The beginning is the right
end at which to begin. The modern man has to read everything backwards; as when
he reads journalism first and history afterwards--if at all.
He is like a blind man
exploring an elephant, and condemned to begin at the very tip of its tail.
But he is still more unlucky;
for when he has a first principle, it is generally the very last principle that
he ought to have.
He starts, as it were, with
one infallible dogma about the elephant; that its tail is its trunk.
He works the wrong way round
on principle; and tries to fit all the practical facts to his principle.
Because the elephant has no
eyes in its tail-end, he calls it a blind elephant; and expatiates on its ignorance,
superstition, and need of compulsory education.
Because it has no tusks at
its tail-end, he says that tusks are a fantastic flourish attributed to a
fabulous creature, an ivory chimera that must have come through the ivory gate.
Because it does not as a
rule pick up things with its tail, he dismisses the magical story that it can
pick up things with its trunk.
He probably says it is
plainly a piece of anthropomorphism to suppose that an elephant can pack its
trunk.
The result is that he
becomes as pallid and worried as a pessimist; the world to him is not only an
elephant, but a white elephant.
He does not know what to do
with it, and cannot be persuaded of the perfectly simple explanation; which is
that he has not made the smallest real attempt to make head or tail of the
animal.
He will not begin at the right end; because he happens to have come first on the wrong end.
But in nothing do I feel
this modern trick, of trusting to a fag-end rather than a first principle, more
than in the modern treatment of poetry.
With this or that particular
metrical form, or unmetrical form, or unmetrical formlessness, I might be
content or not, as it achieved some particular effect or not.
But the whole general
tendency, regarded as an emancipation, seems to me more or less of an
enslavement.
It seems founded on one
subconscious idea; that talk is freer than verse; and that verse, therefore,
should claim the freedom of talk.
But talk, especially in our
time, is not free at all. It is tripped up by trivialities, tamed by
conventions, loaded with dead words, thwarted by a thousand meaningless things.
It does not liberate the
soul so much, when a man can say, “You always look so nice,” as when he can
say, “But your eternal summer shall not fade.”
The first is an awkward and constrained sentence ending with the weakest word ever used, or rather misused, by man.
The second is like the
gesture of a giant or the sweeping flight of an archangel; it has the very rush
of liberty.
I do not despise the man who
says the first, because he „means“ the second; and what he means is more
important than what he says.
I have always done my best
to emphasize the inner dignity of these daily things, in spite of their dull
externals; but I do not think it an improvement that the inner spirit itself
should grow more external and more dull.
It is thought right to
discourage numbers of prosaic people trying to be poetical; but I think it much
more of a bore to watch numbers of poetical people trying to be prosaic.
In short, it is another case
of tail-foremost philosophy; instead of watering the laurel hedge of the
cockney villa, we bribe the
cockney to brick in the plant of Apollo.
G. K. Chesterton, Fanciesversus Fads, London, 1923.
Photo: Pixabay/GDJ
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