AUTOBIOGRAPHY-Chesterton

the merits of the Moral Tale; but it is against all the proper principles that even
any such measure of good fortune should have come to the Idle Apprentice. In
the case of my association with Hodder Williams, it was against all reason that
so unbusinesslike a person should have so businesslike a friend. In the case of
the choice of a trade, it was outrageously unjust that a man should succeed in
becoming a journalist merely by failing to become an artist. I say a trade and
not a profession; for the only thing I can say for myself, in connection with
both trades, is that I was never pompous about them. If I have had a
profession, at least I have never been a professor. But in another sense there
was about these first stages an element of luck, and even of accident. I mean
that my mind remained very much abstracted and almost stunned; and these
opportunities were merely things that happened to me, almost like calamities.
To say that I was not ambitious makes it sound far too like a virtue, when it
really was a not very disgraceful defect; it was that curious blindness of youth
which we can observe in others and yet never explain in ourselves. But, above
all, I mention it here also because it was connected with the continuity of that
unresolved riddle of the mind, which I mentioned at the beginning of this
chapter. The essential reason was that my eyes were turned inwards rather than
outwards; giving my moral personality, I should imagine, a very unattractive
squint. I was still oppressed with the metaphysical nightmare of negations
about mind and matter, with the morbid imagery of evil, with the burden of
my own mysterious brain and body; but by this time I was in revolt against
them; and trying to construct a healthier conception of cosmic life, even if it
were one that should err on the side of health. I even called myself an optimist,
because I was so horribly near to being a pessimist. It is the only excuse I can
offer. All this part of the process was afterwards thrown up in the very
formless form of a piece of fiction called The Man Who Was Thursday. The
title attracted some attention at the time; and there were many journalistic
jokes about it. Some, referring to my supposed festive views, affected to
mistake it for “The Man Who Was Thirsty.” Others naturally supposed that
Man Thursday was the black brother of Man Friday. Others again, with more
penetration, treated it as a mere title out of topsy-turveydom; as if it had been
“The Woman Who Was Half-past Eight,” or “The Cow Who Was Tomorrow
Evening.” But what interests me about it was this; that hardly anybody who
looked at the title ever seems to have looked at the sub-title; which was “A
Nightmare,” and the answer to a good many critical questions.
I pause upon the point here, because it is of some importance to the
understanding of that time. I have often been asked what I mean by the
monstrous pantomime ogre who was called Sunday in that story; and some
have suggested, and in one sense not untruly, that he was meant for a
blasphemous version of the Creator. But the point is that the whole story is a
nightmare of things, not as they are, but as they seemed to the young half-