The Man Who Was Thursday (23 page)
Read The Man Who Was Thursday Online
Authors: G.K. Chesterton
On one side of this lawn, alive with dancers, was a sort of green bank, like the terrace in such old-fashioned gardens.
Along this, in a kind of crescent, stood seven great chairs, the thrones of the seven days. Gogol and Dr. Bull were already in their seats; the Professor was just mounting to his. Gogol, or Tuesday, had his simplicity well symbolized by a dress designed upon the division of the waters, a dress that separated upon his forehead and fell to his feet, grey and silver, like a sheet of rain. The Professor, whose day was that on which the birds and fishes—the ruder forms of life—were created, had a dress of dim purple, over which sprawled goggle-eyed fishes and outrageous tropical birds, the union in him of unfathomable fancy and of doubt. Dr. Bull, the last day of Creation, wore a coat covered with heraldic animals in red and gold, and on his crest a man rampant. He lay back in his chair with a broad smile, the picture of an optimist in his element.
One by one the wanderers ascended the bank and sat in their strange seats. As each of them sat down a roar of enthusiasm rose from the carnival, such as that with which crowds receive kings. Cups were clashed and torches shaken, and feathered hats flung in the air. The men for whom these thrones were reserved were men crowned with some extraordinary laurels. But the central chair was empty.
Syme was on the left hand of it and the Secretary on the right. The Secretary looked across the empty throne at Syme, and said, compressing his lips:
“We do not know that he is not dead in a field.”
Almost as Syme heard the words, he saw on the sea of human faces in front of him a frightful and beautiful alteration, as if heaven had opened behind his head. But Sunday had only passed silently along the front like a shadow, and had sat in the central seat. He was draped plainly, in a pure and terrible white, and his hair was like a silver flame on his forehead.
For a long time—it seemed for hours—that huge masquerade of mankind swayed and stamped in front of them to marching and exultant music. Every couple dancing seemed a separate romance;
it might be a fairy dancing with a pillar-box, or a peasant girl dancing with the moon; but in each case it was, somehow, as absurd as Alice in Wonderland, yet as grave and kind as a love story. At last, however, the thick crowd began to thin itself. Couples strolled away into the garden-walks, or began to drift towards that end of the building where stood smoking, in huge pots like fish-kettles, some hot and scented mixtures of old ale or wine. Above all these, upon a sort of black framework on the roof of the house, roared in its iron basket a gigantic bonfire, which lit up the land for miles. It flung the homely effect of firelight over the face of vast forests of grey or brown, and it seemed to fill with warmth even the emptiness of upper night. Yet this also, after a time, was allowed to grow fainter; the dim groups gathered more and more round the great cauldrons, or passed, laughing and clattering, into the inner passages of that ancient house. Soon there were only some ten loiterers in the garden; soon only four. Finally the last stray merrymaker ran into the house whooping to his companions. The fire faded, and the slow, strong stars came out. And the seven strange men were left alone, like seven stone statues on their chairs of stone. Not one of them had spoken a word.
They seemed in no haste to do so, but heard in silence the hum of insects and the distant song of one bird. Then Sunday spoke, but so dreamily that he might have been continuing a conversation rather than beginning one.
“We will eat and drink later,” he said. “Let us remain together a little, we who have loved each other so sadly, and have fought so long. I seem to remember only centuries of heroic war, in which you were always heroes—epic on epic, iliad on iliad, and you always brothers in arms. Whether it was but recently (for time is nothing), or at the beginning of the world, I sent you out to war. I sat in the darkness, where there is not any created thing, and to you I was only a voice commanding valour and an unnatural virtue. You heard the voice in the dark, and you never
heard it again. The sun in heaven denied it, the earth and sky denied it, all human wisdom denied it. And when I met you in the daylight I denied it myself.”
Syme stirred sharply in his seat, but otherwise there was silence, and the incomprehensible went on.
“But you were men. You did not forget your secret honour, though the whole cosmos turned an engine of torture to tear it out of you. I knew how near you were to hell. I know how you, Thursday, crossed swords with King Satan, and how you, Wednesday, named me in the hour without hope.”
There was complete silence in the starlit garden, and then the black-browed Secretary, implacable, turned in his chair towards Sunday, and said in a harsh voice:
“Who and what are you?”
“I am the Sabbath,” said the other without moving. “I am the peace of God.”
The Secretary started up, and stood crushing his costly robe in his hand.
“I know what you mean,” he cried, “and it is exactly that that I cannot forgive you. I know you are contentment, optimism, what do they call the thing, an ultimate reconciliation. Well, I am not reconciled. If you were the man in the dark room, why were you also Sunday, an offence to the sunlight? If you were from the first our father and our friend, why were you also our greatest enemy? We wept, we fled in terror; the iron entered into our souls—and you are the peace of God! Oh, I can forgive God His anger, though it destroyed nations; but I cannot forgive Him His peace.”
Sunday answered not a word, but very slowly he turned his face of stone upon Syme as if asking a question.
“No,” said Syme, “I do not feel fierce like that. I am grateful to you, not only for wine and hospitality here, but for many a fine scamper and free fight. But I should like to know. My soul and heart are as happy and quiet here as this old garden, but my reason is still crying out. I should like to know.”
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 cresset 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’” 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?”
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.
OMMENTARY
HILAIRE BELLOC
WILLIAM BARRY
WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE
G. K. CHESTERTON
[My] chief claim to know and interpret Chesterton is, of course, a permanent and active personal friendship, through which we were very close companions for more than 30 years and during nearly the whole of his literary activity.
The group to which he and I belonged recognised that the main social event of our generation was the destruction of freedom through the universal growth of Capitalist monopoly, and the ruin of economic independence in the mass of private citizens.
It is essential to a comprehension of Gilbert Chesterton’s life, even in the field of literature (which stands half apart today from politics), to understand that this
political
aim to which he and I and all our group were vowed, the Restoration of Property, the struggle against Communism and the Capitalism whence Communism springs, was our (and his) chief temporal aim.
But such a temporal object must, like all external worldly objects, depend upon an underlying internal spirit. Only a philosophy can produce political action and a philosophy is only vital when it is the soul of a religion.
Now here we come to the thing of chief value and of chief effect in Gilbert Chesterton’s life and work: his religion.
The main points of what I have to say … upon the conditions of survival in Gilbert Chesterton’s writings, may be tabulated as follows:
I. The leading characteristic of Chesterton as a writer and as a man (the two were much closer identified in him than in most writers) was that he was
national…
.
II. The next characteristic was an extreme precision of thought, such as used to be characteristic of Englishmen, though in modern times it has broken down and people have forgotten how native it was to the English mind in the past.
III. The third characteristic I note about his writing and thought is a unique capacity for
parallelism
. He continually illumined and explained realities by comparisons. This was really the weapon peculiar to Chesterton’s genius. It was the one thing which he in particular had, and which no one else in his time came near to, and few in the past have approached. It is the strongest element in his writing and thinking, after the far less exceptional element of sincerity.
IV. The structure upon which his work, like that of all modern men, had been founded, was historical: but it was only in general historical; it was far more deeply and widely
literary
. (I believe I notice this the more because with me it has always been the other way about; I have a very great deal of reading and experience upon history, far less upon literature.)
V. Charity. He approached controversy, his delight, hardly ever as a conflict, nearly always as an appreciation, including that of his opponent.
VI. Lastly there is that chief matter of his life and therefore of his literary activity, his acceptation of the Faith.
The nationalism of Chesterton was providential, not only for his own fame but for its effect upon his readers. It formed a bridge or link between the English mind as it has been formed by the Reformation (and particularly the later part of the Reformation, during the 17th century), and the general culture of Europe which was created by, and can only be preserved through, the Catholic Church.
One example of this national character and style is the way in which the word suggests the word in his writing: a thing not unconnected with the effect of the Jacobean Bible on the English mind since the 17th century, particularly the Epistles of St. Paul. … It is in this connection that the frequent use of puns, or, when they are not puns, plays upon words in Chesterton’s writings, should be noted.
Lastly, there is the national character of high individualisation, which some have also called “localisation;” the preference of concrete connotation to abstraction. Chesterton is in the full tradition of those creative English writers from Chaucer to Dickens, who dwell not upon ideas but upon men and women, and especially is he national in his vast survey of English letters.
Chesterton’s passion for precision of thought was an overwhelming advantage for him over all his modern opponents in controversy, especially for his modern opponents of English speech, or rather of Protestant English culture.
Chesterton is perpetually pulling up the reader with a shock of surprise, and his pages are crammed with epigram…. The heart of his style is lucidity, produced by a complete rejection of ambiguity: complete exactitude of definition.
While there is in this … a peril to his contemporary effect and to its permanence in one way, because he wrote in the English tongue and for a public melted into the last dilution of English Protestantism—a public therefore which was almost physically incapable of appreciating precision in the major matters of life—there is, on the other hand, a strong chance of permanence in another way. For your precise thinker stands unchanged: unaffected by the fluctuations of fashion in expression.
Here, as in many other connections, the permanent effect of Gilbert Chesterton’s writing must largely depend upon our return or non-return to the high culture we have lost. This means in practice the return or non-return of England to the Catholic Church. The English-speaking public, apart from the Irish race, is now Protestant. It has been strongly and increasingly Anti-Catholic for now 250 years. Through the effect of time it is to-day more soaked in Protestantism than ever it was before.
Here, as in every other matter, the permanence of Chesterton’s fame will depend upon that very doubtful contingency—the conversion of England.
His unique, his capital, genius for illustration by parallel, by example, is his peculiar mark. … Now parallelism is a gift or method of vast effect in the conveyance of truth.
Parallelism consists in the illustration of some unperceived truth by its exact consonance with the reflection of a truth already known and perceived.
He introduces [a parallelism] in more than one form; with the phrase … “It is as though,” or more violently, the phrase “Why not say while you are about it,” followed by an example of the absurdity rebuked.
My next point is Chesterton’s
historical basis
.
Gilbert Chesterton, having for his supreme interest the business and fate of his own country and of Christendom, occupied himself with history and literature, as supports and nourishment to the philosophy which it was his main business to expound.
[Some] of his finest verse was historical and the history therein was just, with a particular appreciation of the defence of Christendom against the barbarian and the Mahommedan. No one else but Gilbert Chesterton could have written such a poem as
Lepanto
in English, and no one has attempted it; while the
Ballad of the White Horse
is an extension of the same theme.
But his triumph (if I may so call it), in the historical field was his appreciation of Ireland. No other English writer has come near to Chesterton in understanding both the nature of Ireland and the overwhelming importance of the Irish in the English story.
Everything he wrote upon any one of the great English literary names was of the first quality. He summed up any one pen (that of Jane Austen, for instance) in exact sentences; sometimes in a single sentence, after a fashion which no one else has approached. He stood quite by himself in this department. He understood the very minds (to take the two most famous names) of Thackeray and of Dickens. He understood and presented Meredith. He understood the supremacy in Milton. He understood Pope. He understood the great Dryden. He was not swamped as nearly all his contemporaries were by Shakespeare, wherein they drown as in a vast sea—for that is what Shakespeare is. Gilbert Chesterton continued to understand the youngest and latest comers as he understood the forefathers in our great corpus of English verse and prose.
[His] influence in explaining English letters to Englishmen was great, though perpetually frustrated. He was here a teacher who should have led but who was not permitted to lead. However, he was a teacher who was more listened to than if he had expended the same energy on, and had acquired the same voluminous acquaintance with, history.
Chesterton’s connection with the Faith is much the most important aspect of his literary life….
That one of Chesterton’s innumerable pieces of work wherein the effect of the Faith is most evident is also his best piece of work. Of all his books [
The Thing]
is by far the most profound and the most clear…. If [
The Thing]
is forgotten, that will mean that thought is failing….
All men one may say, or very nearly all men, have one leading moral defect. Few have one leading Christian virtue. That of Gilbert Chesterton was unmistakably the virtue of Christian charity: a virtue especially rare in writing men, and rarest of all in such of them as have a pursuing appetite for controversy—that is, for bolting out the truth.
He loved his fellow-men. Through this affection, which was all embracing, he understood the common man; and that virtue, which was so conspicuous in all his private life and broad river of daily speech, was both a strength and a weakness to his fame.
It was a strength because it gave him access to every mind; men will always listen to a friend; and so much was he a friend of all those for whom he wrote that all were prepared to listen, however much they were puzzled.
The drawback, however, of this virtue of charity as regards its action upon his fame was that it prevented the presence in what he wrote of that acerbity or “bite” which gives an edge or rather a spearhead to every effort at persuasion.
He wounded none, but thus also he failed to provide weapons wherewith one may wound and kill folly. Now without wounding and killing, there is no battle; and thus, in this life, no victory; but also no peril to the soul through hatred.
Christendom would seem to be now entering an ultimate phase in the struggle between good and evil, which is, for us, the battle between the Catholic Church and its opponents. In that struggle, those will stand out in the future most vividly who most provoked hostility. To his lasting advantage in the essential things of the spirit, of his own individual soul, he did not provoke it.
From
On the Place of Gilbert Chesterton in English Letters
, 1940
There are many ways of preaching a lay sermon; and it would be strange if Mr. Chesterton did not take his own. For he combines gifts which are seldom found together. With rare insight he has detected the
glory of the commonplace; he is certain that genius and the ordinary man agree in their judgment about life, death, marriage, morals, and all the things that signify. Therefore he despises in good-humoured fashion the crank, the law-breaker, the “immoralist”—senseless persons who strike an attitude because they can do nothing else. But while cleaving to the old, he arrays it in new garments of a most surprising cut and lively colours. Why should paradox be always enlisted on the wrong side? Who has a better right to laugh than the man that believes in plain and saving Realism? Laugh, accordingly, in the very thick of a struggle to defend the Highest Law, our philosopher does, yet not without grimness, for the smoke of the nether deeps circles around him. The echo of that laugh reminds us in its peculiar accent, at once grave and gay, of Robert Louis Stevenson. And, on the whole, it is Stevenson’s creed that is set before us, healthy, brave, rather high-strung, tender at last with a pity that hides itself in schoolboy fun and frolic.
But all do not construe allegory when they see it; a nightmare is an uncanny sort of vision, and the crowd may not understand.
The Man Who Was Thursday
begins like any other Anarchist make-up; singularly resembling “The Angel of the Revolution,” but ironical, whereas that was no more playful than a thrust with a dagger. We get the thrill and the shock and are led cleverly astray. The “special constables of order”—a conception worthy of Sir Conan Doyle—put us on the
qui vive;
but for a time bewilder us, as they ought in so good a story. Their purpose—and here Mr. Chesterton means what he says—is to keep watch and ward against the most deadly kind of Anarchism. “Yes,” exclaims the “Man who was Thursday,” “the modern world has retained all those parts of police-work which are really oppressive and ignominious, the harrying of the poor, the spying upon the unfortunate. It has given up the more dignified work, the punishment of powerful traitors in the State and powerful heresiarchs in the Church. The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have a right to punish anybody else.”
How few will take this as seriously intended! The blasé reader will smile and rush on, gaping to know what becomes of Syme, the gentleman-detective, who has ventured his life by joining the supreme Anarchist Council, and is bound in honour to fight without help of Scotland Yard. Such racing and chasing ensue that we are caught up in the whirlwind of it, yet always with a point of horror, strongly Stevensonian,
perhaps overdone. There are crowds of dark lines in this spectrum, showing finally as burlesque, but leaving an unpleasant trail behind. No doubt, if you want to throw on canvas the “City of Dreadful Night”—which is the true name for modern unbelief and disorder—you must deepen your sable tints; only our nerves cannot well endure them. These insane eccentricities which we reject have weakened us all; a healthier generation will look back on our age of decadence with wonder and no slight contempt. But, anyhow, even by borrowing its own weapons, Mr. Chesterton strikes at the monstrous phantom which is always denying “the decencies and charities of Christendom,” and he strikes hard.
In this mixture of the picturesque and the horrible there is some-thing Japanese. We may remember among the sketches of Hokusai certain huge apparitions like the enigmatic President, “Sunday,” or combats of weird beings, praeter-human and terrifying, over whom the artist flings a ray of sunshine that adds to their strangeness. At length our nightmare, which we have pursued through thick and thin, tumbles into absolute farce. The undergraduate humour of Syme breaks all bounds; and we feel hurt as we join in that mad chase after “Sunday” across London, where he plays the fool as he drives on. With sudden violence we are carried out of this harlequinade into a drop-scene, parable or what you will, and the philosophy of the book discloses itself. It is the old true Gospel of peace purchased by war, of valour standing up to be slain for its plighted word, of faith against appearances, of redemption through self-sacrifice. Was the message ever brought in a more unconventional garb? At all events, it is the genuine thing, as well as a challenge to the “science” that “announces nonentity,” and the art that “admires decay.” Beyond all question our intellectual anarchists proclaim a doctrine of suicide which the young, the ardent, the weaker sort, have acted upon or will act upon. To show us its meaning, with a hearty laugh at its extreme folly, may do the rest of us good. We wake from this nightmare into a world of sanity, and face the dawn with hope.