CHESTERTON-ALARM AND SIDISCUTIO - The Furrows
As I see the corn grow green all about my neighbourhood, there rushes
on me for no reason in particular a memory of the winter.
I say "rushes," for that is the very word for the old sweeping lines
of the ploughed fields. From some accidental turn of a train-journey
or a walking tour, I saw suddenly the fierce rush of the furrows.
The furrows are like arrows; they fly along an arc of sky.
They are like leaping animals; they vault an inviolable hill
and roll down the other side. They are like battering battalions;
they rush over a hill with flying squadrons and carry it with a
cavalry charge. They have all the air of Arabs sweeping a desert,
of rockets sweeping the sky, of torrents sweeping a watercourse.
Nothing ever seemed so living as those brown lines as they shot sheer
from the height of a ridge down to their still whirl of the valley.
They were swifter than arrows, fiercer than Arabs, more riotous and
rejoicing than rockets. And yet they were only thin straight lines
drawn with difficulty, like a diagram, by painful and patient men.
The men that ploughed tried to plough straight; they had no notion
of giving great sweeps and swirls to the eye. Those cataracts
of cloven earth; they were done by the grace of God. I had always
rejoiced in them; but I had never found any reason for my joy.
There are some very clever people who cannot enjoy the joy unless
they understand it. There are other and even cleverer people
who say that they lose the joy the moment they do understand it.
Thank God I was never clever, and I could always enjoy things when I
understood them and when I didn't. I can enjoy the orthodox Tory, though I
could never understand him. I can also enjoy the orthodox Liberal,
though I understand him only too well.
But the splendour of furrowed fields is this: that like all
brave things they are made straight, and therefore they bend.
In everything that bows gracefully there must be an effort at stiffness.
Bows arc beautiful when they bend only because they try to remain rigid;
and sword-blades can curl like silver ribbons only because they are
certain to spring straight again. But the same is true of every tough
curve of the tree-trunk, of every strong-backed bend of the bough;
there is hardly any such thing in Nature as a mere droop of weakness.
Rigidity yielding a little, like justice swayed by mercy,
is the whole beauty of the earth. The cosmos is a diagram just
bent beautifully out of shape. Everything tries to be straight;
and everything just fortunately fails.
The foil may curve in the lunge, but there is nothing beautiful
about beginning the battle with a crooked foil. So the strict aim,
the strong doctrine, may give a little in the actual fight with facts:
but that is no reason for beginning with a weak doctrine or a
twisted aim. Do not be an opportunist; try to be theoretic at all
the opportunities; fate can be trusted to do all the opportunist part
of it. Do not try to bend, any more than the trees try to bend.
Try to grow straight, and life will bend you.
Alas! I am giving the moral before the fable; and yet
I hardly think that otherwise you could see all that I
mean in that enormous vision of the ploughed hills.
These great furrowed slopes are the oldest architecture of man:
the oldest astronomy was his guide, the oldest botany his object.
And for geometry, the mere word proves my case.
But when I looked at those torrents of ploughed parallels,
that great rush of rigid lines, I seemed to see the whole
huge achievement of democracy, Here was mere equality: but
equality seen in bulk is more superb than any supremacy.
Equality free and flying, equality rushing over hill and dale,
equality charging the world--that was the meaning of those military
furrows, military in their identity, military in their energy.
They sculptured hill and dale with strong curves merely because
they did not mean to curve at all. They made the strong lines
of landscape with their stiffly driven swords of the soil.
It is not only nonsense, but blasphemy, to say that man has spoilt
the country. Man has created the country; it was his business,
as the image of God. No hill, covered with common scrub or patches
of purple heath, could have been so sublimely hilly as that ridge
up to which the ranked furrows rose like aspiring angels.
No valley, confused with needless cottages and towns, can have been
so utterly valleyish as that abyss into which the down-rushing
furrows raged like demons into the swirling pit.
It is the hard lines of discipline and equality that mark out a landscape
and give it all its mould and meaning. It is just because the lines
of the furrow arc ugly and even that the landscape is living and superb.
As I think I have remarked elsewhere, the Republic is founded
on the plough.
It would be really interesting to know exactly why an intelligent person--
by which I mean a person with any sort of intelligence--can and does
dislike sight-seeing. Why does the idea of a char-a-banc full of
tourists going to see the birth-place of Nelson or the death-scene
of Simon de Montfort strike a strange chill to the soul?
I can tell quite easily what this dim aversion to tourists
and their antiquities does not arise from--at least, in my case.
Whatever my other vices (and they are, of course, of a lurid cast),
I can lay my hand on my heart and say that it does not arise from a paltry
contempt for the antiquities, nor yet from the still more paltry contempt
for the tourists. If there is one thing more dwarfish and pitiful
than irreverence for the past, it is irreverence for the present,
for the passionate and many-coloured procession of life, which includes
the char-a-banc among its many chariots and triumphal cars.
I know nothing so vulgar as that contempt for vulgarity which sneers
at the clerks on a Bank Holiday or the Cockneys on Margate sands.
The man who notices nothing about the clerk except his Cockney
accent would have noticed nothing about Simon de Montfort except
his French accent. The man who jeers at Jones for having dropped
an "h" might have jeered at Nelson for having dropped an arm.
Scorn springs easily to the essentially vulgar-minded, and it is
as easy to gibe at Montfort as a foreigner or at Nelson as a cripple,
as to gibe at the struggling speech and the maimed bodies of the mass
of our comic and tragic race. If I shrink faintly from this
affair of tourists and tombs, it is certainly not because I am
so profane as to think lightly either of the tombs or the tourists.
I reverence those great men who had the courage to die; I reverence
also these little men who have the courage to live.
Even if this be conceded, another suggestion may be made.
It may be said that antiquities and commonplace crowds are indeed
good things, like violets and geraniums; but they do not go together.
A billycock is a beautiful object (it may be eagerly urged),
but it is not in the same style of architecture as Ely Cathedral;
it is a dome, a small rococo dome in the Renaissance manner, and does
not go with the pointed arches that assault heaven like spears.
A char-a-banc is lovely (it may be said) if placed upon a pedestal
and worshipped for its own sweet sake; but it does not harmonize with
the curve and outline of the old three-decker on which Nelson died;
its beauty is quite of another sort. Therefore (we will suppose
our sage to argue) antiquity and democracy should be kept separate,
as inconsistent things. Things may be inconsistent in time and space
which are by no means inconsistent in essential value and idea.
Thus the Catholic Church has water for the new-born and oil for
the dying: but she never mixes oil and water.
This explanation is plausible; but I do not find it adequate.
The first objection is that the same smell of bathos haunts the soul
in the case of all deliberate and elaborate visits to "beauty spots,"
even by persons of the most elegant position or the most
protected privacy. Specially visiting the Coliseum by moonlight
always struck me as being as vulgar as visiting it by limelight.
One millionaire standing on the top of Mont Blanc, one millionaire
standing in the desert by the Sphinx, one millionaire standing
in the middle of Stonehenge, is just as comic as one millionaire
is anywhere else; and that is saying a good deal. On the other hand,
if the billycock had come privately and naturally into Ely Cathedral,
no enthusiast for Gothic harmony would think of objecting to the
billycock--so long, of course, as it was not worn on the head.
But there is indeed a much deeper objection to this theory
of the two incompatible excellences of antiquity and popularity.
For the truth is that it has been almost entirely the antiquities
that have normally interested the populace; and it has been almost
entirely the populace who have systematically preserved the antiquities.
The Oldest Inhabitant has always been a clodhopper; I have never
heard of his being a gentleman. It is the peasants who preserve
all traditions of the sites of battles or the building of churches.
It is they who remember, so far as any one remembers, the glimpses
of fairies or the graver wonders of saints. In the classes
above them the supernatural has been slain by the supercilious.
That is a true and tremendous text in Scripture which says that "where
there is no vision the people perish." But it is equally true
in practice that where there is no people the visions perish.
The idea must be abandoned, then, that this feeling of faint
dislike towards popular sight-seeing is due to any inherent
incompatibility between the idea of special shrines and
trophies and the idea of large masses of ordinary men.
On the contrary, these two elements of sanctity and democracy
have been specially connected and allied throughout history.
The shrines and trophies were often put up by ordinary men.
They were always put up for ordinary men. To whatever things
the fastidious modern artist may choose to apply his theory of
specialist judgment, and an aristocracy of taste, he must necessarily find
it difficult really to apply it to such historic and monumental art.
Obviously, a public building is meant to impress the public.
The most aristocratic tomb is a democratic tomb, because it exists
to be seen; the only aristocratic thing is the decaying corpse,
not the undecaying marble; and if the man wanted to be thoroughly
aristocratic, he should be buried in his own back-garden. The
chapel of the most narrow and exclusive sect is universal outside,
even if it is limited inside, its walls and windows confront
all points of the compass and all quarters of the cosmos.
It may be small as a dwelling-place, but it is universal as a monument;
if its sectarians had really wished to be private they should have
met in a private house. Whenever and wherever we erect a national
or municipal hall, pillar, or statue, we are speaking to the crowd
like a demagogue.
The statue of every statesman offers itself for election as much
as the statesman himself. Every epitaph on a church slab is put
up for the mob as much as a placard in a General Election.
And if we follow this track of reflection we shall, I think,
really find why it is that modern sight-seeing jars on something in us,
something that is not a caddish contempt for graves nor an equally
caddish contempt for cads. For, after all, there is many a--
churchyard which consists mostly of dead cads; but that does not
make it less sacred or less sad.
The real explanation, I fancy, is this: that these cathedrals and columns
of triumph were meant, not for people more cultured and self-conscious
than modern tourists, but for people much rougher and more casual.
Those leaps of live stone like frozen fountains, were so placed and poised
as to catch the eye of ordinary inconsiderate men going about their
daily business; and when they are so seen they are never forgotten.
The true way of reviving the magic of our great minsters and historic
sepulchres is not the one which Ruskin was always recommending.
It is not to be more careful of historic buildings. Nay, it is
rather to be more careless of them. Buy a bicycle in Maidstone
to visit an aunt in Dover, and you will see Canterbury Cathedral
as it was built to be seen. Go through London only as the shortest
way between Croydon and Hampstead, and the Nelson Column will
(for the first time in your life) remind you of Nelson.
You will appreciate Hereford Cathedral if you have come for cider,
not if you have come for architecture. You will really see the
Place Vendome if you have come on business, not if you have come for art.
For it was for the simple and laborious generations of men, practical,
troubled about many things, that our fathers reared those portents.
There is, indeed, another element, not unimportant: the fact
that people have gone to cathedrals to pray. But in discussing
modern artistic cathedral-lovers, we need not consider this.
When men of science (or, more often, men who talk about science)
speak of studying history or human society scientifically they
always forget that there are two quite distinct questions involved.
It may be that certain facts of the body go with certain facts
of the soul, but it by no means follows that a grasp of such
facts of the body goes with a grasp of the things of the soul.
A man may show very learnedly that certain mixtures of race make
a happy community, but he may be quite wrong (he generally is)
about what communities are happy. A man may explain scientifically
how a certain physical type involves a really bad man, but he may be
quite wrong (he generally is) about which sort of man is really bad.
Thus his whole argument is useless, for he understands only one half
of the equation.
The drearier kind of don may come to me and say, "Celts are unsuccessful;
look at Irishmen, for instance." To which I should reply,
"You may know all about Celts; but it is obvious that you know
nothing about Irishmen. The Irish are not in the least unsuccessful,
unless it is unsuccessful to wander from their own country over a great
part of the earth, in which case the English are unsuccessful too."
A man with a bumpy head may say to me (as a kind of New Year
greeting), "Fools have microcephalous skulls," or what not.
To which I shall reply, "In order to be certain of that, you must
be a good judge both of the physical and of the mental fact.
It is not enough that you should know a microcephalous skull
when you see it. It is also necessary that you should know a fool
when you see him; and I have a suspicion that you do not know
a fool when you see him, even after the most lifelong and intimate
of all forms of acquaintanceship."
The trouble with most sociologists, criminologists, etc., is that
while their knowledge of their own details is exhaustive and subtle,
their knowledge of man and society, to which these are to
be applied, is quite exceptionally superficial and silly.
They know everything about biology, but almost nothing about life.
Their ideas of history, for instance, are simply cheap and uneducated.
Thus some famous and foolish professor measured the skull of
Charlotte Corday to ascertain the criminal type; he had not historical
knowledge enough to know that if there is any "criminal type,"
certainly Charlotte Corday had not got it. The skull, I believe,
afterwards turned out not to be Charlotte Corday's at all;
but that is another story. The point is that the poor old man
was trying to match Charlotte Corday's mind with her skull without
knowing anything whatever about her mind.
But I came yesterday upon a yet more crude and startling example.
In a popular magazine there is one of the usual articles
about criminology; about whether wicked men could be made good
if their heads were taken to pieces. As by far the wickedest men I
know of are much too rich and powerful ever to submit to the process,
the speculation leaves me cold. I always notice with pain, however,
a curious absence of the portraits of living millionaires from such
galleries of awful examples; most of the portraits in which we
are called upon to remark the line of the nose or the curve of the
forehead appear to be the portraits of ordinary sad men, who stole
because they were hungry or killed because they were in a rage.
The physical peculiarity seems to vary infinitely; sometimes it is
the remarkable square head, sometimes it is the unmistakable round head;
sometimes the learned draw attention to the abnormal development,
sometimes to the striking deficiency of the back of the head.
I have tried to discover what is the invariable factor, the one
permanent mark of the scientific criminal type; after exhaustive
classification I have to come to the conclusion that it consists
in being poor.
But it was among the pictures in this article that I received
the final shock; the enlightenment which has left me in lasting
possession of the fact that criminologists are generally more ignorant
than criminals. Among the starved and bitter, but quite human,
faces was one head, neat but old-fashioned, with the powder of
the 18th century and a certain almost pert primness in the dress
which marked the conventions of the upper middle-class about 1790.
The face was lean and lifted stiffly up, the eyes stared forward
with a frightful sincerity, the lip was firm with a heroic firmness;
all the more pathetic because of a certain delicacy and deficiency
of male force, Without knowing who it was, one could have guessed
that it was a man in the manner of Shakespeare's Brutus, a man
of piercingly pure intentions, prone to use government as a mere
machine for morality, very sensitive to the charge of inconsistency
and a little too proud of his own clean and honourable life.
I say I should have known this almost from the face alone,
even if I had not known who it was.
But I did know who it was. It was Robespierre. And underneath
the portrait of this pale and too eager moralist were written
these remarkable words: "Deficiency of ethical instincts,"
followed by something to the effect that he knew no mercy (which is
certainly untrue), and by some nonsense about a retreating forehead,
a peculiarity which he shared with Louis XVI and with half the people
of his time and ours.
Then it was that I measured the staggering distance between the knowledge
and the ignorance of science. Then I knew that all criminology
might be worse than worthless, because of its utter ignorance
of that human material of which it is supposed to be speaking.
The man who could say that Robespierre was deficient in ethical instincts
is a man utterly to be disregarded in all calculations of ethics.
He might as well say that John Bunyan was deficient in ethical instincts.
You may say that Robespierre was morbid and unbalanced, and you may say
the same of Bunyan. But if these two men were morbid and unbalanced
they were morbid and unbalanced by feeling too much about morality,
not by feeling too little. You may say if you like that Robespierre was
(in a negative sort of way) mad. But if he was mad he was mad on ethics.
He and a company of keen and pugnacious men, intellectually impatient
of unreason and wrong, resolved that Europe should not be choked up
in every channel by oligarchies and state secrets that already stank.
The work was the greatest that was ever given to men to do except
that which Christianity did in dragging Europe out of the abyss
of barbarism after the Dark Ages. But they did it, and no one else
could have done it.
Certainly we could not do it. We are not ready to fight all Europe
on a point of justice. We are not ready to fling our most powerful
class as mere refuse to the foreigner; we are not ready to shatter
the great estates at a stroke; we are not ready to trust ourselves
in an awful moment of utter dissolution in order to make all
things seem intelligible and all men feel honourable henceforth.
We are not strong enough to be as strong as Danton. We are not strong
enough to be as weak as Robespierre. There is only one thing,
it seems, that we can do. Like a mob of children, we can play
games upon this ancient battlefield; we can pull up the bones
and skulls of the tyrants and martyrs of that unimaginable war;
and we can chatter to each other childishly and innocently
about skulls that are imbecile and heads that are criminal.
I do not know whose heads are criminal, but I think I know
whose are imbecile.
The position of the rose among flowers is like that of the dog
among animals. It is so much that both are domesticated as
that have some dim feeling that they were always domesticated.
There are wild roses and there are wild dogs. I do not know the
wild dogs; wild roses are very nice. But nobody ever thinks of either
of them if the name is abruptly mentioned in a gossip or a poem.
On the other hand, there are tame tigers and tame cobras, but if
one says, "I have a cobra in my pocket," or "There is a tiger in
the music-room," the adjective "tame" has to be somewhat hastily
added. If one speaks of beasts one thinks first of wild beasts;
if of flowers one thinks first of wild flowers.
But there are two great exceptions; caught so completely into the wheel
of man's civilization, entangled so unalterably with his ancient
emotions and images, that the artificial product seems more natural
than the natural. The dog is not a part of natural history,
but of human history; and the real rose grows in a garden.
All must regard the elephant as something tremendous, but tamed;
and many, especially in our great cultured centres, regard every
bull as presumably a mad bull. In the same way we think of most
garden trees and plants as fierce creatures of the forest or morass
taught at last to endure the curb.
But with the dog and the rose this instinctive principle is reversed.
With them we think of the artificial as the archetype; the earth-born
as the erratic exception. We think vaguely of the wild dog as if
he had run away, like the stray cat. And we cannot help fancying
that the wonderful wild rose of our hedges has escaped by jumping
over the hedge. Perhaps they fled together, the dog and the rose:
a singular and (on the whole) an imprudent elopement. Perhaps
the treacherous dog crept from the kennel, and the rebellious
rose from the flower-bed, and they fought their way out in company,
one with teeth and the other with thorns. Possibly this is why my
dog becomes a wild dog when he sees roses, and kicks them anywhere.
Possibly this is why the wild rose is called a dog-rose. Possibly not.
But there is this degree of dim barbaric truth in the quaint
old-world legend that I have just invented. That in these two cases
the civilized product is felt to be the fiercer, nay, even the wilder.
Nobody seems to be afraid of a wild dog: he is classed among
the jackals and the servile beasts. The terrible cave canem is written
over man's creation. When we read "Beware of the Dog," it means
beware of the tame dog: for it is the tame dog that is terrible.
He is terrible in proportion as he is tame: it is his loyalty and
his virtues that are awful to the stranger, even the stranger within
your gates; still more to the stranger halfway over your gates.
He is alarmed at such deafening and furious docility; he flees
from that great monster of mildness.
Well, I have much the same feeling when I look at the roses ranked
red and thick and resolute round a garden; they seem to me bold and
even blustering. I hasten to say that I know even less about my own
garden than about anybody else's garden. I know nothing about roses,
not even their names. I know only the name Rose; and Rose is
(in every sense of the word) a Christian name. It is Christian
in the one absolute and primordial sense of Christian--that it comes
down from the age of pagans. The rose can be seen, and even smelt,
in Greek, Latin, Provencal, Gothic, Renascence, and Puritan poems.
Beyond this mere word Rose, which (like wine and other noble words)
is the same in all the tongues of white men, I know literally nothing.
I have heard the more evident and advertised names. I know there is
a flower which calls itself the Glory of Dijon--which I had supposed
to be its cathedral. In any case, to have produced a rose and a cathedral
is to have produced not only two very glorious and humane things,
but also (as I maintain) two very soldierly and defiant things.
I also know there is a rose called Marechal Niel--note once more
the military ring.
And when I was walking round my garden the other day I spoke
to my gardener (an enterprise of no little valour) and asked him
the name of a strange dark rose that had somehow oddly taken my fancy.
It was almost as if it reminded me of some turbid element in
history and the soul. Its red was not only swarthy, but smoky;
there was something congested and wrathful about its colour.
It was at once theatrical and sulky. The gardener told me it was
called Victor Hugo.
Therefore it is that I feel all roses to have some secret power
about them; even their names may mean something in connexion
with themselves, in which they differ from nearly all the sons of men.
But the rose itself is royal and dangerous; long as it has remained
in the rich house of civilization, it has never laid off its armour.
A rose always looks like a mediaeval gentleman of Italy, with a cloak
of crimson and a sword: for the thorn is the sword of the rose.
And there is this real moral in the matter; that we have
to remember that civilization as it goes on ought not perhaps
to grow more fighting--but ought to grow more ready to fight.
The more valuable and reposeful is the order we have to guard, the more
vivid should be our ultimate sense of vigilance and potential violence.
And when I walk round a summer garden, I can understand how those high mad
lords at the end of the Middle Ages, just before their swords clashed,
caught at roses for their instinctive emblems of empire and rivalry.
For to me any such garden is full of the wars of the roses.
One silver morning I walked into a small grey town of stone, like twenty
other grey western towns, which happened to be called Glastonbury;
and saw the magic thorn of near two thousand years growing in the open
air as casually as any bush in my garden.
In Glastonbury, as in all noble and humane things, the myth is more
important than the history. One cannot say anything stronger of
the strange old tale of St. Joseph and the Thorn than that it dwarfs
St. Dunstan. Standing among the actual stones and shrubs one thinks
of the first century and not of the tenth; one's mind goes back beyond
the Saxons and beyond the greatest statesman of the Dark Ages. The tale
that Joseph of Arimathea came to Britain is presumably a mere legend.
But it is not by any means so incredible or preposterous a legend
as many modern people suppose. The popular notion is that the thing
is quite comic and inconceivable; as if one said that Wat Tyler
went to Chicago, or that John Bunyan discovered the North Pole.
We think of Palestine as little, localized and very private,
of Christ's followers as poor folk, astricti globis, rooted to their
towns or trades; and we think of vast routes of travel and constant
world-communications as things of recent and scientific origin.
But this is wrong; at least, the last part of it is. It is
part of that large and placid lie that the rationalists tell
when they say that Christianity arose in ignorance and barbarism.
Christianity arose in the thick of a brilliant and bustling
cosmopolitan civilization. Long sea-voyages were not so quick,
but were quite as incessant as to-day; and though in the nature
of things Christ had not many rich followers, it is not unnatural
to suppose that He had some. And a Joseph of Arimathea may easily
have been a Roman citizen with a yacht that could visit Britain.
The same fallacy is employed with the same partisan motive in the case
of the Gospel of St. John; which critics say could not have been
written by one of the first few Christians because of its Greek
transcendentalism and its Platonic tone. I am no judge of the philology,
but every human being is a divinely appointed judge of the philosophy:
and the Platonic tone seems to me to prove nothing at all.
Palestine was not a secluded valley of barbarians; it was
an open province of a polyglot empire, overrun with all sorts
of people of all kinds of education. To take a rough parallel:
suppose some great prophet arose among the Boers in South Africa.
The prophet himself might be a simple or unlettered man.
But no one who knows the modern world would be surprised if one
of his closest followers were a Professor from Heidelberg or an
M.A. from Oxford.
All this is not urged here with any notion of proving that the tale
of the thorn is not a myth; as I have said, it probably is a myth.
It is urged with the much more important object of pointing
out the proper attitude towards such myths.. The proper attitude
is one of doubt and hope and of a kind of light mystery.
The tale is certainly not impossible; as it is certainly not certain.
And through all the ages since the Roman Empire men have fed their
healthy fancies and their historical imagination upon the very twilight
condition of such tales. But to-day real agnosticism has declined
along with real theology. People cannot leave a creed alone;
though it is the essence of a creed to be clear. But neither can they
leave a legend alone; though it is the essence of a legend to be vague.
That sane half scepticism which was found in all rustics,
in all ghost tales and fairy tales, seems to be a lost secret.
Modern people must make scientifically certain that St. Joseph did
or did not go to Glastonbury, despite the fact that it is now quite
impossible to find out; and that it does not, in a religious sense,
very much matter. But it is essential to feel that he may have
gone to Glastonbury: all songs, arts, and dedications branching
and blossoming like the thorn, are rooted in some such sacred doubt.
Taken thus, not heavily like a problem but lightly like an old tale,
the thing does lead one along the road of very strange realities,
and the thorn is found growing in the heart of a very secret maze
of the soul. Something is really present in the place; some closer
contact with the thing which covers Europe but is still a secret.
Somehow the grey town and the green bush touch across the world
the strange small country of the garden and the grave; there is verily
some communion between the thorn tree and the crown of thorns.
A man never knows what tiny thing will startle him to such ancestral
and impersonal tears. Piles of superb masonry will often pass like a
common panorama; and on this grey and silver morning the ruined towers
of the cathedral stood about me somewhat vaguely like grey clouds.
But down in a hollow where the local antiquaries are making
a fruitful excavation, a magnificent old ruffian with a pickaxe
(whom I believe to have been St. Joseph of Arimathea) showed me
a fragment of the old vaulted roof which he had found in the earth;
and on the whitish grey stone there was just a faint brush of gold.
There seemed a piercing and swordlike pathos, an unexpected
fragrance of all forgotten or desecrated things, in the bare
survival of that poor little pigment upon the imperishable rock.
To the strong shapes of the Roman and the Gothic I had grown accustomed;
but that weak touch of colour was at once tawdry and tender,
like some popular keepsake. Then I knew that all my fathers were
men like me; for the columns and arches were grave, and told of
the gravity of the builders; but here was one touch of their gaiety.
I almost expected it to fade from the stone as I stared.
It was as if men had been able to preserve a fragment of a sunset.
And then I remembered how the artistic critics have always praised
the grave tints and the grim shadows of the crumbling cloisters and
abbey towers, and how they themselves often dress up like Gothic ruins
in the sombre tones of dim grey walls or dark green ivy. I remembered
how they hated almost all primary things, but especially primary colours.
I knew they were appreciating much more delicately and truly than I
the sublime skeleton and the mighty fungoids of the dead Glastonbury.
But I stood for an instant alive in the living Glastonbury,
gay with gold and coloured like the toy-book of a child.
CHESTERTON-ALARM AND SIDISCUTIO - The Furrows