Part 10 (2/2)
The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.--”Tremendous Trifles.”
[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_]
In a hollow of the grey-green hills of rainy Ireland lived an old, old woman, whose uncle was always Cambridge at the Boat-race. But in her grey-green hollows, she knew nothing of this; she didn't know that there was a Boat-race. Also she did not know that she had an uncle. She had heard of n.o.body at all, except of George the First, of whom she had heard (I know not why), and in whose historical memory she put her simple trust. And by and by, in G.o.d's good time, it was discovered that this uncle of hers was really not her uncle, and they came and told her so. She smiled through her tears, and said only, ”Virtue is its own reward.”--”The Napoleon of Notting Hill.”
In a world without humour, the only thing to do is to eat. And how perfect an exception! How can these people strike dignified att.i.tudes, and pretend that things matter, when the total ludicrousness of life is proved by the very method by which it is supported? A man strikes the lyre, and says, ”Life is real, life is earnest,” and then goes into a room and stuffs alien substances into a hole in his head.--”The Napoleon of Notting Hill.”
[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_]
A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.--”George Bernard Shaw.”
[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_]
Only in our romantic country do you have the romantic thing called weather--beautiful and changeable as a woman. The great English landscape painters (neglected now, like everything that is English) have this salient distinction, that the weather is not the atmosphere of their pictures; it is the subject of their pictures. They paint portraits of the weather. The weather sat to Constable; the weather posed for Turner--and the deuce of a pose it was. In the English painters the climate is the hero; in the case of Turner a swaggering and fighting hero, melodramatic but magnificent. The tall and terrible protagonist robed in rain, thunder, and sunlight fills the whole canvas and the whole foreground. Rich colours actually look more luminous on a grey day, because they are seen aganst a dark background, and seem to be burning with a l.u.s.tre of their own. Against a dim sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange about them at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the grim garden of a witch. A bright blue sky is necessarily the high-light in the picture, and its brightness kills all the bright blue flowers. But on a grey day the larkspur looks like fallen heaven; the red daisies are really the lost red eyes of day, and the sunflower is the vice-regent of the sun.
Lastly, there is this value about the colour that men call colourless: that it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average of existence, especially in its quality of strife and expectation and promise. Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour; of brightening into blue, or blanching into white, or breaking into green or gold. So we may be perpetually reminded of the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself; and when there is grey weather on our hills or grey hair on our heads perhaps they may still remind us of the morning.--”Daily News.”
[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesteron_]
Silence is the unbearable repartee.--”Charles d.i.c.kens.”
[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_]
For those who study the great art of lying in bed there is one emphatic caution to be added. Even for those who cannot do their work in bed (as, for example, the professional harpooners of whales), it is obvious that the indulgence must be very occasional. But that is not the caution I mean. The caution is this: if you do lie in bed, be sure you do it without any reason or justification at all. I do not speak, of course, of the seriously sick. But if a healthy man lies in bed, let him do it without a rag of excuse; then he will get up a healthy man. If he does it for some secondary hygienic reason, if he has some scientific explanation, he may get up a hypochondriac.--”Tremendous Trifles.”
[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_]
His soul will never starve for exploits or excitements who is wise enough to be made a fool of. He will make himself happy in the traps that have been laid for him; he will roll in their nets and sleep. All doors will fly open to him who has a mildness more defiant than mere courage. The whole is unerringly expressed in one fortunate phrase--he will be always ”taken in.” To be taken in everywhere is to see the inside of everything. It is the hospitality of circ.u.mstance. With torches and trumpets, like a guest, the greenhorn is taken in by Life.
And the sceptic is cast out by it.--”Charles d.i.c.kens.”
[Sidenote: _G.K. Chesterton_]
I have often been haunted with a fancy that the creeds of men might be paralleled and represented in their beverages. Wine might stand for genuine Catholicism, and ale for genuine Protestantism; for these at least are real religions, with comfort and strength in them. Clean cold Agnosticism would be clean cold water--an excellent thing if you can get it. Most modern ethical and idealistic movements might be well represented by soda-water--which is a fuss about nothing. Mr. Bernard Shaw's philosophy is exactly like black coffee--it awakens, but it does not really inspire. Modern hygienic materialism is very like cocoa; it would be impossible to express one's contempt for it in stronger terms than that.--”William Blake.”
To the quietest human being, seated in the quietest house, there will sometimes come a sudden and unmeaning hunger for the possibilities or impossibilities of things; he will abruptly wonder whether the teapot may not suddenly begin to pour out honey or sea-water, the clock to point to all hours of the day at once, the candle to burn green or crimson, the door to open upon a lake or a potato-field instead of a London street. Upon any one who feels this nameless anarchism there rests for the time being the spirit of pantomime. Of the clown who cuts the policeman in two it may be said (with no darker meaning) that he realises one of our visions.--”The Defendant.”
”THE VULGAR TONGUE”
[Sidenote: _Dean Hole_]
First, of abuses. I protest against those sensational adjectives, which are so commonly misapplied--against the union of grand and n.o.ble words with subjects of a minute and trivial nature. It is as though a huge locomotive engine were brought out to draw a child's perambulator, or as though an Armstrong gun were loaded and levelled to exterminate a tom-t.i.t.
I heard a tourist say the other day that, when he was at Black Gang Chine, in the Isle of Wight, he had seen the _most magnificent_--what do you think? A sunset, a man-of-war, a thunderstorm? Nothing of the kind.
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