Browning’s poems are studded with more or less minatory towers. A solitary tower, reclaimed by animal and vegetable life, is for instance all that remains of the barbaric warlord Alberic’s castle in Sordello (1840). And there are a number of towers in his depictions of the Roman Campagna; one ‘strange’, another ‘malicious’, all of them enigmatic, resistant to meaning, and oddly threatening.21 ‘Love Among the Ruins’ (1852), for example, a poem composed only two days before ‘Childe Roland’, features a solitary turret on the plains that ‘Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time / Sprang sublime’.22 These ruined erections, traces of an imperial past, are suffixes of what Henri Lefebvre classified as ‘the phallic formant’, which is one of the basic permutations of abstract space: ‘Metaphorically, it symbolizes force, male fertility, masculine violence.’23
Browning’s towers, often in retreat from the profusion of organic life, are monuments to a regimen of political violence that, once omnipotent, has been fatally eroded by time. Bristling with abandoned towers, then, Browning’s poems are built on ‘ruined quests’ as well as ‘good moments’, to use Harold Bloom’s celebrated terms. The epiphanies he portrays are what Bloom calls ‘vastations of quest’; and his ‘darkest visions of failure’, conversely, are ‘celebrations’.24
‘Childe Roland’, with its enigmatic and ambiguous conclusion, is the supreme example of this. In Browning’s treatment of the theme, the chivalric quest so closely resembles a desperate struggle simply to escape the spiritual horror of meaninglessness that it also appears to constitute the ruination of all quests. Only by confronting the failure of his quest, in the events narrated in the final stanzas, does Roland grasp the promise of success – although the fact that the final line of the poem loops the reader back to its title, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’, implies the possibility that this almost derelict knight is trapped in a cyclical structure from which he cannot ultimately escape. Perhaps, like the ancient Mariner, he is doomed endlessly to repeat a description of this pointless quest to anyone prepared to stop and listen to his guilt-ridden monologue.
Bloom argues that ‘Childe Roland’ is the supreme instance of the quest form emptying itself out. For Chesterton, implicitly, it is an example of the quest form being restored to its full significance. It is, according to him, a kind of test case of the reader’s temperament or spiritual condition. When he discusses the poem in in his brilliant little biographical monograph on Browning, published in 1903, Chesterton pointedly expresses his frustration with readers who ask what it means. ‘The only genuine answer to this’, he expostulates, is ‘What does anything mean?’:
Does the earth mean nothing? Do grey skies and wastes covered with thistles mean nothing? Does an old horse turned out to graze mean nothing? If it does, there is but one further truth to be added – that everything means nothing.25
For Chesterton, Browning’s poem sets a sort of trap for the reader: if the reader assumes it is nihilistic, then they are themselves a nihilist, poised on the point of a spiritual suicide. Perhaps it is because rather than in spite of the fact that ‘Childe Roland’ superficially appears to be Browning’s most pessimistic poem that it appealed to Chesterton. ‘Childe Roland’, for him, affirms the meaningfulness of the quest only by an abrupt and implausible leap of faith. ‘All pessimism’, Chesterton once wrote, ‘has a secret optimism for its object.’26
In his concluding comments on ‘Childe Roland’, Chesterton praises it for being ‘the hint of an entirely new and curious type of poetry, the poetry of the shabby and hungry aspect of the earth’. Chesterton effectively proposes that it represents the first truly post-Romantic poetry. For, unlike those poets who celebrated ‘the poetry of rugged and gloomy landscapes’, Browning ‘insists upon celebrating the poetry of mean landscapes’.27 The shift or displacement his poem describes is from the sublime to the grotesque.
Chesterton perceives in ‘Childe Roland’ the emergence of a poetics of the grotesque. Implicitly, the grotesque constitutes the first genuinely post-Romantic aesthetic. Standing in blunt contrast to Alfred Tennyson’s contemporaneous Arthurian poems, with their idealization of imperial Britain, Browning’s poem, festering as it is with images of corruption, triumphs in the demise of Romanticism. ‘Childe Roland’, Chesterton concludes with relish, is ‘the song of the beauty of refuse; and Browning was the first to sing it’.28 Here is a poetry of debris, rubbish and rejectamenta. And its characteristic landscape is a wasteland.
Perhaps Chesterton liked to think that he was the second to sing ‘the beauty of refuse’. A number of the poems collected in The Wild Knight and Other Poems (1900) are indebted to ‘Childe Roland’. Take ‘The Pessimist’, an intemperate attack on the ethics of the 1890s, which opens in these provocative terms: ‘You that have snarled through the ages, take your answer and go –, / I know your hoary question, the riddle that all men know.’29 The second of these lines alludes to the opening lines of ‘Childe Roland’: ‘My first thought was, he lied in every word, / That hoary cripple …’30 Chesterton’s poet is identified with Browning’s knight; and this poet’s pessimistic antagonist is implicitly identified with Browning’s cripple, an accursed cynic standing at the roadside apparently attempting to deceive him and deter him from the quest.
In ‘The Wild Knight’, the volume’s title poem, the poet is an embattled chivalric hero whose ‘green, pale pennon’, attached to his spear, is a ‘blazon of wild faith / And love of fruitless things’. He journeys across an apocalyptic landscape where a cold wind ‘blows across the plains, / And all the shrines stand empty’. The object of this desperate knight’s quest, it transpires, is not a dark tower but a ‘twisted path / Under a twisted pear-tree’. He believes that there, precisely because of the ‘strange-visaged blunders’ and ‘mystic cruelties’ he has suffered, he will finally come to know God.
But, in the concluding lines, he admits for all his optimism that this might be a dream: ‘the grey clouds come down / In hail upon the icy plains’, and he rides ‘Burning for ever in consuming fire’.31 Chesterton’s poem finally seems to catalogue the poet’s failure both to redeem the darker ambiguities of Browning’s dramatic monologue and to affirm the Christian God to whom he longs to accommodate himself.
‘The Wild Knight’ therefore charts some of the same territory later mapped by T. S. Eliot’s modernist epic The Waste Land (1922) – a poem that is also shaped by the apocalyptic landscape of ‘Childe Roland’. The final section of Eliot’s systematic critique of the romance form offers febrile glimpses of ‘the approach to the Chapel Perilous’, as the Notes to the poem summarize it, in terms that recall both Browning’s poem and, no doubt unintentionally, Chesterton’s. Eliot’s ‘empty chapel’ itself, which is discovered beside ‘tumbled graves’ where ‘the grass is singing’, is in the end ‘only the wind’s home’.32
This section of The Waste Land is steepled with images of shattered towers that stand out against the plains – from the ‘Falling towers’ of the great cities of ancient and modern civilization in the sixth stanza (‘Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London’), to the towers that are ‘upside down in air’ and toll ‘reminiscent bells’ in the seventh. Ruined towers are one of Eliot’s central emblems for the collapse of contemporary Europe. The final fragment of ‘What the Thunder Said’ quotes from Gérard de Nerval’s ‘El Desdichado’ (1854): ‘Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie’, ‘The Prince of Aquitaine, his tower in ruins’.33
If Chesterton is keen to demonstrate that ‘Childe Roland’ is a ‘new and curious type of poetry’, then his interpretation of it arguably renders it even newer and more curious; and it does so by deliberately urbanizing it. The ‘mean landscapes’ that Chesterton has in mind are in the first instance those strange edgelands, in liminal regions of the city, that are neither picturesque nor sublime, and that don’t as a result fit into the categories of aesthetics. Wastelands. ‘That sense of scrubbiness in nature, as of a man unshaved,’ Chesterton writes in relation to Browning�
��s poem, ‘had never been conveyed with this enthusiasm and primeval gusto before.’34 This is an extraordinary and unexpected anthropomorphization. It brilliantly evokes the dishevelled, morally questionable atmosphere of the landscape described by Browning. And it has an oddly modernizing effect.
This becomes more apparent when Chesterton cites the twelfth stanza of ‘Childe Roland’:
If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk
Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents
Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents
In the dock’s harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to balk
All hope of greenness? ’tis a brute must walk
Pashing their life out, with a brute’s intents.35
Commenting on this stanza, with its tone of pinched, repetitious desperation, Chesterton notes that it is ‘a perfect realisation of that eerie sentiment which comes upon us not so often among mountains and water-falls, as it does on some half-starved common at twilight, or in walking down some grey mean street’.36
Roland’s landscape is a profoundly sinister but at the same time perfectly unsensational one; and it metamorphoses, in the course of Chesterton’s comment, into a cityscape. Bloom perspicaciously notes that ‘Roland describes his landscape like Zola describing an urban scene.’37 Chesterton, too, brilliantly draws attention to the hidden urban dimension of ‘Childe Roland’, relocating its eponymous knight’s quest to the nastier, more impoverished streets of the city, its torn and ragged outer edges. His interpretation of Browning thus experiments with the idea of transposing epic to a naturalist setting.
In the first half of The Man Who Was Thursday, an allegorical romance whose enigmatic goings-on unfold in the pubs and streets of a familiar London, Chesterton applies the same technique. In Chapter 4, Chesterton’s hero, the poet and detective Gabriel Syme, boards a steamboat and travels up the Thames under moonlight that is like ‘dead daylight’. The more conscious he becomes of the ‘glittering desolation’ of this cityscape, which is characterized by ‘a luminous and unnatural discoloration’ evocative of ‘Childe Roland’, ‘the more his own chivalric folly glow[s] in the night like a great fire’:
Even the common things he carried with him – the food and the brandy and the loaded pistol – took on exactly that concrete and material poetry which a child feels when he takes a gun upon a journey or a bun with him to bed. The sword-stick and the brandy-flask, though in themselves only the tools of morbid conspirators, became the expressions of his own more healthy romance. The sword-stick became almost the sword of chivalry, and the brandy the wine of the stirrup-cup. For even the most dehumanised modern fantasies depend on some older and simpler figure; the adventures may be mad, but the adventurer must be sane. The dragon without St. George would not even be grotesque. So this inhuman landscape was only imaginative by the presence of a man really human.
The Man Who Was Thursday is an elaborate celebration, in a cultural climate poisoned by morbid conspirators, of healthy romance. It pits a solitary, sane and humane adventurer against the dehumanized modern fantasies that Chesterton associates with the 1890s – like Jack ranged against the Giant or St George against the Dragon. Or like Childe Roland confronting the Tower.
In ‘A Defence of Detective Stories’ (1901), Chesterton identified ‘the agent of social justice’, that is, the detective, as a romantic archetype whom he praises as ‘the original and poetic figure’.38 Syme, in The Man Who Was Thursday, is just such an emblematic figure of the romance tradition. He is a knight-errant reincarnated in the form of a detective desperately attempting to redeem the threat of damnation in the conditions of metropolitan modernity.
‘It is no use attempting to say what it is all about,’ wrote Austin Harrison in his review of The Man Who Was Thursday; ‘it is about everything, and that in curiously thrilling detective form.’39
Ostensibly at least, the book is about a battle to the death between anarchists and anti-terrorist detectives in London at the end of the nineteenth century – the ‘boom of bomb throwing’, as Orson Welles so deliciously put it in the comments with which he prefaced his radio recording of the novel in 1938.40 But, in contrast to Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), it is not about anarchists themselves, and the political and psychological destruction they may cause, so much as it is about the ‘wandering champions’ celebrated by Ker and the role these epic archetypes might play in the spiritual redemption of industrial modernity at the turn of the twentieth century.
The novel begins in a bohemian suburb of 1890s London, where Syme encounters another poet, the aesthete and self-professed anarchist Lucien Gregory. After a heated argument about the relationship between politics and aesthetics, one that Gregory hopes to clinch by offering Syme irrefutable proof that he is committed to anarchism in practice as well as in theory, the former takes the latter to a conspiratorial meeting in a subterranean chamber beneath a tavern, at which he expects to be selected for a post on the Central Anarchist Council.
Moments before they enter the chamber, however, after making a pact with Gregory that requires the anarchist to maintain strict secrecy, Syme reveals that he is a police detective. In the event, to Gregory’s deepening horror, it is instead Syme whom the assembled anarchists elect to the Council. And it is Syme, consequently, who meets the other members of the Council, each of whom is named after one of the days of the week, at a bizarre breakfast party in Leicester Square where a plan to assassinate various European heads of state is being finalized. Syme thus becomes Thursday.
The president of the anarchists, a vast monument of a man ‘like a statue carved deliberately as colossal’, is Sunday (42). This mysterious, omniscient figure stages the dreamlike events that ensue, a succession of ominous and at the same time ludicrous social games conducted at breakneck pace, involving revelations of concealed identities, duels, pitched battles and crazed chases across London and France, all culminating, in the final chapter of the book, in a complicated religious masquerade.
In the course of these episodes, through a series of mesmerizing, artfully calculated narrative displacements, it successively emerges that, like Thursday himself, each of the anarchists on the Council is a detective in disguise. Indeed, it is eventually revealed that even Sunday, having appeared as the towering embodiment of pure evil, is none other than the police chief who, quite as imposing as the arch-anarchist he has mimicked and mirrored, is responsible for recruiting this team of anti-terrorists.
This does not make him the embodiment of pure good instead, though. The novel is not that simple. For the intricate dance that Sunday has choreographed, the elaborate metaphysical farce described by the book’s plot, seems mystifyingly amoral. Chesterton half-helpfully intimated that Sunday was not so much God himself, as some commentators claimed, as ‘Nature as it appears to the pantheist whose pantheism is struggling out of pessimism’ (102). In spite of this, though, Sunday’s identity, if the idea of an identity is not hopelessly inappropriate in relation to this superhuman entity, remains the book’s intractable, but at the same time oddly liberating, secret.
So is the plot an allegory, as a number of critics have suggested? No, not exactly. It is, perhaps, a plot. That is to say, the novel’s plot, which apparently involves both the anarchists’ plot to overthrow order and the detectives’ plot to overthrow disorder, is itself a form of plot. It is a kind of conspiratorial campaign against the complacent reader expecting adventure fiction. The revelations of this metanarrative plot, however, pivot in the end not on the malign motives behind extraordinary events but the benign motivelessness of ordinary events.
In Robert Browning, Chesterton had praised the poet’s commitment to the commonplace and even the superficial, and it is to this almost sublime state of superficiality that he himself aspired: ‘To the man who sees the marvellousness of all things, the surface of life is fully as strange and magical as its interior; clearness and plainness of life is fully as mysterious as its mysteries.’41 The fiendishly complicated
plot of The Man Who Was Thursday is a deliberate attempt to bamboozle its readers and so leave them, at the novel’s climactic conclusion, both amazed and relieved at the divine simplicity of the universe.
Chesterton’s novel vibrates and reverberates like ‘one incessant carnival of insane and inspired improvisation’, as he himself once said of Dickens’s life.42 It comprises a riotously colourful patchwork of different genres, including the detective story, the metaphysical disquisition, the dream poem, the dystopia, the fairy tale, the dramatic farce, the gothic fantasia, the allegorical masquerade, the melodrama, the nonsense tale, the novel of ideas, the political fable, the religious allegory, the romance, the spy thriller and the theological treatise, among other things. It contains everything, in short, except the familiar qualities of the realist or naturalist novel.
On the contrary, it is gloriously, self-consciously ‘irrealist’.43 And, in this respect, it inhabits a tradition that Chesterton described in an essay entitled ‘Dreams’ (1901), a lineage of ‘great works which mix up abstractions fit for an epic with fooleries not fit for a pantomime’, and ‘which present such a picture of literary chaos as might be produced if the characters of every book from Paradise Lost to Pickwick Papers broke from their covers and mingled in one mad romance’. Such books, this manifesto concludes, have ‘the same unity that we find in dreams’ – that is, ‘an absolute unity of emotion’.44
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