Manalive! Or: Commandments, Not Conventions.

What would you do if an old friend from sent you this message: "Man found alive with two legs"?  You'd be puzzled, would you not?  Or at least consider that your friend must have lost his metaphysical marbles.  And what if that friend were named Innocent Smith? (An innocuous title to be sure!)  Would you really think him not just insane, but also a murderer, bigamist, and a burglar?

 If you did, you would be right to think so.  You would also be wrong.  If nothing else, you would be in full agreement with Drs. Herbert Warner and Cyrus Pym, characters in Gilbert Keith Chesterton's brilliant novel Manalive.    -- Then again, of course, maybe you wouldn't.  After all, a man has been found alive with two legs.

To be quite fair, you are probably now confused.  Perhaps you are so confused that you have stopped reading, and I write this post in vain.  But if, perchance, you have not given up, then I think I have a treat for you.  This treat - this treasure - is called knowledge, and I believe you may get a good deal of it from Chesterton's book, and a little of it (hopefully) from this post.  

Before I go on, let met first warn you that I may give one or three small "spoilers."  So if you don't want them, stop here.  Turn back and repent.  (Regardless of whether you do read on, that last one is not such a bad idea - not enough people try it.  I think it comes down to the fact that they do not realize how well sackcloth and ashes suit them.  And me.  But I digress.)  I will not, however, summarize the whole book, as no truly good book should be merely summarized (such methods tend to give you a picture of half a shoelace when they should be showing you the cobbler's shop).  Rather, I will describe just a few parts - well, one part really; a little bauble from this treasure-trove - as an appetizer which I hope will whet your appetite for more that this great author has to offer.  Thus I (finally!) begin:

                                                                                   

In this excerpt, from the Google Books version of Manalive***, our burglar (Innocent Smith) has broken into a house by coming down the chimney, bringing with him a perplexed English curate.  Smith's eccentric if not criminal actions (in my opinion they are not criminal, for reasons which, I hope, will become evident) show us several things.

First, and most obviously, the curate discovers more about the nature of stealing (but that much is obvious from this text).  But he then learns something else, something curious: the house they have broken into is Smith's.  The wine Smith drinks is his own.  But why should a man steal his own possessions, or break into his own house?

The startling conclusion the curate reaches is partly this: Smith has learned the art of coveting his own goods instead of his neighbor's.  Smith has found a way - odd, no doubt - of reminding himself that he is alive, and how to love that which he has as if it were not his (his interesting and rather wild way of re-courting his wife is another prominent example of this).  He has discovered how to break the conventions while keeping the Commandments, and the character Michael Moon rightly says that it is this that constitutes Smith's "spiritual power" (Part II, Chapter IV).

It seems as if Chesterton echoes through the antics of Innocent Smith, the blameless "guilty" man, some of the same sentiment he meant to convey when he said "A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it." And Smith is certainly a living thing.  Indeed, he is a Living thing, if you take my meaning.  What I think Chesterton is getting at in Manalive, at least in part, is that conventions, not Commandments, constrain.  It is that we can - and in some cases should - dispense with custom, but not with creed.  Smith certainly does.  And if this behavior, if these, his wild but morally upright shenanigans lead him (as they seem to) to be the happiest character in the book -- well, might not the same be true for us?

Perhaps that is too many thoughts for one post.  Perhaps it is too few.  Nevertheless and regardless, I leave you with one more: remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.  For a man has been found alive with two legs.

Riddle me that if you can!


**Thanks to tumblr_lmw26wyQ841qe7ziso1_500.jpg for the above picture of the man with a gun.
***Thanks to http://books.google.com/books?id=ckCzB8f_vC8C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=a%20millionth%20part&f=false    for the excerpts (pages 220-221).