#tmwwt bookclub

[why-bless-your-heart]

Chapter 6: The Exposure

Chapter title: dun-dun-DUUUNNHH

“Each figure seemed to be, somehow, on the borderland of things, just as their theory was on the borderland of thought. He knew that each one of these men stood at the extreme end, so to speak, of some wild road of reasoning. He could only fancy, as in some old-world fable, that if a man went westward to the end of the world he would find something—say a tree—that was more or less than a tree, a tree possessed by a spirit; and that if he went east to the end of the world he would find something else that was not wholly itself—a tower, perhaps, of which the very shape was wicked. So these figures seemed to stand up, violent and unaccountable, against an ultimate horizon, visions from the verge. The ends of the earth were closing in.” In The Ball and the Cross MacIan says that things come together to a point at the end of the world. This is an apocalyptic theme for Chesterton, and while I don’t think TMWWT was written as an apocalypse there is no denying that it has many of those elements.

“Only three days afterwards the Czar was to meet the President of the French Republic in Paris, and over their bacon and eggs upon their sunny balcony these beaming gentlemen had decided how both should die.” At the time of publication, Nicholas II and Clément Armand Fallières. 

“Then there fell upon him the great temptation that was to torment him for many days. In the presence of these powerful and repulsive men, who were the princes of anarchy, he had almost forgotten the frail and fanciful figure of the poet Gregory, the mere aesthete of anarchism. He even thought of him now with an old kindness, as if they had played together when children. But he remembered that he was still tied to Gregory by a great promise. He had promised never to do the very thing that he now felt himself almost in the act of doing. He had promised not to jump over that balcony and speak to that policeman. He took his cold hand off the cold stone balustrade. His soul swayed in a vertigo of moral indecision. He had only to snap the thread of a rash vow made to a villainous society, and all his life could be as open and sunny as the square beneath him. He had, on the other hand, only to keep his antiquated honour, and be delivered inch by inch into the power of this great enemy of mankind, whose very intellect was a torture-chamber. Whenever he looked down into the square he saw the comfortable policeman, a pillar of common sense and common order. Whenever he looked back at the breakfast-table he saw the President still quietly studying him with big, unbearable eyes.” Syme’s real trial: his duty isn’t just to stop the anarchists, but to keep his promise (made without full knowledge but with complete free will), to Lucian Gregory.

“It never occurred to him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to a weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their allegiance under this oppression of a great personality. They might have called Sunday the super-man. If any such creature be conceivable, he looked, indeed, somewhat like it, with his earth-shaking abstraction, as of a stone statue walking. He might have been called something above man, with his large plans, which were too obvious to be detected, with his large face, which was too frank to be understood. But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink even in his extreme morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not quite coward enough to admire it.” Chesterton pulls no punches. 

The Marquis says he wants the personal gratification of sticking a knife into the French president, but the Secretary argues that, ideologically speaking, it must be dynamite, that thought will break up the universe. The Marquis then says that he doesn’t want that quite yet, as he’s still attached to unnamed sins, and Dr. Bull says that it doesn’t seem worth doing those if it’s all meant to be destroyed before the Professor puts an end to the discussion by pronouncing that “nothing is worth doing.” Materialism leads to violence leads to apathy leads to despair.

Jumping ahead again, the melodrama of these exchanges is, frankly, hilarious.

The music of a barrel-organ has a sacramental element in that it takes Syme suddenly out of himself to remind him of the core belief that will let him go down to face his death, phrased in a quote from The Song of Roland:  “Pagens ont tort et Chretiens ont droit,” or “Pagans are wrong and Christians are right.” Like Roland, Syme is now ready to face a warrior’s martyrdom at the hands of the pagans.

Immediately after, Sunday pokes fun at Gogol’s same sentiment when he (somewhat incoherently) exclaims that he will die for mankind and destroy their enemies: “You die for mankind first, and then you get up and smite their oppressors.” His words are aimed at Gogol, but apply just as aptly to Syme’s heroism.

The traitor to the anarchists, the spy in their midst, the policeman on the council, is exposed. It is---Gogol. The twist is like a practical joke as Syme, safe for now despite all of his willingness to die and kill for what is right, collapses, ending the chapter.