The Man Who Was Thursday

by

G. K. Chesterton

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Tradition vs. Modernity Theme Analysis

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Order, Chaos, and God Theme Icon
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The Man Who Was Thursday is set around the turn of the 20th century, when major social, economic, technological, and philosophical changes were transforming life in Europe. Pessimist intellectuals were turning against democracy and the Enlightenment. The Second Industrial Revolution was making factory work the norm and technologies like steam trains and electric street lamps more widely accessible. And the majority of the population was living in cities for the first time. All of these developments set the stage for radical politics to grow, and anarchist terrorists assassinated dozens of prominent leaders and bombed countless public places between the late 1870s and the outbreak of World War I.

All of these developments figure prominently in The Man Who Was Thursday, and G. K. Chesterton was not particularly happy about any of them. Throughout the novel, he comically juxtaposes aspects of his contemporary European society with the earlier, more traditional, religious, and agrarian societies that he preferred. For example, in just a few pages, his protagonists fight a traditional duel while waiting to catch a steam train, debate property ownership laws for French and British peasants while running away from a mob of masked anarchists, run over a horse with an automobile, and win a shootout with the help of an antique religious lantern. In these and countless other situations throughout the novel, Chesterton uses humor to suggest that modern technology and cities create a hollow society and make people’s lives worse by distancing them from their roots. But whereas pessimists and anarchists view this hollowness as a justification for destroying society, Chesterton wants to save it. In this sense, his tongue-in-cheek examples of old meeting new also serve as examples of how he thinks modern people can embrace history and tradition, thereby living richer, happier lives.

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Tradition vs. Modernity Quotes in The Man Who Was Thursday

Below you will find the important quotes in The Man Who Was Thursday related to the theme of Tradition vs. Modernity.
Chapter 1 Quotes

“An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen. An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only.”

[…]

“The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street, or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria.”

Related Characters: Gabriel Syme (speaker), Lucian Gregory (speaker)
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

“I will tell you,” said the policeman slowly. “This is the situation. The head of one of our departments, one of the most celebrated detectives in Europe, has long been of opinion that a purely intellectual conspiracy would soon threaten the very existence of civilization. He is certain that the scientific and artistic worlds are silently bound in a crusade against the Family and the State. He has, therefore, formed a special corps of policemen, policemen who are also philosophers. It is their business to watch the beginnings of this conspiracy.”

Related Characters: The Philosophical Policeman (speaker), Gabriel Syme, The President/The Police Chief/Sunday
Page Number: 32
Explanation and Analysis:

“The outer ring—the main mass of their supporters—are merely anarchists; that is, men who believe that rules and formulas have destroyed human happiness.”

[…]

“They are under no illusions; they are too intellectual to think that man upon this earth can ever be quite free of original sin and the struggle. And they mean death. When they say that mankind shall be free at last, they mean that mankind shall commit suicide. When they talk of a paradise without right or wrong, they mean the grave. They have but two objects, to destroy first humanity and then themselves.”

Related Characters: The Philosophical Policeman (speaker), Gabriel Syme
Page Number: 34-35
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

A barrel-organ in the street suddenly sprang with a jerk into a jovial tune. Syme stood up taut, as if it had been a bugle before the battle. He found himself filled with a supernatural courage that came from nowhere. The 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. […] 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.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Gabriel Syme, The President/The Police Chief/Sunday
Page Number: 52
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

He felt a strange and vivid value in all the earth around him, in the grass under his feet; he felt the love of life in all living things. He could almost fancy that he heard the grass growing; he could almost fancy that even as he stood fresh flowers were springing up and breaking into blossom in the meadow—flowers blood-red and burning gold and blue, fulfilling the whole pageant of the spring. And whenever his eyes strayed for a flash from the calm, staring, hypnotic eyes of the Marquis, they saw the little tuft of almond tree against the skyline. He had the feeling that if by some miracle he escaped he would be ready to sit for ever before that almond tree, desiring nothing else in the world.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Gabriel Syme, The Marquis de St. Eustache/Inspector Ratcliffe/Wednesday
Page Number: 97
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

Was he wearing a mask? Was anyone wearing a mask? Was anyone anything? This wood of witchery in which men’s faces turned black and white by turns, in which their figures first swelled into sunlight and then faded into formless night, this mere chaos of chiaroscuro (after the clear daylight outside) seemed to Syme a perfect symbol of the world in which he had been moving for three days. […] 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. For Gabriel Syme had found in the heart of that sun-splashed wood what many modern painters had found there. He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Gabriel Syme, The Marquis de St. Eustache/Inspector Ratcliffe/Wednesday
Page Number: 107-108
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

The next instant the automobile had come with a catastrophic jar against an iron object. The instant after that four men had crawled out from under a chaos of metal, and a tall lean lamp-post that had stood up straight on the edge of the marine parade stood out, bent and twisted, like the branch of a broken tree.

“Well, we smashed something,” said the Professor, with a faint smile. “That’s some comfort.”

“You’re becoming an anarchist,” said Syme, dusting his clothes with his instinct of daintiness.

“Everyone is,” said Ratcliffe.

Related Characters: Gabriel Syme (speaker), The Professor de Worms/Wilks/Friday (speaker), The Narrator (speaker)
Page Number: 123
Explanation and Analysis:

“Do you see this lantern?” cried Syme in a terrible voice. “Do you see the cross carved on it, and the flame inside? You did not make it. You did not light it. Better men than you, men who could believe and obey, twisted the entrails of iron and preserved the legend of fire. There is not a street you walk on, there is not a thread you wear, that was not made as this lantern was, by denying your philosophy of dirt and rats. You can make nothing. You can only destroy. You will destroy mankind; you will destroy the world. Let that suffice you. Yet this one old Christian lantern you shall not destroy. It shall go where your empire of apes will never have the wit to find it.”

Related Characters: Gabriel Syme (speaker), The Secretary/Monday
Related Symbols: Dr. Renard’s Lantern
Page Number: 127
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

“I tell you this, that you will have found out the truth of the last tree and the topmost cloud before the truth about me. You will understand the sea, and I shall be still a riddle; you shall know what the stars are, and not know what I am. Since the beginning of the world all men have hunted me like a wolf—kings and sages, and poets and law-givers, all the churches, and all the philosophers. But I have never been caught yet, and the skies will fall in the time I turn to bay. I have given them a good run for their money, and I will now.”

Related Characters: The President/The Police Chief/Sunday (speaker), Gabriel Syme
Page Number: 132
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

“Listen to me,” cried Syme with extraordinary emphasis. “Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? 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 stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front—”

Related Characters: Gabriel Syme (speaker)
Page Number: 145
Explanation and Analysis:

The six adventurers had passed through many adventures, but not one had carried them so utterly off their feet as this last adventure of comfort. They had all become inured to things going roughly; but things suddenly going smoothly swamped them. They could not even feebly imagine what the carriages were; it was enough for them to know that they were carriages, and carriages with cushions. They could not conceive who the old man was who had led them; but it was quite enough that he had certainly led them to the carriages.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker)
Page Number: 147-148
Explanation and Analysis:

But though he affected to despise the mummery, he felt a curious freedom and naturalness in his movements as the blue and gold garment fell about him; and when he found that he had to wear a sword, it stirred a boyish dream. As he passed out of the room he flung the folds across his shoulder with a gesture, his sword stood out at an angle, and he had all the swagger of a troubadour. For these disguises did not disguise, but reveal.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Gabriel Syme
Related Symbols: The Divine Clothing
Page Number: 150
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

“Who and what are you?”

“I am the Sabbath,” said the other without moving. “I am the peace of God.”

The Secretary started up, and stood crushing his costly robe in his hand.

“I know what you mean,” he cried, “and it is exactly that that I cannot forgive you. I know you are contentment, optimism, what do they call the thing, an ultimate reconciliation. Well, I am not reconciled. If you were the man in the dark room, why were you also Sunday, an offence to the sunlight? If you were from the first our father and our friend, why were you also our greatest enemy? We wept, we fled in terror; the iron entered into our souls—and you are the peace of God! Oh, I can forgive God His anger, though it destroyed nations; but I cannot forgive Him His peace.”

Related Characters: The President/The Police Chief/Sunday (speaker), The Secretary/Monday (speaker), The Narrator (speaker)
Page Number: 154-155
Explanation and Analysis: