Gilbert

by Michael Coren

  I remember, I remember,

  Long before I was born,

  The tree-tops where my racial self

  Went dancing round at morn.

  Green wavering archipelagos,

  Great gusty bursts of blue,

  In my race-memory I recall

  (Or I am told to do).

  In that green-turreted Monkeyville

  (So I have often heard)

  It seemed as if a Blue Baboon

  Might soar like a Blue Bird.

  Low crawling Fundamentalists

  Glared up through the green mist,

  I hung upon my tail in heaven

  A Firmamentalist.

  And concluded with

  The past was bestial ignorance:

  But I feel a little funky,

  To think I’m further off from heaven

  Than when I was a monkey.

  It was not Gilbert at his best. He had read Darwin, and knew that the monkey obsession which so many critics of evolution had, who had not made themselves familiar with Darwin’s writings, was heavily out of proportion; Darwin had much more to say than a few suggestions about the relationship between man and ape. Gilbert had chosen the role of champion of tradition, and to an extent that position had been thrust upon him. The result was the same. He was now the shining knight of orthodoxy, looked to for support and protection from that long silent group who considered themselves the majority, and knew themselves to be both correct and voiceless.

  VII - The Man Who Was Orthodox

  Gilbert’s second novel, a work which he was unsure of and not satisfied with, appeared in the February of 1908. Sub-titled “A Nightmare,” as The Man Who Was Thursday it received more recognition than any of his previous writings. He dedicated it to Edmund Clerihew Bentley, with an introductory poem

  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;

  The world was old and ended:

  But you and I were gay;

  Round us in antic order

  Crippled vices came —

  Lust that had lost its laughter,

  Fear that had lost its shame.

  Like the white lock of Whistler,

  That lit our aimless gloom,

  Men showed their own white feather

  As proudly as a plume.

  Life was a fly that faded,

  And death a drone that stung;

  The world was very old indeed

  When you and I were young.

  They twisted even decent sin

  To shapes not to be named:

  Men were ashamed of honour;

  But we were not ashamed.

  Weak if we were and foolish

  Not thus we failed, not thus;

  When that black Baal blocked the heavens

  He had no hymns from us.

  Children we were — our forts of sand

  Were even as weak as we,

  High as they went we piled them up

  To break that bitter sea.

  Fools as we were in motley,

  All jangling and absurd,

  When all church bells were silent

  Our cap and bells were heard.

  Not all unhelped we held the fort,

  Our tiny flags unfurled;

  Some giants laboured in that cloud To lift it from the world.

  I find again the book we found,

  I feel the hour that flings

  Far out of fish-shaped Paumanok

  Some cry of cleaner things;

  And the Green Carnation withered,

  As in forest fires that pass,

  Roared in the wind of all the world

  Ten million leaves of grass;

  Or sane and sweet and sudden as

  A bird sings in the rain —

  Truth out of Tusitala spoke

  And pleasure out of pain.

  Yea, cool and clear and sudden as

  A bird sings in the grey.

  Dunedin to Samoa spoke,

  And darkness unto day.

  But we were young; we lived to see

  God break their bitter charms

  God and the good Republic

  Come riding back in arms;

  We have seen the City of Mansoul,

  Even as it rocked, relieved —

  Blessed are they who did not see,

  But being blind, believed.

  This is a tale of those old fears,

  Even of those emptied hells,

  And none but you shall understand

  The true thing that it tells —

  Of what colossal gods of shame

  Could cow men and yet crash,

  Of what huge devils hid the stars,

  Yet fell at a pistol flash.

  The doubts that were so plain to chase,

  So dreadful to withstand —

  Oh, who shall understand but you;

  Yea, who shall understand?

  The doubts that drove us through the night

  As we two talked amain,

  And day had broken on the streets

  E’er it broke upon the brain.

  Between us, by the peace of God,

  Such truth can now be told;

  Yea, there is strength in striking root,

  And good in growing old.

  We have found common things at last,

  And marriage and a creed,

  And I may safely write it now,

  And you may safely read.

  The intent of the novel was set down quite clearly in the poem: an attack upon the misconceptions of fashionable decadence, a defence of the values which Gilbert, his friends and — so he thought — his God cherished so dearly. He employs the character of Gabriel Syme, a romantic young poet who is also an undercover agent working for the British police. Syme’s experiences throughout the book are based in the twilight area of the nightmare, and we are never sure where reality and dream mingle or become one. Syme passes himself off as an anarchist, defeating a real anarchist poet at his own game of distorted honour and bluff. As he walks through a haunting area of London, which is Bedford Park by all appearances, he learns more of an anarchist plot and the extent of the world conspiracy. The hub of the crime is the Central Anarchist Council, consisting of seven members each named after a day of the week. By extreme demonstrations of courage and a calm wit Syme joins their ranks. He meets all the council members, discovering that they are undercover agents working for the police, mistrusting each other until the disguises are lifted. Only one member, the President, Sunday, is loyal and true to his cause. He is more than a man, more than a monster

  The form it took was a childish and yet hateful fancy. As he walked across the inner room towards the balcony, the large face of Sunday grew larger and larger; and Syme was gripped with a fear that when he was quite close the face would be too big to be possible, and that he would scream aloud. He remembered that as a child he would not look at the mask of Memnon in the British Museum, because it was a face, and so large.

  When the surreptitious detectives join together and chase President Sunday they undergo a series of outlandish adventures, eventually tracking the man who represents so much evil to his own garden. When confronted face-to-face their sworn enemy is exposed as the Chief of Police who originally gave them their orders, explaining why he was always hidden in darkness when he addressed his men. He is questioned, but will only reply “I am the Sabbath. I am the peace of God.” Syme, the only character with any depth in the book, responds to Sunday’s actions and to the appearance at the end of the novel of the real anarchist poet who he had hoodwinked earlier, with a fit of revelation; he shakes 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 f
ight 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?”

  Gilbert’s use of dream symbolism was a new departure for him, without doubt having its roots in the painful years of his lonely period, when his sleep as well as his waking hours were filled with nightmare visions which seemed never to leave him. He was to play down some of the theological meaning in the book, anxious that the story and the moral should stand on their own merits. He wrote that the tale was of a nightmare of things, “not as they are, but as they seemed to the half-pessimist of the ’90s …” In an interview published many years later, when The Man Who Was Thursday was adapted for the stage, he spoke of an ordinary detective tale and the tearing away of menacing masks.

  Associated with that merely fantastic notion was the one 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. I think it is quite true that it is just as well we do not, while the fight is on, know all about each other; the soul must be solitary, or there would be no place for courage.

  A rather amusing thing was said by Father Knox on this point. He said that he should have regarded the book as entirely pantheist and as preaching that there was good in everything if it had not been for the introduction of the one real anarchist and pessimist. But he was prepared to wager that if the book survives for a hundred years — which it won’t — they will say that the real anarchist was put in afterwards by the priests.

  But, though I was more foggy about ethical and theological matters than I am now, I was quite clear on that issue; that there was a final adversary, and that you might find a man resolutely turned away from goodness.

  People have asked me whom I meant by Sunday. Well, I think, on the whole, and allowing for the fact that he is a person in a tale — I think you can take him 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 …

  It was a book which Gilbert underestimated, believing that if any of his writings would still be being read and discussed in the future it most certainly would not be this one. His reasons were many; not least that it revealed a little too much of the fears and anxieties he underwent as a younger man. He had more faith in his essays. Few of them are read today for anything more than a glimpse of a clever literary style or witty debating points. They deserve far more analysis than that. Shortly after The Man Who Was Thursday a collection of pieces from the Illustrated London News was published under the title All Things Considered. Compared to the book which preceded it this volume of essays made a limited impression, but it is a lasting testimony to the Chestertonian ability to grasp relevance and present argument. In it he explored the contrast between the French and the English, the city of Oxford and its attractions, the delights of Christmas, spiritualism and a host of diverse subjects. One essay, “Patriotism and Sport,” has a particular pertinence today, in a world of fighting football fans running and screaming at each other under their respective flags; and nations banned from international sporting gatherings because of political belief and hypocrisy. In it he considered the notion of “Anglo-Saxon superiority,” dismissing it with “No quite genuine Englishman ever did believe in it.” He continued

  The typical Jingoes who have admired their countrymen too much for being conquerors will, doubtless, despise their countrymen too much for being conquered. But the Englishman with any feeling for England will know that athletic failures do not prove that England is weak, any more than athletic successes proved that England was strong. The truth is that athletics, like all other things, especially modern, are insanely individualistic. The Englishmen who win are exceptional even among men. English athletes represent England just about as much as Mr Barnum’s freaks represent America. There are so few of such people in the whole world that it is almost a toss-up whether they are found in this or that country.

  He also argued that all communities, all races, possess athletic abilities. He used as an example, interestingly enough, the Jewish people

  Or, to take another case: it is, broadly speaking, true that the Jews are, as a race, pacific, intellectual, indifferent to war, like the Indians, or, perhaps, contemptuous of war, like the Chinese: nevertheless, of the very good prizefighters, one or two have been Jews.

  In actual fact most of the British, and a large number of the world boxing champions of this period were Jewish, and the observation revealed how startled Gilbert was to learn that there may be a dent in the stereo-type of the Edwardian Jew as a cowardly man interested only in finance and ambition. Gilbert had been informed about a tough Jewish working class in the East End of London clawing its way out of the ghetto by eighteen-hour working days and the immediate success of the boxing ring, but he found it difficult to believe. The best he could do was to acknowledge that “one or two” Jewish fighters were good.

  In Orthodoxy, which appeared in September 1908, he set out to “answer a challenge.” Following the publication of Heretics some critics had asked Gilbert for a defence of his own views as well as an attack on other people’s. Not one to ignore a challenge, he wrote what is essentially a history of his own education as a thinker and believer, what Maisie Ward described as “Chesterton’s own history of his mind.” Gilbert’s primary aim was to satisfy himself in terms of exploring his faith and confirming it on paper; if he could answer his critics with the same action so much the better. He was not prepared at this stage to identify himself with Roman Catholicism, indeed he did not consider himself a Roman Catholic, but instead defended what he constantly referred to as “Orthodox Christianity.” He explained his reasons as follows

  To show that a faith or a philosophy is true from every standpoint would be too big an undertaking even for a much bigger book than this; it is necessary to follow one path of argument; and this is the path that I here propose to follow. I wish to set forth my faith as particularly answering this double spiritual need, the need for that mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar which Christendom has rightly named romance. For the very word “romance” has in it the mystery and ancient meaning of Rome. Any one setting out to dispute anything ought always to begin by saying what he does not dispute. Beyond stating what he proposes to prove he should always state what he does not propose to prove. The thing I do not propose to prove, the thing I propose to take as common ground between myself and any average reader, is this desirability of an acti
ve and imaginative life, picturesque and full of a poetical curiosity, a life such as western man at any rate always seems to have desired. If a man says that extinction is better than variety and adventure, then he is not one of the ordinary people to whom I am talking. If a man prefers nothing I can give him nothing. But nearly all people I have ever met in this western society in which I live would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable. It is this achievement of any creed that I shall chiefly pursue in these pages.

  His thesis was that modern thinkers were attempting to restructure the way in which people thought, as well what they thought. Not only did they challenge the definition of sin, but that sin was a reality at all. As well as the sure existence of evil, there was also the certain existence of good; and Gilbert was a man who, untypically for a Christian of his period, was always more interested in the Resurrection than the Crucifixion. Miracles, magic and Christian charity were real and living; so was moderation. In a prediction of the horrible polarisation of the world which would occur in the 1930s he called for a return to Orthodox Christianity as the only safe means of keeping to a moderate course in a universe of hot extremism. He concluded the book with the argument that Orthodoxy not only ensured moderation and truth, but also simple joy. Joy, happiness, was to Gilbert what conformity was to other theologians; it took on the importance of a virtual sacrament to him. “Man is more himself, man is more manlike” he wrote, “when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial.”