Alarms and Discursions

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Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Alarms and Discursions

Introductory: On Gargoyles

I

II

III

The Surrender of a Cockney

The Nightmare

The Telegraph Poles

A Drama of Dolls

The Man and His Newspaper

The Appetite of Earth

Simmons and the Social Tie

Cheese

The Red Town

The Furrows

The Philosophy of Sight-seeing

A Criminal Head

The Wrath of the Roses

The Gold of Glastonbury

The Futurists

Dukes

The Glory of Grey

The Anarchist

How I found the Superman

The New House

The Wings of Stone

The Three Kinds of Men

The Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds

The Field of Blood

The Strangeness of Luxury

The Triumph of the Donkey

The Wheel

Five Hundred and Fifty-five

Ethandune

The Flat Freak

The Garden of the Sea

The Sentimentalist

The White Horses

The Long Bow

The Modern Scrooge

The High Plains

The Chorus

A Romance of the Marshes

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Alone at some distance from the wasting walls of a disused abbey I found half sunken in the grass the grey and goggle-eyed visage of one of those graven monsters that made the ornamental water-spouts in the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. It lay there, scoured by ancient rains or striped by recent fungus, but still looking like the head of some huge dragon slain by a primeval hero. And as I looked at it, I thought of the meaning of the grotesque, and passed into some symbolic reverie of the three great stages of art.

Now this priest was told by his people to build a great tower, pointing to the sky in salutation of the Sun-god; and he pondered long and heavily before he picked his materials. For he was resolved to use nothing that was not almost as clear and exquisite as sunshine itself; he would use nothing that was not washed as white as the rain can wash the heavens, nothing that did not sparkle as spotlessly as that crown of God. He would have nothing grotesque or obscure; he would not have even anything emphatic or even anything mysterious. He would have all the arches as light as laughter and as candid as logic. He built the temple in three concentric courts, which were cooler and more exquisite in substance each than the other. For the outer wall was a hedge of white lilies, ranked so thick that a green stalk was hardly to be seen; and the wall within that was of crystal, which smashed the sun into a million stars. And the wall within that, which was the tower itself, was a tower of pure water, forced up in an everlasting fountain; and upon the very tip and crest of that foaming spire was one big and blazing diamond, which the water tossed up eternally and caught again as a child catches a ball.

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The evening breeze freshened among the little tossing trees of that lane, and the purple evening clouds piled up and darkened behind my Country Seat, the house that belonged to me, making, by contrast, its yellow bricks gleam like gold. At last my friend said: “To cut it short, then, you mean that you will live in the country because you won’t like it. What on earth will you do here; dig up the garden?”

“Dig!” I answered, in honourable scorn. “Dig! Do work at my Country Seat; no, thank you. When I find a Country Seat, I sit in it. And for your other objection, you are quite wrong. I do not dislike the country, but I like the town more. Therefore the art of happiness certainly suggests that I should live in the country and think about the town. Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London. I abominate and abjure the man who lives in London and wants to go to the country; I do it with all the more heartiness because I am that sort of man myself. We must learn to love London again, as rustics love it. Therefore (I quote again from the great Cockney version of The Golden Treasury) —

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