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, with the curious incident at the beginning when the whimsical Auberon Quin walking behind his two friends in frock-coats suddenly sees two black dragons with evil eyes instead of two black buttons at the back of the frock coats). This corps has been formed to combat a crusade against the Family and the State’ waged by intellectuals, compared with whom ordinary criminals like thieves were honest men. The poor, in the form of barrelorgan players (a recurrent motif) or the French peasant at the end of the book, who are not attracted by the intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime’ of moral anarchy, symbolize normality and sanity in this nightmare world. But it is also the modern world that says one must not punish heretics’, who are the only people, Syme thinks, we have a right to punish’. Sunday had not been present at the meeting when Syme was elected on to the Council, but when Syme first sees him he sees ‘the back of a great mountain of a man’, a man abnormally tall and quite incredibly fat’, enlarged terribly to scale’. Syme had a sense of nearing the headquarters of hell’ as he walks across to meet the President, whose large face … grew larger and larger’. Syme might have given his allegiance’ to this superman’, but he cannot sink’ to the modern meanness’ of weak worship of intellect and force’. In the end, all the members of the Council are revealed to be philosophical’ policemen like Syme and Sunday himself
to be the head of this corps.63
Who, then, is Sunday? In his own words, he is a riddle’—a riddle like nature, like the universe itself. Sunday’s mockeries’ remind Syme of how Nature was always making quite mysterious jokes. Sunday had told them that they would understand him when they had understood the stars.’ But when Sunday offered the solid stretch of his unconscious back’, they felt even more mocked. He ‘seemed like the final form of matter’, ‘absent-minded’ in the way that wild animals are at once innocent and pitiless’. Syme thinks of Sunday as he thinks of ‘the whole world’. When he first saw him, he saw only his back, and he knew he was the worst man in the world’, indeed not a man at all, but a beast dressed up in men’s clothes’. But when he saw him face to face, his face frightened’ him because it was so beautiful, because it was so good’. From behind he had seemed an animal’, but from the front a god’. Pan’, interposes another member of the Council, was a god and an animal’. Syme wonders whether the mystery of Sunday’ is not also the mystery of the world’: When I see the horrible back, I am sure the noble face is but a mask. When I see the face but for an instant, I know the back is only a jest. Bad is so bad, that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good, that we feel certain that evil could be explained.’ That, suddenly exclaims Syme, is ‘the secret of the whole world’, that ‘we have only known the back of the world’. At the end of the book, Sunday reveals himself as the ‘Sabbath, the peace of God’ who rested on the Sabbath after the creation of the world. How then could he be both friend’ and enemy’? Like God in the Book of Job, taxed with the existence of evil and pain, Sunday responds, I have heard your complaints … And here I think, comes another to complain …’. It is the ‘real anarchist’, Lucian Gregory—’ when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them’, one of the members of the Council quotes from the Book of Job. Gregory curses ‘the people in power’, who have never suffered like him. Syme responds that now he understands why he had to be alone in the dreadful Council of the Days’, so that he might ‘have the glory and isolation of the anarchist’ and ‘be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter’, in order that the real lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this blasphemer’, because he too has suffered. But what about Sunday himself—has he ever suffered?
the great face grew to an awful size… grew larger and larger, filling the whole sky; then everything went black. Only in the darkness 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?’64
Syme then wakes from his nightmare. And, because in dreams people say inconsequential, strange, unexpected things, the voice of Sunday (if it is Sunday), so far only identified with nature or the world itself, quoting Christ’s words from the gospel referring to his imminent crucifixion, does not demand the kind of justification it otherwise would. Indeed, the book must be judged as a literary evocation of a nightmare and not of real life.65 In dreams we grope at meaning and significance, and that is what the novel itself does.
As Chesterton explained in the Autobiography, when in the 1890s he was so horribly near to being a pessimist’, he was trying to construct a healthier conception of cosmic life’. It was this stage in his development that he had attempted to fictionalize in a novel, the key to which was its subtitle, A Nightmare’. It had been suggested, and in one sense not untruly’, that the monstrous pantomime ogre’ Sunday was meant for a blasphemous version of the Creator’. But the point was that the story was a nightmare of things, not as they are, but as they seemed to the young half-pessimist of the ’90s; and the ogre who appears brutal but is also cryptically benevolent is not so much God’ as Nature as it appears to the pantheist, whose pantheism is struggling out of pessimism. So far as the story had any sense in it, it was meant to begin with the picture of the world at its worst and to work towards the suggestion that the picture was not so black as it was already painted.’ For he was ‘trying vaguely to found a new optimism, not on the maximum but the minimum of good’. He did not so much mind the pessimist who complained that there was so little good’ as ‘the pessimist who asked what was the good of good’. But he also ‘even for the worst reasons… already knew too much to pretend to get rid of evil’, which was why he ‘introduced at the end one figure who really does, with a full understanding, deny and defy the good’. For Lucian Gregory testifies ‘to the extreme evil (which is merely the unpardonable sin of not wishing to be pardoned)’ that Chesterton knew from experience: I had learned it from myself. I was already quite certain that I could if I chose cut myself from the whole life of the universe.’66
When the book was adapted for the stage in 1926 by Ralph Neale and ‘Keith’Jones, by then Mrs Cecil Chesterton, Chesterton explained in an introduction that the pessimism he was opposing was dogmatic … even orthodox’. This philosophy of narrow despair’, deriving from Schopenhauer, was an imprisoning system’ that really resembled a nightmare’. It was in the middle of a thick London fog’ of pessimism and materialism’ that he had written the novel. But he was not opposing the heresy of pessimism’ with the equally morbid and diseased insanity of optimism’. The question was whether everything is really evil’, and regarding this ‘nightmare’ possibility it was relevant that nightmares are not true; and that in them even the faces of friends may appear as the faces of fiends’. In the novel itself, there was a scene in a wood full of shattered sunlight and shaken shadows’ where the hero could hardly see his companions for the patterns of sun and shade that danced upon them’; this ‘chaos of chiaroscuro’ seemed to symbolize the nightmare world in which he had been moving, where he wondered what was a friend and what an enemy’. And Chesterton adds, in allusion to his time at the Slade: He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.’67
In an interview in the Observer shortly before the play opened, Chesterton explained his motive in writing the original novel. He had thought it would be fun’ to reverse the usual detective plot in which an apparently innocent person is revealed as the murderer by tearing away… menacing masks’ to reveal benevolence’. There was also the related idea that there is actually a lot of good to be discovered in unlikely places, and that we who are fighting each other may be all fighting on the right side’—but that it was as well that we do not know this as the soul must be solitary, or there would be no place for courage’. But the novel’s moral was not the pantheist message that there was good in everything’, as was shown by the introduction of the one real anarchist and pessimist’, the ‘final Adversary… a man resolutely turned away from goodness’. He thought that Sunday could be taken to stand for Nature as distinguished from God. Huge, boisterous, full of vitality, dancing with a hundred legs, bright with the glare of the sun, and at first sight, somewhat regardless of us and our desires.’ However, the quotation from the Gospel at the end of the book seems to mean that Sunday is God. That is the only serious note in the book, the face of Sunday changes, you tear off the mask of Nature and you find God.’ Nevertheless, Chesterton warned his interviewer, when he wrote the novel he was feeling his way in matters of belief. The book, to use a monstrously incongruent parallel, is a sort of “Lead, Kindly Light.”’Still, he was protesting against the pessimism of the nineties’, and, although he did not know much about God’, he was ready to stick up for him’: It was a bad period when it was unfashionable to believe in innocence, and we were all supposed to worship Wilde and Whistler, and everything twisty and strange. I suppose it was a natural revolt.’ Comparing the pessimism of The Man who was Thursday with that of 1926, Chesterton thought the contemporary pessimism was much more noble’: ‘The sad souls of the ‘nineties lost hope because they had taken too much absinthe; our young men lost hope because a friend died with a bullet in his head.’68
A fortnight later Chesterton was also interviewed in
the Illustrated Sunday Herald. What had he meant when he wrote the book? ‘There you have me. It was so long ago, and I am a very forgetful person.’ It was certainly meant to be a detective story, written partly to please himself and partly to please his friend E. C. Bentley. But he wanted ‘to write a particular kind of detective tale’. He wanted to reverse’ the usual’ process’, and have a number of characters who are apparently able-bodied villains who, when unmasked, prove to be decent citizens’. The ‘idea behind this … standing of the ordinary detective tale on its head’ was that we who think we are fighting for justice are often aiming tremendous blows at villainous masks which hide people who have the same aim as we have, and think of us as we do of them. Most people, in fact are on the right side, only they keep it dark.’ However, he was also convinced then, and … convinced still, that there are people who have definitely taken sides with the devil’. And this was true of Lucian Gregory, who does stand for the forces of evil and despair’. It was no accident that the villain—the real anarchist of the story’ was ‘a decadent artist’, who was typical of that ‘poisonous period’. There was now a nobler sort of pessimism’ born of the carnage of the First World War and not born of the reaction from debauch’; the contemporary young pessimists’ were not merely contemptible’ like Gregory. But there is still as great a need as ever for faith … that most of those round us are on the right side, fight as we do and must with each other in the darkness.’ As for Sunday, he could be called Nature’: But you will note that I hold that when the mask of Nature is lifted you find God behind. All that wild exuberance of Nature, all its strange pranks, all its seeming indifference … all that is only a mask.’ Chesterton concluded by saying that it is well that we should not know all about those around us, that we should fight in the dark, while having the faith that most men are on the right side, for to possess courage the soul of man must be lonely until at last it knows all’.69