CHESTERTON-ALARM AND SIDISCUTIO - The Long Bow
I find myself still sitting in front of the last book by Mr. H. G. Wells,
I say stunned with admiration, my family says sleepy with fatigue.
I still feel vaguely all the things in Mr. Wells's book which I
agree with; and I still feel vividly the one thing that I deny.
I deny that biology can destroy the sense of truth, which alone can
even desire biology. No truth which I find can deny that I am seeking
the truth. My mind cannot find anything which denies my mind...
But what is all this? This is no sort of talk for a genial essay.
Let us change the subject; let us have a romance or a fable
or a fairy tale.
Come, let us tell each other stories. There was once a king who
was very fond of listening to stories, like the king in the
Arabian Nights. The only difference was that, unlike that
cynical Oriental, this king believed all the stories that he
heard. It is hardly necessary to add that he lived in England.
His face had not the swarthy secrecy of the tyrant of the thousand tales;
on the contrary, his eyes were as big and innocent as two blue moons;
and when his yellow beard turned totally white he seemed to be
growing younger. Above him hung still his heavy sword and horn,
to remind men that he had been a tall hunter and warrior in his time:
indeed, with that rusted sword he had wrecked armies. But he was one
of those who will never know the world, even when they conquer it.
Besides his love of this old Chaucerian pastime of the telling of tales,
he was, like many old English kings, specially interested in the art
of the bow. He gathered round him great archers of the stature
of Ulysses and Robin Hood, and to four of these he gave the whole
government of his kingdom. They did not mind governing his kingdom;
but they were sometimes a little bored with the necessity
of telling him stories. None of their stories were true;
but the king believed all of them, and this became very depressing.
They created the most preposterous romances; and could not get
the credit of creating them. Their true ambition was sent empty away.
They were praised as archers; but they desired to be praised as poets.
They were trusted as men, but they would rather have been admired
as literary men.
At last, in an hour of desperation, they formed themselves into a club
or conspiracy with the object of inventing some story which even
the king could not swallow. They called it The League of the Long Bow;
thus attaching themselves by a double bond to their motherland of England,
which has been steadily celebrated since the Norman Conquest for its
heroic archery and for the extraordinary credulity of its people.
At last it seemed to the four archers that their hour had come.
The king commonly sat in a green curtained chamber, which opened by
four doors, and was surmounted by four turrets. Summoning his champions
to him on an April evening, he sent out each of them by a separate door,
telling him to return at morning with the tale of his journey.
Every champion bowed low, and, girding on great armour as for awful
adventures, retired to some part of the garden to think of a lie.
They did not want to think of a lie which would deceive the king;
any lie would do that. They wanted to think of a lie so outrageous
that it would not deceive him, and that was a serious matter.
The first archer who returned was a dark, quiet, clever fellow,
very dexterous in small matters of mechanics. He was more
interested in the science of the bow than in the sport of it.
Also he would only shoot at a mark, for he thought it cruel to kill
beasts and birds, and atrocious to kill men. When he left the king
he had gone out into the wood and tried all sorts of tiresome
experiments about the bending of branches and the impact of arrows;
when even he found it tiresome he returned to the house of the four
turrets and narrated his adventure. "Well," said the king,
"what have you been shooting?" "Arrows," answered the archer.
"So I suppose," said the king smiling; "but I mean, I mean what
wild things have you shot?" "I have shot nothing but arrows,"
answered the bowman obstinately. "When I went out on to the plain
I saw in a crescent the black army of the Tartars, the terrible
archers whose bows are of bended steel, and their bolts as big
as javelins. They spied me afar off, and the shower of their
arrows shut out the sun and made a rattling roof above me.
You know, I think it wrong to kill a bird, or worm, or even a Tartar.
But such is the precision and rapidity of perfect science that,
with my own arrows, I split every arrow as it came against me.
I struck every flying shaft as if it were a flying bird.
Therefore, Sire, I may say truly, that I shot nothing but arrows."
The king said, "I know how clever you engineers are with your fingers."
The archer said, "Oh," and went out.
The second archer, who had curly hair and was pale, poetical,
and rather effeminate, had merely gone out into the garden and stared
at the moon. When the moon had become too wide, blank, and watery,
even for his own wide, blank, and watery eyes, he came in again.
And when the king said "What have you been shooting?" he answered
with great volubility, "I have shot a man; not a man from Tartary,
not a man from Europe, Asia, Africa, or America; not a man on this
earth at all. I have shot the Man in the Moon." "Shot the Man
in the Moon?" repeated the king with something like a mild surprise.
"It is easy to prove it," said the archer with hysterical haste.
"Examine the moon through this particularly powerful telescope,
and you will no longer find any traces of a man there." The king
glued his big blue idiotic eye to the telescope for about ten minutes,
and then said, "You are right: as you have often pointed out,
scientific truth can only be tested by the senses. I believe you."
And the second archer went out, and being of a more emotional
temperament burst into tears.
The third archer was a savage, brooding sort of man with tangled
hair and dreamy eyes, and he came in without any preface, saying,
"I have lost all my arrows. They have turned into birds."
Then as he saw that they all stared at him, he said "Well,
you know everything changes on the earth; mud turns into marigolds,
eggs turn into chickens; one can even breed dogs into quite
different shapes. Well, I shot my arrows at the awful eagles
that clash their wings round the Himalayas; great golden eagles
as big as elephants, which snap the tall trees by perching on them.
My arrows fled so far over mountain and valley that they turned
slowly into fowls in their flight. See here," and he threw
down a dead bird and laid an arrow beside it. "Can't you see
they are the same structure. The straight shaft is the backbone;
the sharp point is the beak; the feather is the rudimentary plumage.
It is merely modification and evolution." After a silence the king
nodded gravely and said, "Yes; of course everything is evolution."
At this the third archer suddenly and violently left the room,
and was heard in some distant part of the building making extraordinary
noises either of sorrow or of mirth.
The fourth archer was a stunted man with a face as dead as wood,
but with wicked little eyes close together, and very much alive.
His comrades dissuaded him from going in because they said that they
had soared up into the seventh heaven of living lies, and that there
was literally nothing which the old man would not believe. The face
of the little archer became a little more wooden as he forced his way in,
and when he was inside he looked round with blinking bewilderment.
"Ha, the last," said the king heartily, "welcome back again!"
There was a long pause, and then the stunted archer said,
"What do you mean by 'again'? I have never been here before."
The king stared for a few seconds, and said, "I sent you out from
this room with the four doors last night." After another pause
the little man slowly shook his head. "I never saw you before,"
he said simply; "you never sent me out from anywhere. I only saw
your four turrets in the distance, and strayed in here by accident.
I was born in an island in the Greek Archipelago; I am by profession
an auctioneer, and my name is Punk." The king sat on his throne
for seven long instants like a statue; and then there awoke in his mild
and ancient eyes an awful thing; the complete conviction of untruth.
Every one has felt it who has found a child obstinately false.
He rose to his height and took down the heavy sword above him,
plucked it out naked, and then spoke. "I will believe your mad
tales about the exact machinery of arrows; for that is science.
I will believe your mad tales about traces of life in the moon;
for that is science. I will believe your mad tales about jellyfish
turning into gentlemen, and everything turning into anything;
for that is science. But I will not believe you when you tell me
what I know to be untrue. I will not believe you when you say that
you did not all set forth under my authority and out of my house.
The other three may conceivably have told the truth; but this
last man has certainly lied. Therefore I will kill him."
And with that the old and gentle king ran at the man with uplifted sword;
but he was arrested by the roar of happy laughter, which told
the world that there is, after all, something which an Englishman
will not swallow.
Mr. Vernon-Smith, of Trinity, and the Social Settlement, Tooting,
author of "A Higher London" and "The Boyg System at Work,"
came to the conclusion, after looking through his select and even
severe library, that Dickens's "Christmas Carol" was a very suitable
thing to be read to charwomen. Had they been men they would have been
forcibly subjected to Browning's "Christmas Eve" with exposition,
but chivalry spared the charwomen, and Dickens was funny,
and could do no harm. His fellow worker Wimpole would read things
like "Three Men in a Boat" to the poor; but Vernon-Smith regarded
this as a sacrifice of principle, or (what was the same thing to him)
of dignity. He would not encourage them in their vulgarity;
they should have nothing from him that was not literature.
Still Dickens was literature after all; not literature of a high order,
of course, not thoughtful or purposeful literature, but literature
quite fitted for charwomen on Christmas Eve.
He did not, however, let them absorb Dickens without due
antidotes of warning and criticism. He explained that Dickens
was not a writer of the first rank, since he lacked the high
seriousness of Matthew Arnold. He also feared that they
would find the characters of Dickens terribly exaggerated.
But they did not, possibly because they were meeting them every day.
For among the poor there are still exaggerated characters;
they do not go to the Universities to be universified. He
told the charwomen, with progressive brightness, that a mad wicked
old miser like Scrooge would be really quite impossible now; but as
each of the charwomen had an uncle or a grandfather or a father-in-law
who was exactly like Scrooge, his cheerfulness was not shared.
Indeed, the lecture as a whole lacked something of his firm and
elastic touch, and towards the end he found himself rambling, and in
a sort of abstraction, talking to them as if they were his fellows.
He caught himself saying quite mystically that a spiritual plane
(by which he meant his plane) always looked to those on the sensual
or Dickens plane, not merely austere, but desolate. He said,
quoting Bernard Shaw, that we could all go to heaven just as we can
all go to a classical concert, but if we did it would bore us.
Realizing that he was taking his flock far out of their depth, he ended
somewhat hurriedly, and was soon receiving that generous applause
which is a part of the profound ceremonialism of the working classes.
As he made his way to the door three people stopped him,
and he answered them heartily enough, but with an air of hurry which
he would not have dreamed of showing to people of his own class.
One was a little schoolmistress who told him with a sort of feverish
meekness that she was troubled because an Ethical Lecturer
had said that Dickens was not really Progressive; but she
thought he was Progressive; and surely he was Progressive.
Of what being Progressive was she had no more notion than a whale.
The second person implored him for a subscription to some soup
kitchen or cheap meal; and his refined features sharpened;
for this, like literature, was a matter of principle with him.
"Quite the wrong method," he said, shaking his head and pushing past.
"Nothing any good but the Boyg system." The third stranger, who was male,
caught him on the step as he came out into the snow and starlight;
and asked him point blank for money. It was a part of Vernon-Smith's
principles that all such persons are prosperous impostors;
and like a true mystic he held to his principles in defiance of his
five senses, which told him that the night was freezing and the man
very thin and weak. "If you come to the Settlement between four
and five on Friday week," he said, "inquiries will be made."
The man stepped back into the snow with a not ungraceful gesture
as of apology; he had frosty silver hair, and his lean face,
though in shadow, seemed to wear something like a smile.
As Vernon-Smith stepped briskly into the street, the man stooped
down as if to do up his bootlace. He was, however, guiltless of
any such dandyism; and as the young philanthropist stood pulling
on his gloves with some particularity, a heavy snowball was
suddenly smashed into his face. He was blind for a black instant;
then as some of the snow fell, saw faintly, as in a dim mirror
of ice or dreamy crystal, the lean man bowing with the elegance
of a dancing master, and saying amiably, "A Christmas box."
When he had quite cleared his face of snow the man had vanished.
For three burning minutes Cyril Vernon-Smith was nearer to the people
and more their brother than he had been in his whole high-stepping
pedantic existence; for if he did not love a poor man, he hated one.
And you never really regard a labourer as your equal until you
can quarrel with him. "Dirty cad!" he muttered. "Filthy fool!
Mucking with snow like a beastly baby! When will they be civilized?
Why, the very state of the street is a disgrace and a temptation
to such tomfools. Why isn't all this snow cleared away and the
street made decent?"
To the eye of efficiency, there was, indeed, something to complain
of in the condition of the road. Snow was banked up on both
sides in white walls and towards the other and darker end
of the street even rose into a chaos of low colourless hills.
By the time he reached them he was nearly knee deep, and was
in a far from philanthropic frame of mind. The solitude of
the little streets was as strange as their white obstruction,
and before he had ploughed his way much further he was convinced
that he had taken a wrong turning, and fallen upon some formless
suburb unvisited before. There was no light in any of the low,
dark houses; no light in anything but the blank emphatic snow.
He was modern and morbid; hellish isolation hit and held him suddenly;
anything human would have relieved the strain, if it had been only
the leap of a garotter. Then the tender human touch came indeed;
for another snowball struck him, and made a star on his back.
He turned with fierce joy, and ran after a boy escaping;
ran with dizzy and violent speed, he knew not for how long.
He wanted the boy; he did not know whether he loved or hated him.
He wanted humanity; he did not know whether he loved or hated it.
As he ran he realized that the landscape around him was changing
in shape though not in colour. The houses seemed to dwindle and
disappear in hills of snow as if buried; the snow seemed to rise
in tattered outlines of crag and cliff and crest, but he thought
nothing of all these impossibilities until the boy turned to bay.
When he did he saw the child was queerly beautiful, with gold
red hair, and a face as serious as complete happiness. And
when he spoke to the boy his own question surprised him, for
he said for the first time in his life, "What am I doing here?"
And the little boy, with very grave eyes, answered, "I suppose
you are dead."
He had (also for the first time) a doubt of his spiritual destiny.
He looked round on a towering landscape of frozen peaks and plains,
and said, "Is this hell?" And as the child stared, but did not answer,
he knew it was heaven.
All over that colossal country, white as the world round
the Pole, little boys were playing, rolling each other down
dreadful slopes, crushing each other under falling cliffs;
for heaven is a place where one can fight for ever without hurting.
Smith suddenly remembered how happy he had been as a child,
rolling about on the safe sandhills around Conway.
Right above Smith's head, higher than the cross of St. Paul's,
but curving over him like the hanging blossom of a harebell, was a
cavernous crag of snow. A hundred feet below him, like a landscape
seen from a balloon, lay snowy flats as white and as far away.
He saw a little boy stagger, with many catastrophic slides,
to that toppling peak; and seizing another little boy by the leg,
send him flying away down to the distant silver plains.
There he sank and vanished in the snow as if in the sea;
but coming up again like a diver rushed madly up the steep once more,
rolling before him a great gathering snowball, gigantic at last,
which he hurled back at the mountain crest, and brought both the boy
and the mountain down in one avalanche to the level of the vale.
The other boy also sank like a stone, and also rose again like
a bird, but Smith had no leisure to concern himself with this.
For the collapse of that celestial crest had left him standing
solitary in the sky on a peak like a church spire.
He could see the tiny figures of the boys in the valley below, and he knew
by their attitudes that they were eagerly telling him to jump.
Then for the first time he knew the nature of faith, as he had just
known the fierce nature of charity. Or rather for the second time,
for he remembered one moment when he had known faith before.
It was n when his father had taught him to swim, and he had believed
he could float on water not only against reason, but (what is
so much harder) against instinct. Then he had trusted water;
now he must trust air.
He jumped. He went through air and then through snow with the same
blinding swiftness. But as he buried himself in solid snow like a bullet
he seemed to learn a million things and to learn them all too fast.
He knew that the whole world is a snowball, and that all the stars
are snowballs. He knew that no man will be fit for heaven till
he loves solid whiteness as a little boy loves a ball of snow.
He sank and sank and sank... and then, as usually happens in such cases,
woke up, with a start--in the street. True, he was taken up
for a common drunk, but (if you properly appreciate his conversion)
you will realize that he did not mind; since the crime of drunkenness
is infinitely less than that of spiritual pride, of which he had
really been guilty.
By high plains I do not mean table-lands; table-lands do not interest
one very much. They seem to involve the bore of a climb without
the pleasure of a peak. Also they arc vaguely associated with Asia
and those enormous armies that eat up everything like locusts,
as did the army of Xerxes; with emperors from nowhere spreading
their battalions everywhere; with the white elephants and the
painted horses, the dark engines and the dreadful mounted bowmen
of the moving empires of the East, with all that evil insolence
in short that rolled into Europe in the youth of Nero, and after
having been battered about and abandoned by one Christian nation
after another, turned up in England with Disraeli and was christened
(or rather paganed) Imperialism.
Also (it may be necessary to explain) I do not mean "high planes"
such as the Theosophists and the Higher Thought Centres talk about.
They spell theirs differently; but I will not have theirs
in any spelling. They, I know, are always expounding how this
or that person is on a lower plane, while they (the speakers)
are on a higher plane: sometimes they will almost tell you what plane,
as "5994" or "Plane F, sub-plane 304." I do not mean this sort
of height either. My religion says nothing about such planes except
that all men are on one plane and that by no means a high one.
There are saints indeed in my religion: but a saint only means
a man who really knows he is a sinner.
Why then should I talk of the plains as high? I do it for a
rather singular reason, which I will illustrate by a parallel.
When I was at school learning all the Greek I have ever forgotten,
I was puzzled by the phrase OINON MELAN that is "black wine,"
which continually occurred. I asked what it meant, and many most
interesting and convincing answers were given. It was pointed
out that we know little of the actual liquid drunk by the Greeks;
that the analogy of modern Greek wines may suggest that it was
dark and sticky, perhaps a sort of syrup always taken with water;
that archaic language about colour is always a little dubious,
as where Homer speaks of the "wine-dark sea" and so on. I was very
properly satisfied, and never thought of the matter again; until one day,
having a decanter of claret in front of me, I happened to look at it.
I then perceived that they called wine black because it is black.
Very thin, diluted, or held-up abruptly against a flame, red wine is red;
but seen in body in most normal shades and semi-lights red wine
is black, and therefore was called so.
On the same principles I call the plains high because the
plains always are high; they are always as high as we are.
We talk of climbing a mountain crest and looking down at the plain;
but the phrase is an illusion of our arrogance. It is impossible even
to look down at the plain. For the plain itself rises as we rise.
It is not merely true that the higher we climb the wider and wider
is spread out below us the wealth of the world; it is not merely
that the devil or some other respectable guide for tourists takes us
to the top of an exceeding high mountain and shows us all the kingdoms
of the earth. It is more than that, in our real feeling of it.
It is that in a sense the whole world rises with us roaring,
and accompanies us to the crest like some clanging chorus of eagles.
The plains rise higher and higher like swift grey walls piled up
against invisible invaders. And however high a peak you climb,
the plain is still as high as the peak.
The mountain tops are only noble because from them we are privileged
to behold the plains. So the only value in any man being superior is
that he may have a superior admiration for the level and the common.
If there is any profit in a place craggy and precipitous it is
only because from the vale it is not easy to see all the beauty
of the vale; because when actually in the flats one cannot
see their sublime and satisfying flatness. If there is any
value in being educated or eminent (which is doubtful enough)
it is only because the best instructed man may feel most swiftly
and certainly the splendour of the ignorant and the simple:
the full magnificence of that mighty human army in the plains.
The general goes up to the hill to look at his soldiers, not to look
down at his soldiers. He withdraws himself not because his regiment
is too small to be touched, but because it is too mighty to be seen.
The chief climbs with submission and goes higher with great humility;
since in order to take a bird's eye view of everything, he must
become small and distant like a bird.
The most marvellous of those mystical cavaliers who wrote intricate
and exquisite verse in England in the seventeenth century, I mean
Henry Vaughan, put the matter in one line, intrinsically immortal
and practically forgotten--
"Oh holy hope and high humility."
That adjective "high" is not only one of the sudden and stunning
inspirations of literature; it is also one of the greatest and gravest
definitions of moral science. However far aloft a man may go,
he is still looking up, not only at God (which is obvious),
but in a manner at men also: seeing more and more all that is towering
and mysterious in the dignity and destiny of the lonely house of Adam.
I wrote some part of these rambling remarks on a high ridge
of rock and turf overlooking a stretch of the central counties;
the rise was slight enough in reality, but the immediate ascent
had been so steep and sudden that one could not avoid the fancy
that on reaching the summit one would look down at the stars.
But one did not look down at the stars, but rather up at the cities;
seeing as high in heaven the palace town of Alfred like a lit sunset
cloud, and away in the void spaces, like a planet in eclipse, Salisbury.
So, it may be hoped, until we die you and I will always look up
rather than down at the labours and the habitations of our race;
we will lift up our eyes to the valleys from whence cometh our help.
For from every special eminence and beyond every sublime landmark,
it is good for our souls to see only vaster and vaster visions
of that dizzy and divine level; and to behold from our crumbling
turrets the tall plains of equality.
One of the most marked instances of the decline of true popular sympathy
is the gradual disappearance in our time of the habit of singing
in chorus. Even when it is done nowadays it is done tentatively
and sometimes inaudibly; apparently upon some preposterous principle
(which I have never clearly grasped) that singing is an art.
In the new aristocracy of the drawing-room a lady is actually
asked whether she sings. In the old democracy of the dinner
table a man was simply told to sing, and he had to do it.
I like the atmosphere of those old banquets. I like to think
of my ancestors, middle-aged or venerable gentlemen, all sitting
round a table and explaining that they would never forget old days
or friends with a rumpty-iddity-iddity, or letting it be known that
they would die for England's glory with their tooral ooral, etc.
Even the vices of that society (which 'sometimes, I fear,
rendered the narrative portions of the song almost as cryptic
and inarticulate as the chorus) were displayed with a more human
softening than the same vices in the saloon bars of our own time.
I greatly prefer Mr. Richard Swiveller to Mr. Stanley Ortheris.
I prefer the man who exceeded in rosy wine in order that the wing
of friendship might never moult a feather to the man who exceeds
quite as much in whiskies and sodas, but declares all the time that
he's for number one, and that you don't catch him paying for other
men's drinks. The old men of pleasure (with their tooral ooral)
got at least some social and communal virtue out of pleasure.
The new men of pleasure (without the slightest vestige of a
tooral ooral) are simply hermits of irreligion instead of religion,
anchorites of atheism, and they might as well be drugging themselves
with hashish or opium in a wilderness.
But the chorus of the old songs had another use besides this
obvious one of asserting the popular element in the arts.
The chorus of a song, even of a comic song, has the same purpose
as the chorus in a Greek tragedy. It reconciles men to the gods.
It connects this one particular tale with the cosmos and the philosophy
of common things, Thus we constantly find in the old ballads,
especially the pathetic ballads, some refrain about the grass
growing green, or the birds singing, or the woods being merry in spring.
These are windows opened in the house of tragedy; momentary glimpses
of larger and quieter scenes, of more ancient and enduring landscapes.
Many of the country songs describing crime and death have refrains of a
startling joviality like cock crow, just as if the whole company were
coming in with a shout of protest against so sombre a view of existence.
There is a long and gruesome ballad called "The Berkshire Tragedy,"
about a murder committed by a jealous sister, for the consummation
of which a wicked miller is hanged, and the chorus (which should
come in a kind of burst) runs:
"And I'll be true to my love
If my love'll be true to me."
The very reasonable arrangement here suggested is introduced,
I think, as a kind of throw back to the normal, a reminder that even
"The Berkshire Tragedy" does not fill the whole of Berkshire.
The poor young lady is drowned, and the wicked miller (to whom
we may have been affectionately attached) is hanged; but still
a ruby kindles in the vine, and many a garden by the water blows.
Not that Omar's type of hedonistic resignation is at all the same
as the breezy impatience of the Berkshire refrain; but they are
alike in so far as they gaze out beyond the particular complication
to more open plains of peace. The chorus of the ballad looks past
the drowning maiden and the miller's gibbet, and sees the lanes
full of lovers.
This use of the chorus to humanize and dilute a dark
story is strongly opposed to the modern view of art.
Modern art has to be what is called "intense." It is not easy
to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying
only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong. Modern tragic
writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories
(as the man said of philosophy) cheerfulness would creep in.
Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.
And doubtless they bore some resemblance to some lives lived
under our successful scientific civilization; lives which tend
in any case to be painful, and in many cases to be brief.
But when the artistic people passed beyond the poignant anecdote
and began to write long books full of poignancy, then the reading
public began to rebel and to demand the recall of romance. The long
books about the black poverty of cities became quite insupportable.
The Berkshire tragedy had a chorus; but the London tragedy has no chorus.
Therefore people welcomed the return of adventurous novels about alien
places and times, the trenchant and swordlike stories of Stevenson.
But I am not narrowly on the side of the romantics. I think that
glimpses of the gloom of our civilization ought to be recorded.
I think that the bewilderments of the solitary and sceptical soul ought
to be preserved, if it be only for the pity (yes, and the admiration)
of a happier time. But I wish that there were some way in
which the chorus could enter. I wish that at the end of each
chapter of stiff agony or insane terror the choir of humanity
could come in with a crash of music and tell both the reader
and the author that this is not the whole of human experience.
Let them go on recording hard scenes or hideous questions, but let
there be a jolly refrain.
Thus we might read: "As Honoria laid down the volume of Ibsen and went
wearily to her window, she realized that life must be to her not
only harsher, but colder than it was to the comfortable and the weak.
With her tooral ooral, etc.;" or, again: "The young curate smiled
grimly as he listened to his great-grandmother's last words.
He knew only too well that since Phogg's discovery of the
hereditary hairiness of goats religion stood on a very different
basis from that which it had occupied in his childhood.
With his rumpty-iddity, rumpty-iddity;" and so on. Or we might read:
"Uriel Maybloom stared gloomily down at his sandals, as he realized
for the first time how senseless and anti-social are all ties
between man and woman; how each must go his or her way without
any attempt to arrest the head-long separation of their souls."
And then would come in one deafening chorus of everlasting humanity
"But I'll be true to my love, if my love'll be true to me."
In the records of the first majestic and yet fantastic developments
of the foundation of St. Francis of Assisi is an account of a
certain Blessed Brother Giles. I have forgotten most of it,
but I remember one fact: that certain students of theology came
to ask him whether he believed in free will, and, if so, how he could
reconcile it with necessity. On hearing the question St. Francis's
follower reflected a little while and then seized a fiddle and
began capering and dancing about the garden, playing a wild tune
and generally expressing a violent and invigorating indifference.
The tune is not recorded, but it is the eternal chorus of mankind,
that modifies all the arts and mocks all the individualisms,
like the laughter and thunder of some distant sea.
CHESTERTON-ALARM AND SIDISCUTIO - The Long Bow