The Man Who Was Thursday: Chesterton's duel with the fin de siecle.

Moran, Daniel

In former days the heretic was proud of not being a heretic. It was the kingdoms of the world and the police and the judges who were heretics. He was orthodox. He had no pride in having rebelled against them; they had rebelled against him. The armies with their cruel security, the kings with their cold faces, the decorous processes of State, the reasonable processes of law--all these like sheep had gone astray. The man was proud of being orthodox, was proud of being right. If he stood alone in a howling wilderness he was more than a man; he was a church. He was the centre of the universe; it was round him that the stars swung. All the tortures torn out of forgotten hells could not make him admit that he was heretical. But a few modern phrases have made him boast of it. He says, with a conscious laugh, "I suppose I am very heretical," and looks round for applause. The word "heresy" not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word "orthodoxy" not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong. All this can mean one thing, and one thing only. It means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right. For obviously a man ought to confess himself crazy before he confesses himself heretical. The Bohemian, with a red tie, ought to pique himself on his orthodoxy. The dynamiter, laying a bomb, ought to feel that, whatever else he is, at least he is orthodox. G.K. CHESTERTON, HERETICS History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. JAMES JOYCE, ULYSSES

CHAPTER X OF The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1907) is titled "The Duel." It features the hero, Gabriel Syme, in exhausting swordplay with the impossibly unharmed Marquis de Saint Eustache--a literal duel that reflects the many figurative ones that occur throughout the novel. Chesterton had many quarrels with his time (only such a man could title one of his books What's Wrong with the World) and enjoyed dueling over any issue that came to light in the pages of the Daily News or from the pens of friendly adversaries such as H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. And while the issues that Chesterton debated were numerous and filled the pages of The Illustrated London News for thirty years, much of his work can be read as an argument for the importance of what C.S. Lewis would, almost forty years after the publication of Thursday, call "the Tao": "the sole source of all value judgments" (1) that informs all major world religions--"the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others are really false." (2) Chesterton, with uncharacteristic brevity, used the label "general theories" (3) for this same idea, resisting, "quite consciously, the splitting apart of reason and emotion, mind and body, spirit and matter, which had occurred unconsciously in so many of his contemporaries." (4)

To Chesterton, what proved the truth of general theories was their very generality, a shared belief that what are commonly called "Judeo-Christian ethics" are "the best root of energy and ethics," (5) and the belief that not all questions of value are relative or solely functions of time and space. In Orthodoxy, published a year after Thursday, Chesterton characterizes his era--which he feared was moving toward increasingly relativistic values--with the remark, "A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed." (6) Chesterton's great and extended duel against what he viewed as (at best) a wooden-headed and (at worst) a pernicious moral entropy was fought in the pages of his novels, short stories, verse, essays, and apologia; his greatest foes were not figures such as Shaw and Wells, whose values ran counter to Chesterton's own, but those who denied the importance of such intellectual contests in the first place.

Chesterton spent "much of his life reacting against the certainties, and uncertainties, of his age." (7) While his age has passed, the moral, philosophical, and aesthetic tensions articulated within it still remain. Marshall McLuhan has admitted that much of Chesterton's work has become dated for contemporary readers, but he has also argued that the "specific contemporary relevance of Chesterton is this, that his metaphysical intuition of being was always in the service of a search for moral and political order in the current chaos." (8) In this light, The Man Who Was Thursday can be read as a novel in which Chesterton appropriates the political anarchy that was part of the era in order to explore--and attack--the moral anarchy that he saw as much more prevalent and dangerous. Those at the time may have viewed the fin de siecle as "an era of new beginnings" and "tremendous vitality," (9) but Chesterton argued that his contemporaries "were on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table" and "philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own." (10) Chesterton was "a fugitive from the fin de siecle who borrowed from it almost all of his equipment as a writer, but took none of its ideas." (11) His most well-known novel is, like his style, rooted in paradox, and is a representative example of the period--but an inverted one that rejects, rather than champions, the attack on general theories that characterized the age.

The novel's dedicatory verses to Chesterton's friend E.C. Bentley (in whom he found a sympathetic spirit while a student at the Slade School of Art from 1892 to 1895) serves as an overture to the novel's issues as well as a display of Chesterton's gratitude to Bentley for having helped him survive the moral crises of his time. Its opening lines characterize this period as a nightmare very much like the one from which Syme will struggle to awake: 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 their 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. (12)

Throughout the dedication, Chesterton portrays his young self as, like Syme, a man searching for a way to break free from the pessimism that weighed upon the modern mind. The pride (suggested by the verbs "announced" and "admired") exhibited by the moderns in their rejection of all that Chesterton valued threatened the values and assumptions that he held as a student and that he viewed as under assault. The plume of honor was replaced by the white feather of cowardice, and while the reference to the white feather suggests cowardice in battle, the specific cowardice to which Chesterton here refers is moral: the refusal, as Flannery O'Connor wrote, to "push as hard as the age that pushes against you." (13) This pride in the abnegation of traditional values suggested that "the world was old and ended," but in spite of this, Chesterton's friendship with Bentley helped him keep his sprits "gay." As he says later in the dedication, "Men were ashamed of honor: but we were not ashamed" (25).

The dedication continues in this vein and continues to characterize the period as a time when Chesterton and Bentley took arms against nihilism. Acknowledging that they were "weak and foolish" in the face of fashionable despair, Chesterton still characterizes himself and Bentley as refusing to capitulate: 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 we were in motley, all jangling and absurd, When all church bells were silent our cap and bells were heard. (26)

His military language here suggests his having waged an ideological war against the "bitter sea" of his contemporaries; while he and Bentley may have been, intellectually, "children" and "fools," they still refused to lay down their arms, despite the fact that even the church bells were silenced in their acquiescence to the fashions of moral relativism. In the novel to follow, the character Bull describes those of the "New Detective Corps" (85) as "very desperate men at war with a vast conspiracy" (182). While Bull finds allies in his fellow detectives, Chesterton and Bentley found theirs in artists whose work and optimism confounded the sick cloud of favorites such as Wilde and Whistler.

Chesterton also recalls his discovery that all art did not, in fact, "admire decay": "I find again the book we found, I feel the hour that flings / Far out of fish-shaped Paumanok some cry of cleaner things" (26). This "cleaner cry" came from Whitman, whose optimism, celebration of common humanity, and refutation of art-for-art's-sake Chesterton saw as a much-needed counterattack to Wilde: "And the Green Carnation withered, as in forest fires that pass, / Roared in the wind of all the world ten million leaves of grass" (27). Whitman's "barbaric yawp," (14) conveying the poet's "brightly colored view of life as a grand fight against odds," (15) rang in Chesterton's young ears more loudly than the white noise that called his ethics into question.

Another ally in the war over artistic values was Robert Louis Stevenson. In the line, "Dunedin to Samoa spoke, and darkness unto day" (27), Chesterton employs the Scottish name for Edinburgh (Stevenson's birthplace) and his residence in Samoa to suggest, in a biblical-sounding phrase, that Stevenson's work helped lift the clouds upon the minds and souls of young thinkers like Chesterton and Bentley.

Chesterton was not a steadfast maverick who began pointing out heresies and hypocrisies from the moment he was born, but a man whose youth challenged his assumptions and gave him something against which to react. In Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC 1874-1908, William Oddie argues that Chesterton's "healthy horror" of evil was a result of his questioning the worship of Wilde and his fundamental disagreement with Wilde's championing a lack of any absolute values in art or ethics: We look on Wilde now as a victim, and so he was. He was also lovable and endlessly entertaining. ... To understand Chesterton's strong revulsion for "the evil," we have to return if we can to the way Wilde was seen before his trial, at the height of his public reputation. ... Chesterton's "healthy horror" was very far from being a mere petty bourgeois moralism. We have to remember that the decadent movement of the Age of Dorian really did believe, not only in the irrelevance of morality but in the corruption of virtue. Here, the greatest transgression was self-control and self-denial. (16)

Eventually, "God and the good Republic came riding back in arms" (27), defeating the forces of Dorian Gray and leaving Chesterton and Bentley safe and stronger: "We have found common things at last, and marriage and a creed, / And I may safely write it now, and you may safely read" (30). Just how "God and the Republic" triumphed over the forces of the Green Carnation is never explained in the dedication, although the conclusion of the novel (in which Syme hears the "good news" from Sunday) does offer an antidote to what Chesterton saw as the poisonous intellectual fads (pessimism, moral relativism, art-for-art's-sake, and impressionism) of the fin de siecle.

The dedication thus reveals Chesterton's revulsion of--and eventual victory over--the intellectual climate of the period, the same revulsion and victory that Syme experiences in the course of the novel. Chesterton tells Bentley, "This is a tale of those old fears," fears that the two of them felt as they lived through a seductive and powerful attack on traditional assumptions about ethics, art, and religion (28). The Man Who Was Thursday is Chesterton's portrayal of those old fears in the novelistic form of a thriller in which the threats are both physical, as in Syme's frequent brushes with death, and moral, as seen, for example, in the anarchist Lucian Gregory's assertion, "I would destroy the world if I could" (261). In his Autobiography, Chesterton describes the novel as "a nightmare of things, not as they are, but as they seemed to the young half-pessimist of the '90s." (17) Elsewhere he describes that era as one in which "pessimism was dogmatic, when it was even orthodox." (18) And in an interview conducted nineteen years after the novel's publication, Chesterton echoes the combinative language of the novel's dedication: "It was, of course, a protest against the pessimism of the 'nineties. And though I didn't know much about God, I was ready to stick up for Him against the jury of Cockney poets who had brought Him in guilty. 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." (19)

This "bad period," that needed to be countered with a rejection of relativistic values and art-for-art's-sake, is the milieu of the novel. The policeman who recruits Syme into the New Detective Corps tells him, "The head of one of our departments" has "long been of the opinion that a purely intellectual conspiracy would soon threaten the very existence of civilization" and that "the scientific and artistic worlds are silently bound in a crusade against the Family and the State" (80). Syme's mission as an agent is to destroy this conspiracy; Chesterton's mission as an author is to convey what was at stake and how he and others like him resisted the assault of the era. This was the "Age of Dorian," epitomized by Wilde and the "white lock of Whistler"--and while Chesterton uses Wilde as a convenient target, he saw Wilde as a representative example of how a breakdown in general theories can lead to shocking hypocrisy: In the fifteenth century men cross-examined and tormented a man because he preached some immoral attitude; in the nineteenth century we feted and flattered Oscar Wilde because he preached such an attitude, and then broke his heart in penal servitude because he carried it out. It may be a question which of the two methods was the more cruel; there can be no kind of question which was the more ludicrous. The age of the Inquisition has not at least the disgrace of having produced a society which made an idol of the very same man for preaching the very same things which it made him a convict for practicing. (20)

A dismissal of general theories is at the heart of the matter and what made this, to Chesterton, a "bad period." As he writes in the same chapter of Heretics, "There is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period." (21) In his study of Chesterton's debates in both fiction and the press, John D. Coates remarks, "Chesterton is, above all, a novelist of cultural crisis." (22) The issues explored in Heretics and Orthodoxy--the first a collection of essays and the second a "slovenly autobiography" in which he records his religious awakening (23)--are explored through the actions of Syme and the cultural crisis he faces.

One of Chesterton's shorter pieces of the period in which he composed Thursday illuminates his moral horror at what he viewed as not a perversion of values, but a dismissal of them in toto. "The Diabolist," one of the "fleeting sketches" (24) he wrote for the Daily News in 1907, details what Chesterton calls "the most terrible thing that has ever happened to me in my life": (25) a quiet conversation with a sinister figure that occurred while Chesterton was at the Slade. Chesterton embellishes the setting for the conversation, noting a gardener's fire nearby that sent "red sparks past us like swarming insects in the dark" and the red hair of the Diabolist, a feature Chesterton gave to Gregory in Thursday, to underscore the satanic nature of his interlocutor (228). Chesterton remarks here that he was "becoming orthodox" because, after much thought, he has come to "the old belief that heresy is worse than sin" and that evil does, in fact, exist in the modern world: "An Imperialist is worse than a pirate. For an Imperialist keeps a school for pirates; he teaches piracy disinterestedly and without an adequate salary. A Free Lover is worse than a profligate. For a profligate is serious and reckless even in his shortest love; while a Free Lover is cautious and irresponsible even in his longest devotion" (229). The Imperialist and Free Lover are "worse" not because they disbelieve in the values that motivate the pirate and profligate, but because they dismiss the reality of all values in the first place.

This same concept is found in the policeman's words to Syme as he urges the young poet to join the New Detective Corps, a secret branch of the police devoted to combating the era's "most dangerous criminal," the "entirely lawless modern philosopher" (81): We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential idea of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more properly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fullness of human life by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. (81-82)

Again, the threat is not found in those who commit immoral acts, but in modern philosophers who "hate life itself" and who wish not "to alter things, but to annihilate them" (82). Thus, the common criminal is a "conditional good man" (82); the threat of modern nihilists is their desire to move people (like Nietzsche's Ubermensch and Conrad's Mr. Kurtz) beyond good and evil and twist "even decent sin in shapes not to be named" (25). Chesterton remarks in the novel that many moderns would revere Sunday as "the superman" (105). When the Diabolist argues that perhaps his own values run counter to Chesterton's, the latter is not afraid--only irritated. What terrifies Chesterton, however, is a remark he overhears between the Diabolist and one of his companions: I suddenly heard his voice again, but the words were inaudible. I stopped, started: then I heard the voice of one of the vilest of his associates saying, "Nobody can possibly know." And then I heard these two or three words which I remember in every syllable and cannot forget. I heard the Diabolist say, "I tell you I have done everything else. If I do that I shan't know the difference between right and wrong." I rushed out without daring to pause, and as I passed the fire I did not know whether it was hell or the furious love of God. (231)

Chesterton's terror here is moral; his fear of a world where "even decent sin" cannot be known as such because the very values that inform behavior strip the term "sin" of its meaning makes him experience momentary doubts of his own (as revealed in his remarks about the fire), doubts that he tells the reader are eventually quelled. "I think," Chesterton writes, "that he committed suicide" (231)--a predictable result of a true dismissal of all values--and exactly what the anarchists in Thursday seek to bring to the world: "We wish," Gregory tells Syme, "to deny all those arbitrary distinctions of virtue and vice, honor and treachery upon which mere rebels base themselves. The silly sentimentalism of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man! We hate Rights and we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and Wrong" (54). Oddie argues that "the parallels" between the Diabolist and Dorian Gray "are strikingly close" and that Chesterton's essay reflects his complete "loathing for the Wildean fin de siecle," (26) a loathing imparted to Syme by his creator.

The stage is therefore set for the battle between Syme, whose values and assumptions reflect Chesterton's own belief in the "conditional goodness" of humanity, and Gregory's anarchists, who do not seek to supplant or replace Syme's values and assumptions, but completely deny their importance or necessity. How this battle is fought and won is the subject of The Man Who Was Thursday; how Chesterton's novel reflects his backward glance to what he viewed as a nihilistic nightmare is the subject of this article.

II

The novel's opening scene is, like its dedication, an overture for the issues to come, a way for Chesterton to suggest his characters' positions on these issues, and an indication that the reader is entering a surreal world where the issues of such debates become literalized and translated into action. The novel begins at "sundown" (31): things physically and morally clear in the literal and figurative light of day will become obscured by the many disguises worn by the anarchists during Syme's unraveling of Sunday's elaborate hoax. The architecture of Saffron Park is "sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne," the builders having been "apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical" (34); the setting is like a "dream" (35), a "whole insane village" where the trees are "dwarfish" but still bear "monstrous fruit" (34). All is in flux and the values that Syme finds so solid will be tested and occasionally bested by Lucian Gregory, the decadent poet who is known as "the hero" of the place and who, like its architecture, is a combination of contraries: "He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape" (36). The angel in question, of course, is Lucifer, which Chesterton suggests by the anarchist's first name, by certain physical features ("dark, red hair" like that of a virgin in a "pre-Raphaelite picture" [36]) and by the opening debate with Syme. Gregory's very presence here makes Saffron Park a battleground of the sort mentioned in the dedication: "It looked like the end of the world"--and while this description is a way to convey the colors of the sunset, it is also an important reminder that "the end of the world" loved by Syme and Chesterton is what Gregory seeks (37).

Chesterton's making Gregory a poet who lives in an "artistic colony" yet who "never in any definable way produced any art" (35) makes him partly a caricature of Wilde, whose aphorisms such as, "There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book" and "No artist has ethical sympathies" (27) are echoed in Gregory's own idea that "an artist is identical with an anarchist" because he "abolishes all conventions" and "delights in disorder only" (39). (Chesterton avoids mentioning Wilde's fondness for aesthetic order, for a thing to be "admired intensely," an opinion he certainly shared. (28) As one perceptive reader has noted, Chesterton often "seemed to choose what he wanted to pick in his subject and overlook what did not suit his thesis." (29)) Gregory proudly asserts that "the poet will be discontented even in the streets of Heaven" and is "always in revolt" against convention (43). Chaos and anarchy, as symbolized by the tree that he hits with his cane, are "splendid"; the lamppost he also hits is "ugly and barren" (46). As Chesterton remarked in a 1926 interview: "You will notice that my villain--the real anarchist of the story--is a decadent artist. He was very much with us at the time I wrote the book. It was a poisonous period, when all the ordinary ways of living were regarded as silly, and young men who spent most of their time in drinking strange liquors and imagining stranger sins impeached God for not having made a universe to suit them." (30) Gregory's anarchism is not that of Emile Henry, Mikhail Bakunin, or Peter Kropotkin, who each hoped to replace one form of society with what he saw as a better one. His anarchism is a movement seeking, as he says, "to abolish God ... and Right and Wrong" (54).

The political anarchism that marked the fin de siecle, therefore, is to Chesterton's novel as the actual Denmark is to Hamlet: it is a convenient frame upon which Chesterton hangs his chosen issues, not the actual focus of the work. The "mere anarchy" here that is "loosed upon the world" is philosophical more than political; it is fought with debate more than with dynamite. (31) In the imagined world of the novel--and the real world in which Chesterton wrote it--the enemy was not the enemy because he was evil; the enemy was the enemy because, like the Diabolist, he denied the existence of evil. When asked what made her convert to Roman Catholicism, Chesterton's wife Frances always joked, "The devil," (32) a joke at which Gregory might chuckle but never regard as a lighthearted depiction of a more serious issue.

Frances's quip aside, the anarchists in the novel are not thieves whose actions must be thwarted or potential killers whose victims must be rescued; they are philosophers who, over time, do greater damage by eroding the moral fabric of the nation. Compared during their mass assault on the detectives to "an army of automatons" (194) and a "black cloud of locusts," these pessimists, who, like automatons, never think to question what is trumpeted as true, are a modern plague that seeks to "hang over the good man and his house" until he capitulates (197). Chesterton's loathing of such philosophers is made clear in his Autobiography: "I did not so much mind the pessimist who complained that there was so little good. But I was furious, even to slaying, with the pessimist who asked what was the good of good. And second, even in the earliest days and even for the worst reasons, I already knew too much to pretend to get rid of evil." (33) Unlike Chesterton, whose "healthy horror" of evil informed his own beliefs and work, the anarchists seek to exorcise Frances's devil by denying that he exists.

As Gregory embodies the desire to break down all established systems of value and ordinary ways of living, his nemesis Gabriel Syme seeks to uphold and defend his values against the sick cloud blown by Gregory. Like Gregory, Syme's first name suggests his moral nature and the unabashed endorsement of his views by his author. This moral nature is, also like Gregory's, presented in the opening debate. When Gregory evokes the Underground as the epitome of unpoetic dullness, Syme is quick to defend it as a monument to man's imposing order on a chaotic world: "The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. ... Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his victories. ... Every time a train comes in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man has won a battle against chaos" (40-41). (Again Chesterton employs military metaphor to describe the philosophical struggles of the age.)

With his self-consciously stylized undercutting of all of Gregory's most earnest assertions ("Revolt in the abstract is--revolting" [43]), hyperbole, and costume (a "sword-stick, a large Colt's revolver" and a "heavy-looking cape or cloak" [58]), Syme is Chesterton's agent as much as the agent of the New Detective Corps. (34) In "The Tale of a Detective," the chapter describing Syme's recruitment into the New Detective Corps, Chesterton describes the young Syme as a man raised by "a family of cranks in which the oldest people had all the newest notions" (74)--in other words, a fin de siecle famille. "Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt since infancy," Chesterton writes, "Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left--sanity" (75). Such a description clearly echoes the one of himself that Chesterton would offer a year later in Orthodoxy: "I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy." (35)

Syme's "fears for humanity" are found in what he sees as "aberrations of the scientific intellect" (79), recalling the dedication's indictment of materialism and death of the self ("Science announced nonentity"), making him a natural candidate for a secret organization that inverts the norms of detective work to stop those seeking to invert the norms of common humanity: "The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves," the recruiting policemen tells Syme. "We go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. ... We were only just in time to prevent the assassination at Hartlepool, and that was entirely due to the fact" that one of their agents "thoroughly understood a triolet" (81).

The realization that a refusal of general theories (or Lewis's Tao) could lead to a breakdown of society and an increase in actual crime is what fuels both Chesterton's outrage at the Diabolist and Syme's desire to join the New Detective Corps. Syme is warned by the policeman that the "vast philosophic movement" he seeks to combat has "an outer and an inner ring," ironically corresponding to a laity and priesthood (83). Those in the outer ring are "merely anarchists," people who think that "all the evil results of human crime are the results of the system that has called it crime" and whose high-blown rhetoric reflects their hope in a newly-fashioned world (83). Those of the priesthood, however, "are under no illusions" and have "but two objects, to first destroy humanity and then themselves" (84).

Traditional anarchists want to topple the existing house of cards and rebuild it; modern philosophers want to burn the deck--and it is in this second group that Gregory operates. "For a long time the red-haired revolutionary had reigned without a rival," but he finds one in Syme, as the heretics of modernity found theirs in Chesterton (37). Syme's unwillingness to break his vow to Gregory to not tell the police or the other anarchists about his having invited an undercover detective to their meetings allows Chesterton's plot to work, but also serves as a reminder of Syme's belief in a world where even the smallest promise has meaning. To be sure, neither Syme nor Chesterton leapt into battle without any fears; Syme is, throughout the novel, often terrified and experiences the "eerie sensation of having strayed into a new world" (93). Yet he does prevail in his attempt to thwart Gregory and save the world from nihilism and despair. All members of the New Detective Corps are given blue cards on which are written "The Last Crusade," a phrase laden with obvious symbolism (86).

What makes Syme a worthy contender (more than his sword-stick) is his understanding of what it means to be human. His empathy with those who find value in "all the ordinary ways of living" is suggested at critical moments in the novel. A man "really human" (87), who finds himself in a world threatening his humanity, Syme is sent to infiltrate a band of anarchists whose very humanity--as defined by their belief in any set of values--is almost nonexistent: "Each man had something about him, perceived at perhaps the tenth or twentieth glance, which was not normal, and which seemed hardly human. The only metaphor he could think of was this, that they all looked as men of fashion and presence would look, with the additional twist given in a false and curved mirror" (97-98). (36) When he first sees Professor De Worms, Syme thinks that the man expresses both "decrepitude" and "corruption" and that "whenever the man moved, a leg or arm might fall off" (100). This "dehumanized brotherhood" seeks to destroy the very thing that Chesterton suggests makes humanity more than an "army of automatons": its morality and sense of absolute ethical standards (118). While being pursued on the beach, two of the detectives reinforce this idea of humanity under siege: "Even if the police do come now," said the Professor mournfully, "they can do nothing with this mob." "Nonsense!" said Bull desperately, "there must be some people left in the town who are human." "No," said the helpless inspector, "the human being will soon be extinct. We are the last of mankind." (214)

The Professor's subsequent recital of lines from The Dunciad, depicting a world without "human life" or "glimpse divine," where "universal darkness buries all" reflects Syme's despair, a despair felt by the young Chesterton at the Slade. Syme is on the run in a world where humanity has grown less creative ("Light dies before thine uncreating word" [214]), and where more and more people join the ranks, as evidenced by the number of the detectives' allies in the chase scene who seem to betray them, of those who "can make nothing" and "only destroy" (217). While Chesterton's "relentless Christian optimism" (37) may be tiresome to some, (38) he does take pains to portray Syme as a man who values his own humanity and who is outraged by the ways in which his age "pushes against" him. Compared to the anarchists and the modern philosophers of whom they are dark parodies, Frankenstein's creature is, to quote Hamlet, "the paragon of animals." (39)

Chesterton's use of a barrel-organ also suggests Syme's angelic stature and empathy with the great mass of humanity. The barrel-organ is first mentioned in the opening scene, after Gregory's sister asks Syme if her brother is really an anarchist. Unable at this point to believe that Gregory's claims are more than an affectation, Syme sits in a garden and tells Gregory's sister about his own assumptions regarding the ordinary ways of living: "He defended respectability with violence and exaggeration. He grew passionate in his praise of tidiness and propriety. All the time there was a smell of lilac all around him. Once he heard very faintly in some distant street a barrel-organ begin to play, and it seemed to him that his heroic words were moving to a tiny tune from under or beyond the world" (45). As Whitman heard America singing "varied carols" in the work and play of its common citizens, Syme hears Great Britain sing a similar tune. (40) The barrel-organ's tune is not played by a single person, but by a force that serves as the foundation ("under") and aspiration of ("beyond") the common people. Later, during a moment of crisis in Leicester Square in which Syme fears being exposed by Sunday, Chesterton notes, "A barrel-organ in the street suddenly sprang with a jerk into a jovial tune," giving Syme "a supernatural courage that came from nowhere" and hardening his resolve to continue fighting the modern plague: That jingling music seemed full of the vivacity, the vulgarity, and the irrational valour of the poor, who in all those unclean streets were all clinging to the decencies and the charities of Christendom. His youthful prank of being a policeman had faded from his mind; he did not think of himself as the representative of the corps of gentlemen turned into fancy constables, or of the old eccentric who lived in the dark room. But he did feel himself as the ambassador of all these common and kindly people in the street, who every day marched into battle to the music of the barrel-organ. And this high pride in being human had lifted him unaccountably to an infinite height above the monstrous men around him. For an instant, at least, he looked down upon all their sprawling eccentricities from the starry pinnacle of the commonplace. He felt towards them all that unconscious and elementary superiority that a brave man feels over powerful beasts or a wise man over powerful errors. He knew that he had neither the intellectual nor the physical strength of President Sunday; but in that moment he minded it no more than the fact that he had not the muscles of a tiger or a horn on his nose like a rhinoceros. All was swallowed up in an ultimate certainty that the President was wrong and that the barrel-organ was right. There clanged in his mind that unanswerable and terrible truism in the song of Roland-- "Pagens ont tort et Chretiens ont droit" which in the old nasal French has the clang and groan of great iron. This liberation of his spirit from the load of his weakness went with a quite clear decision to embrace death. If the people of the barrel-organ could keep their old-world obligations, so could he. This very pride in keeping his word was that he was keeping it to miscreants. It was his last triumph over these lunatics to go down into their dark room and die for something that they could not even understand. The barrel-organ seemed to give the marching tune with the energy and the mingled noises of a whole orchestra; and he could hear deep and rolling, under all the trumpets of the pride of life, the drums of the pride of death. (109-10)

This passage reflects Chesterton at his most optimistic and, some could argue, his most grossly and shamelessly sentimental. Regardless of how one responds to Chesterton's championing (or romanticizing) the "valor of the poor," however, the barrel-organ--the Aeolian harp of common humanity--reminds Syme of the importance of his quest and the reader of the philosophical rightness of general theories. Syme does not reason toward the quotation from the song of Roland; instead, the "terrible truism" comes upon him as a fact of nature, beyond debate. (As Lewis remarks of the values for which Syme is ready to die, "You cannot reach them as conclusions; they are premises.") (41) When Syme later realizes that he must again face death and challenge the Marquis to a duel, Chesterton informs the reader that the music of a band playing in a cafe chantant "hidden among the trees seemed like the jar and jingle of that barrel-organ in Leicester Square, to the tune of which he had once stood up to die" (169). As in the first appearance of the barrel-organ, the tune is heard from some unseen and ethereal source.

Syme's belief that "I may be mad, but humanity isn't" is what Chesterton argues is needed to counter the forces of fashionable despair (210). "In choosing to die for the sake of his integrity," Syme "is dying for something the anarchists could never understand." (42) Only the valor of the poor is worth defending, since only the poor have ever had a justified claim to making the world one in which life had any meaning: "The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists," Syme explains. "The poor man really has a stake in his country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all" (191). (43) To Chesterton, God is playing the barrel-organ and the tune is heard by Syme, who feels as inspired by it as Joan of Arc was when she embarked on her own war in the name of values under attack.

Chesterton's novel abounds in the disguises, secret identities, and search for clues that characterize the kind of detective fiction that Chesterton read and wrote. But it also simultaneously parodies these conventions. For example, the expected plot twist of the detective's exposure as an undercover agent occurs, but the same exposure occurs with five other characters; disguises are worn, but are so effective and convincing that they allow the Marquis to become seemingly immortal in a duel and the Professor to convince others that the actual man whom he is impersonating is his own imposter; secret codes are employed, but to such an extent that the effect is comic, as in the scene where Syme and the Professor tap out paragraph-long messages to each other with their fingers as they interrogate Dr. Bull; cryptic messages from the ostensible villain are intercepted, as are Sunday's messages during the final chase, but they are either comic imitations of the conventional messages one might expect during a novel's climax ("Fly at once. The truth about your trouser-stretchers is known.-A FRIEND" [229]) or deliberate nonsense ("The word, I fancy, should be 'pink'" [233]) in which there is no attempt to make them even resemble traditional red herrings. All of these parodies contribute to the lasting appeal of the novel but also work as a means by which Chesterton characterizes Syme's struggle and search for some moral and intellectual foundation on which to stand. (44)

This struggle is woven into the plot of the novel and epitomized in the scene where Syme and his fellow detectives are chased by the "dark cloud of men" (188), the anarchists who are trying to kill them, and take refuge in a wood, where the "shattered sunlight and sunken shadows" cast a "shuddering veil" (189) over all of their aspects: "Was he wearing a mask? Was any one wearing a mask? Was any one anything?" Syme asks in this "wood of witchery" that serves as "a perfect symbol of the world in which he had been moving for three days" (189). This wood is a world without general theories, which causes Syme to ask, "Was there anything that was apart from what it seemed? The Marquis had just taken off his nose and turned out to be a detective. Might not he just as well take off his head and turn out to be a hobgoblin? Was not everything, after all, like this bewildering woodland, this dance of dark and light? Everything only a glimpse, the glimpse always unforeseen, and always forgotten" (189).

The wood allows Chesterton to maintain the suspense of the chase, but also suggests Syme's moment of crisis, for he "had found in the heart of that sun-splashed wood what many modern painters had found there. He had found the thing which modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final skepticism which can find no floor to the universe" (190). Syme is lured into believing that his own perceptions are more "real" than the actual world, a solipsistic belief that Chesterton thought marred the work of the Impressionists and that he here dramatizes as yet another weapon of the modern moral anarchists. Only by glimpsing a "heavy French peasant" through an "open space of sunlight" do Syme and his companions escape the wood in which their own perceptions trump any enduring truths. Chesterton's describing the peasant as "almost like some allegorical figure of labour frescoed on a ground of gold" again recalls Syme's belief in the common man's general theories and Chesterton's endorsement of them (192). Syme here is a modern Dante, struggling to escape a literal and figurative dark wood of error where the only light comes from the "pale lock of Whistler," a light that paradoxically confuses rather than illuminates.

The most maddening parody is, of course, that of the traditional mystery novel's conclusion, in which the villain is unmasked by the detective and the motives for the villain's crimes are laid bare. Here, the enigmatic Sunday proves to be both the terrifying leader of the Central Anarchist Council and the solitary figure who recruited the philosophical policemen. Tackling the significance of Sunday is, to Chesterton scholars, the equivalent of Melville scholars explaining the significance of the white whale. The text offers many teasing moments where Chesterton calls attention to the riddle, emphasizing Sunday's "maddening" (233) and "terrible" (246) back yet "beautiful" front (246), the inappropriateness of calling him simply "clever" (92), his "voice that made men drop drawn swords" (114), his "incredible height" (224), his taunts to the detectives, such as, "You will have found out the truth of the last tree before you have found out about me" (224-25), and, of course, his inability to be caught. These and many other examples create for the reader the sense that Sunday is a moral Moriarity, a figure devoted to toying with, as he calls the detectives, "well-intentioned young jackasses" for his own amusement (224).

Even Chesterton himself could offer only the most tenuous of explanations for Sunday's actions. His most explicit words on Sunday are found in his Autobiography: "Some have suggested, and in one sense not untruly, that he was meant for a blasphemous version of the creator. ... The ogre who appears brutal but is also cryptically benevolent is not so much God, in the sense of religion or irreligion, but rather Nature as it appears to the pantheist, whose pantheism is struggling out of pessimism." (45) Sunday's actions, therefore, are meant to dramatize the ways in which the young Chesterton and Bentley regarded nature in their days at the Slade, when they struggled to understand, like Syme and his colleagues, how the universe could be at once so terrifying yet wonderful, seemingly vacuous yet meaningful. As Syme explains to Ratcliffe, "When I see the horrible back, I am sure the noble face is but a mask. When I see the face 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" (247).

Sunday, like "a father playing with his children," is the personification of nature as it appears to one without values--or, at the very least, to one who lacks belief in anything other than the self (247). Without a bedrock of values, which Chesterton developed in his "rebellion against rebellion" while at the Slade, one cannot regard the actions of nature with any meaning, and, like Sunday, remains a massive contradiction and practical joker. As Ratcliffe remarks, Sunday is "an absent-minded man who, if he happens to see you, will apologize" but who also, if he happens to see you, may "kill you" (243). "I am the peace of God," Sunday tells the detectives--but this is a peace that none of them can presumably know without recourse to Sunday's final words in the novel (260).

These words help us better understand Chesterton's discovery of orthodoxy--his realization that in his youthful desire to be "ten minutes ahead of the truth" he "found that he was eighteen hundred years behind it" (46)--as well as Syme's epiphany about his own trials and final refutation of all the anarchists' pessimism and nihilism. The detectives' words to Sunday range from demands ("Who and what are you?") to pleas ("I wish I knew why I hurt so much") to befuddlement ("It seems so silly that you should have been on both sides and fought yourself ") to unquestioning acceptance ("I understand nothing, but I am happy" [260]) to a refusal to even entertain the issue ("I don't think of Sunday on principle" [243]). Gregory, of course, detests the entire enterprise, telling Sunday, "I am a destroyer. I would destroy the world if I could" (261) and claiming that others deserve destruction because they have not "suffered for one hour a real agony" (262). (47) Only Syme wants more from Sunday. After positing that suffering is a necessary part of the human condition that enables (and ennobles) people to experience the "glory and isolation of the anarchist" through their "fight against the world itself" (262), he turns to Sunday and distills the many questions into one: "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?" (263)

This parody of the detective novel's traditional climax is also Chesterton's most didactic authorial intrusion; he called it "the only serious note in the book" (279). The Gospel quoted here, that may come from Sunday or the "distant voice" of Christ himself, implies that the suffering of man--and of Christ--gives meaning to a world that would otherwise remain an abyss. This moment is the philosophical equivalent of Dupin revealing that the orangutan committed the murders in the Rue Morgue or Holmes explaining the truth about the hound of the Baskervilles. A reader seeking a logical explanation for the novel's events must be disappointed, but both Syme and Chesterton find Sunday's explanation more satisfying than a mere explanation of how he arranged for the secret meeting room or stole an elephant from the London Zoo. It is, to again evoke Lewis, mere Christianity that Chesterton finds more satisfactory than a mere explanation for the "mysterious jokes" of nature (232). "It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head," he wrote in Orthodoxy. "And it is his head that splits." (48)

Without a belief in values that transcend time and space, matter remains matter; with such a belief, Syme can state, "This is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud" (247). While "the revelation comes too suddenly to be understood ... until it is understood, all that ought to seem mystifying only seems meaningless." (49) Just how the suffering of Christ can "make all things new" is not the immediate issue here; (50) Chesterton's concern is Syme's understanding and acceptance of what Chesterton called the "practical romance" of Christian belief, the "combination of something that is strange with something that is secure." (51)

One novelistic convention that Chesterton insists upon not following is that in which the protagonist awakens from a dream in "some place in which they might have fallen asleep" and "yawn in chair, or lift themselves with bruised limbs from a field" (263-64). Chesterton instead states that Syme "could not remember having come to at all. He could only feel unnatural buoyancy in his body and a crystal simplicity in his mind that seemed to be superior to everything 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" (264). Chesterton avoids the "it was all a dream" convention because doing so would both cheapen Syme's enlightenment by suggesting it is built upon a fancy as well as seem inaccurate in terms of the experience: as he remarks in "The Diabolist," "The man asked me abruptly why I was becoming orthodox. Until he said it, I really had not known that I was; but the moment he had said it I knew it to be literally true." (52)

Becoming orthodox is not an event (53) heralded by angelic messengers, but, as it was for Chesterton and is for Syme, a shift of mind resulting from struggles with contemporary nightmares. Dawn breaking in the novel's final paragraph--accompanied by "a breeze so clean and sweet, that one could not think it blew from the sky" but "through some hole in the sky"--that is, heaven--causes Syme to experience the "simple surprise" of seeing Saffron Park as if for the first time, like the "early birds" who "hopped and sang" (265). Chesterton never provides a calendar, but one could guess it is Chaucer's April. The final image of Gregory's innocent sister, inside a "fenced garden" and "cutting lilac before breakfast, with the great unconscious gravity of a girl" (265), symbolizes to Syme and to the reader the "adorable triviality" of human experience when informed by the "good news" of the Gospels.

III

Chesterton begins his novel "with the picture of the world at its worst" and then "work[s] towards the suggestion that the picture was not so black as it was already painted." (54) The dedication suggests that the "colossal gods of shame" and "huge devils" fell quickly ("at a pistol flash" [28]). As the reader learns in the final pages, Syme shifts back into the real world effortlessly and seamlessly: his belief in the good news, and his instant realization, like Chesterton's, that he is, in fact, orthodox, defeats the conspiracy and lifts the veil of the nightmare. If, as Freud claimed, every dream is a "fulfilled wish," then Chesterton's novel is a "nightmare" glimpse of a period of moral entropy as well as its author's wish (dramatized by the preponderance of detectives in the Central Anarchist Council) that the anarchists, pessimists, and impressionists were less of a threat than they first appeared. (55) Even Gregory seems to transform into his self-important yet harmless former self, a "man worth listening to" for one's own amusement and who dabbles in anarchism as long as it does not threaten his comfortable life in Saffron Park (36). The dark cloud no longer hangs over men's souls, and human love, epitomized by Gregory's sister, proves victorious. Syme, like Chesterton in "The Diabolist" and as portrayed throughout Orthodoxy, was "becoming orthodox," but the effects of that transformation--and how it is detailed in Orthodoxy--is the subject of another story in which the thrills do not involve disguises, secret societies, and a looming supernatural figure, but those of the man who has sailed around the world, searching for adventure, only to arrive back home and learn that "Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian." (56) The novel is a nightmare with a happy ending, an expression of "a bewildering moral struggle" from which Syme emerges as a new and enlightened self. (57)

The Man Who Was Thursday is a work filled with disguises, which is appropriate for a novel that is a sustained harangue against moral, philosophical, and artistic entropy disguised as a thriller. It is Chesterton's attempt to recruit the reader, as the unnamed detective recruited Syme, into the New Detective Corps. And while Syme's costume and accoutrements resemble Chesterton's own, one can also note the similarity between Chesterton and Sunday: both men lead others on a search for meaning in a world that often denies the value of the search and both leave their pursuers with a solution that predates them by thousands of years. According to Chesterton, the "dynamiter, laying a bomb, ought to feel that, whatever else he is, at least he is orthodox," that is, acting, however immorally, upon a set of values with the aim of bringing these values to the world at large. (58) Figures like Gregory seek to remove any values from the equation; they seek to topple general theories more than buildings. But Chesterton argues that such toppling may, in hindsight, prove less threatening than it does at first, since the foundations are stronger than the anarchists believe.

Notes

(1.) C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975), 55.

(2.) Ibid., 31.

(3.) G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006), 6.

(4.) Ian Crowther, G.K. Chesterton (London: The Claridge Press, 1991), 21.

(5.) G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2006), 7.

(6.) Ibid., 27.

(7.) Crowther, G.K. Chesterton, 11.

(8.) Marshall McLuhan, "Where Chesterton Comes In," in G.K. Chesterton: A Half-Century of Views, ed. D.J. Conlon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 75.

(9.) Gail Marshall, introduction to The Cambridge Guide to the Fin de Siecle, ed. Gail Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 5.

(10.) Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 27.

(11.) Alzina Stone Dale, The Outline of Sanity: A Life of G.K. Chesterton (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1982), 38.

(12.) G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999), 25. All subsequent parenthetical references to the novel are from this edition.

(13.) Flannery O'Connor to Maryat Lee, 12 July 1957, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988), 229.

(14.) Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2007), 67.

(15.) Dale, The Outline of Sanity, 35.

(16.) William Oddie, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC 1874-1908 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 117.

(17.) G.K. Chesterton, The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 103.

(18.) G.K. Chesterton, introduction to The Man Who Was Thursday, a dramatic adaptation by Mrs. Cecil Chesterton and Ralph Neale (London: Ernest Benn, 1926), reprinted in The Man Who Was Thursday, 273.

(19.) G.K. Chesterton, interview in The Observer (10 January 1926), quoted by Joseph Pearce in Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), 328.

(20.) Chesterton, Heretics, 3-4.

(21.) Ibid., 2.

(22.) John D. Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (Hull, England: Hull University Press, 1984), 214.

(23.) Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 7.

(24.) G.K. Chesterton, preface to Tremendous Trifles (London: Methuen & Company, 1920), v.

(25.) Chesterton, "The Diabolist," in Tremendous Trifles, 225.

(26.) Oddie, The Romance of Orthodoxy, 120.

(27.) Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York: Penguin, 2003), 3.

(28.) Ibid.

(29.) Christopher Hollis, The Mind of Chesterton (London: Hollis & Carter, 1970), 61.

(30.) Chesterton, interview in The Illustrated Sunday Herald (24 January 1926), reprinted in The Man Who Was Thursday, 277.

(31.) W.B. Yeats. "The Second Coming," The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats (London: Bibliophile Books, 2000), 158.

(32.) Chesterton, Autobiography, 104.

(33.) Ibid.

(34.) Many Chesterton scholars mention this "costume," which is as much a part of Chesterton's persona as Johnson's disheveled powdered wig was of his. See Dorothy Collins, "Recollections," G.K. Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal, ed. John Sullivan (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 157; or J.P. Corrin, G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc: The Battle Against Modernity (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981), 5.

(35.) Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 6.

(36.) The fact that all (save two) of the anarchists turn out to be undercover detectives is irrelevant here; what is important is that these detectives play the roles of "modern philosophers" frighteningly well. The undercover detectives' costumes are those of their enemies, and it is these enemies that the detectives and Chesterton seek to expose and defeat.

(37.) Benny Green, "Defender of the Faith," G.K. Chesterton: A Half-Century of Views (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) 342.

(38.) See, as a representative example, Adam Gopnik, "The Back of the World: The Troubling Genius of G.K. Chesterton," The New Yorker (7, 14 July 2008): 52, where Gopnik argues that Chesterton's "gassy Church apologetics" are not as interesting as his "funny and suggestively mystical Christian allegories."

(39.) William Shakespeare, Hamlet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 2.2.331.

(40.) Whitman, "I Hear America Singing," The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (New York: Penguin, 2003), 47.

(41.) Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 53.

(42.) Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis, 217.

(43.) Chesterton's other works on distributism and what he saw as the faults of capitalism explore this idea in greater depth; see the collections What's Wrong with the World) 1910) and The Outline of Sanity (1926).

(44.) In his introduction to the Penguin edition of the novel, Kingsley Amis states, "I have read it so many times that, if a sentence anywhere in it were put in front of me, I bet I could be pretty accurate about what was the next one. And yet it remains the most thrilling book I have ever read." Kingsley Amis, introduction to The Man Who Was Thursday (New York: Penguin, 1990), 1.

(45.) Chesterton, Autobiography, 103.

(46.) Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 6.

(47.) The detectives' attitudes here call to mind the title of a recent seminar at Drew University: "Evil and the Problem of God."

(48.) Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 13.

(49.) Mrs. Cecil Chesterton and Ralph Neale, Thursday (adaptation) introduction, 271.

(50.) Revelation 21:5.

(51.) Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 5.

(52.) Chesterton, "The Diabolist" in Tremendous Trifles, 228.

(53.) Chesterton, Autobiography, 104.

(54.) Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963), 60.

(55.) Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 155.

(56.) Ian Boyd, The Novels of G.K. Chesterton (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 50.

(57.) Chesterton, Heretics, 2.