For the understanding of Chesterton's romances it is necessary to remember that the more non-sensical they seem, the more sense they have in them. This is because when he gets blinded by a big idea he sees men as concepts walking. He is too much of a Platonist to be a good novelist. He admires Dickens but never imitates him, for Chesterton's stories are singularly devoid of individuals. All the little variations and accidental peculiarities that make a type into a person in the great novels of the world are lacking. In "The Ball and the Cross" Mac Ian is simply the archetype of the Catholic Romanticist and Turnbull of the Revolutionary Rationalist. Neither of them ever does anything out of character, but then neither of them has any character outside of the Idea that made them what they are. Each falls in love with a girl of the opposite type, drawn to scale. This is carried farther yet by the introduction of an incredibly consistent Tolstoyan and a Nietzschean beside whom Nietzsche would seem all too human. Thus the whole book is balanced and matched like old-fashioned wall paper or an Italian garden.
Manalive comes closer to being real. He certainly is alive, but he is not a man; he is an ideal, Chesterton's superman. "All habits are bad habits" is the text of G. K. Chesterton's "Manalive", which proved as delightful to his admirers and distasteful to his antipathists as any of his former productions. In his essays Mr. Chesterton's method is first to set down something that sounds like a wild absurdity and then to argue the reader into the admission—cheerful or indignant, according to his temperament—that it is a very sensible thing after all. In his romances his method is essentially the same. Nobody could act crazier than Mr. Innocent Smith in the first chapters of this volume, but in the end he is proved, by a long legal process, to be the only really sane man of the lot. He is accused of about as many crimes as the hero of Jokai's tale, "The Death's Head", confessed to, but he turns out to be quite as guiltless. Charges of murder, burglary, bigamy, and kidnaping, amply certificated, slip off him like water off a duck's back. Neither prison nor asylum can hold Manalive. Smith's theory is that if you keep the commandments, you may violate the conventions; which, being the reverse of the ordinary rule of procedure, gets him into all sorts of misunderstandings. He had evidently read Schopenhauer's theory that the only happiness is the pursuit of happiness, and, what is more, he acts upon it by letting go what he most delights in that he may recapture it. He goes round the world in search of his own home, and his series of amorous adventures are conducted in strict accord with monogamous morality. By getting outside of himself he can gain the joy of coveting his own possessions. The economic law of diminishing returns applies to all our habitual pleasures, and to escape it we must be continually seeking new investments.
So Manalive is distinguished from ordinary men in that he has legs that he uses. He is not rooted. He breaks out and runs around and discovers the most novel and wonderful things in the most commonplace environment.
Mr. Chesterton is as fond of a chase as a fox hunter or a kinetoscope man. We have it in "Manalive" as we have it in "The Man Who Was Thursday" and "The Ball and the Cross." As usual he stops every little while and paints a cloudscape to rest our eyes; and all along he enlivens the way by epigrams and inverted proverbs. Here are a few:
When men are weary they fall into anarchy; but when they are gay and vigorous they invariably make rules. We are never free until some institution frees us; and liberty cannot exist until it is declared by authority.
For she was one of those women who at bottom regard all men as equally mad, wild animals of some utterly separate species.
Though she never spoke she always looked as if she might speak any minute. Perhaps this is the very definition of a companion.
All that the parsons say is unproved. All that the doctors say is disproved. That's the only difference between science and religion there's ever been or ever will be.
The academic mind reflects infinity, and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still.
With our weak spirits we should grow old in eternity, if we were not kept young by death. Providence has to cut immortality into lengths for us, as nurses cut the bread and butter into fingers.
The most fantastic and therefore characteristic of Chesterton's romances is "The Man Who Was Thursday" which the French are able more concisely to entitle Nommé Jeudi. The author calls it "A Nightmare", and it is. The only books to compare with it are George Macdonald's "Lilith", Strindberg's "Dream Plays", and Andreyev's "Masked Ball"; but for wild imagining, grotesquerie, farcicality, and swift transformations it cannot be matched. It is a detective story, a motion-picture chase, and a system of theology, all in one. Like all dreams, according to Freud, it is symbolic, but the symbolism is not to be interpreted in the usual Freudian way, for Chesterton is clean-minded. The clue to it is to be found in his earliest book of essays, "The Defendant", when he argues for the moral value of the detective story in the following fashion: "By dealing with the unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society, it tends to remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war upon a chaotic world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but traitors within our gates."
The detective, he says, who stands alone and fearless amid the knives and fists of a thieves' kitchen, is the original and poetic figure, and the criminals surrounding him represent cosmic conservatism. But in "The Man Who Was Thursday" each one of the six detectives, separately commissioned by the mysterious head of the secret police to enter the inner circle of seven anarchists, believes himself to be fighting single-handed for law and order against a criminal conspiracy to destroy civilization. The seven pseudo-anarchists go through all sorts of perilous and absurd adventures in the course of which they are metamorphosed successively into the seven days of the week, the seven days of creation, the seven orders of created things, and the seven angels of heaven. Finally seated upon seven thrones, robed in state, blazoned—of course, since it is Chesterton—with heraldic devices, they recognize one another as friends and allies through all their strange strife. It reminds one of Emerson's Brahma: "If the red slayer thinks he slays." But Chesterton is too much of a Manichean to let it go at that. One of the anarchists turns out to be genuine, the only real one in the world, the irreconcilable rebel, the Eternal Anarchist, the spirit that continually denies, the leader of His Majesty's Opposition. In some ways Chesterton's conception of the devil reminds one of Andreyev's "Anathema" or perhaps rather of the Satan whom Dostoievsky introduces into his "Brothers Karamazarov." Chesterton's mind seems to have a curious affinity to the Russian, though so far as I remember his writings show no evidence of being influenced by Russian literature.
"The Man Who Was Thursday" affects readers variously. To some it seems ridiculous; to others blasphemous. Julius West, usually sympathetic, dismisses it in his biography of Chesterton as incomprehensible and tiresome. Yet three people I know—a man, a woman, and a child—consider it one of the most wonderful books in the world, and know it almost by heart.
My own opinion is that it shows that Chesterton has not yet found the true medium for the expression of his genius. Drawing and writing are too slow and cold to give scope to his pictorial imagination. He should, like D'Annunzio, take to the screen. "The Man Who Was Thursday" would make a magnificent scenario as it stands, and Chesterton could then add all of the things he thought of or saw while composing it but could not put into words.
Blake, too, was a man who would have done wonders with the cinematograph if it had only been invented sooner. Chesterton, in his sketch of Blake, explains his difficulties of expression by word and picture: