But there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol—a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post card. His was one of the leading voices against the Boer War. Neither could have seen any meaning in my own fancy for having things on a smaller and smaller scale. The novel tells the story, in a mood deliberately feverish and overlit—snowstorms over St. Each has taken as a code name a day of the week. Syme, after infiltrating the group, becomes Thursday; its chief is the dreadful Sunday.
Syme discovers that the group is plotting a bombing in Paris, and sets off to stop it. As he races through England and across the Channel, he discovers that the entire circle of anarchists is really made up of undercover policemen, including the sinister-seraphic Sunday, who is, somewhat mystically, both the ultimate anarchist and the leading cop—the two faces of the deity, as Chesterton seems to have imagined him then.
Here Kafka and Borges are implicit; Chesterton must have influenced both. There is your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself—there is anarchy, splendid in green and gold. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree. He regarded them as a huge and pitiless peril, like a Chinese invasion. He poured perpetually into newspapers and their wastepaper baskets a torrent of tales, verses and violent articles, warning men of this deluge of barbaric denial.
There was no anarchist with a bomb in his pocket so savage and solitary as he. Only an act of strong will can resist it. Where the ordinary liberal scoffs at the idea that apocalyptic terror represents a real threat to his society, the awakened humanist, like Syme the poet-policeman or Chesterton himself, believes that everyone else has missed the reality, by refusing to accept how plausible and alluring the argument for destruction is.
They cannot see what is in front of their noses even as it blows up their cities. Only cops and criminals are really alive. Or is it, perhaps, that the anarchists, who are really policemen, secretly wish to be anarchists? This double vision, where the appetite for romantic violence is imagined as the flip side of the desire for absolute order, gives the book its permanence. It ends with a powerful and strange image of reality itself as two-sided:.
It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stopping and hiding a face? Given that longing, it was as obvious that Chesterton was headed to Rome as it was that Wilde was headed to Reading jail. If you want a solution, at once authoritarian and poetic, to the threat of moral anarchism, then Catholicism, which built Chartres and inspired Dante, looks a lot better than Scotland Yard.
If you want stability allied to imagination, Catholicism has everything else beat. And right around here is where the Jew-hating comes in. Eliot, mistrusted Jews—when even the philo-Semites give them a home! The ugliness really began in , when he joined his brother in a crusade against the corruption of the Liberal Government, using a scandal that involved Rufus Isaacs, a Cabinet minister, and his brother Godfrey, a businessman.
The affair, then called the Marconi Scandal it had to do with what would now be called insider trading in a wireless-telegraph company , implicated non-Jews, too—David Lloyd George, for one—but the nasty heart of the accusations was directed by the Chestertons against the Isaacs brothers, who were not only corrupt but alien.
Eventually, Godfrey Isaacs sued Cecil Chesterton, successfully, for libel. There had been mild Jew-bashing in his work before, based on the ethnic generalities that everyone engaged in—the Jews are all alike in his stories, but then the French and the Italians are all alike, too.
These people of the plains have found the Jewish problem exactly as they might have struck oil; because it is there , and not even because they were looking for it. In his autobiography, Chesterton tries to defend himself by explaining what it is that makes people naturally mistrust Jews. No one born a Jew can become a good Englishman: if England had sunk into the Atlantic, he says, Disraeli would have run off to America. The more he tries to excuse himself, the worse it gets. Lewis, Grand Rapids, Mich.
Eerdmans, Titterton, W. William Richard , G. Chesterton: a portrait, Folcroft, Pa. Folcroft Library Editions, ; Norwood, Pa. Wahlert Memorial Library, Gilbert Keith Chesterton; an exhibition catalogue of English and American first editions on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, , along with appreciations and tributes to the man and his works by friends and critics, Dubuque, La. All rights reserved.
Dale, Alzina Stone, The art of G. Chesterton, Chicago: Loyola University Press, Ffinch, Michael, G. The Wisdom of Father Brown. A Short History of England. All Things Considered. Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens.
Charles Dickens: Eugenics and Other Evils. George Bernard Shaw. Robert Browning. The Appetite of Tyranny. The Crimes of England.
The Defendant. The New Jerusalem. The Victorian Age in Literature. Tremendous Trifles. Twelve Types: A Collection of Biographies.
Utopia of Usurers and other Essays. What I Saw in America. What's Wrong With The World. Greybeards at Play. The Ballad of St. Barbara And Other Verses. The Wild Knight and Other Poems. The Suffragist. The Poet and the Cheese. The Thing. The Man Who Thinks Backwards.
The Nameless Man. The Gardiner and the Guinea. The Voter and the Two Voices. The Mad Official. The Enchanted Man. The Sun Worshipper. The Wrong Incendiary. The Free Man. The Hypothetical Householder. The Priest of Spring. The Real Journalist. The Sentimental Scot. The Sectarian of Society.
The Fool. The Conscript and the Crisis. The Miser and His Friends. Any subject may seem as "dull as ditchwater," he wrote, but added, "naturalists with microscopes have told me that ditchwater teems with quiet fun.
Upon questioning a Yorkshire priest with "some rather sordid social questions of vice and crime," he was surprised to discover the clergyman's profound understanding of evil. He then fictionalized the priest in his best-known works, the Father Brown detective mysteries — In Chesterton left Canterbury for Rome. Catholicism, he asserted, was the only church that "dared to go down with me into the depths of myself.
His conversion was followed by a few books on denominational topics, including some jabs at Puritanism and the Reformation. Shortly after writing his autobiography, Chesterton fell ill and died. Authors from T. Eliot who penned his obituary to H. Wells, a longtime friend and debating opponent, expressed their grief. Sections Home. Bible Coronavirus Prayer.