The Ancient of Days

A child sits in a sunny place,
Too happy for a smile,
And plays through one long holiday
With balls to roll and pile;
A painted wind-mill by his side,
Runs like a merry tune,
But the sails are the four great winds of heaven,
And the balls are the sun and moon.

A staring doll’s-house shows to him
Green floors and starry rafter,
And many-coloured graven dolls
Live for his lonely laughter.
The dolls have crowns and aureoles,
Helmets and horns and wings,
For they are the saints and seraphim,
The prophets and the kings.

(c.late 1890s).

Poetry and prose

We should all like to speak poetry at the moment when we truly live, and if we do not speak it, it is because we have an impediment in our speech. It is not song that is the narrow or artificial thing, it is conversation that is a broken and stammering attempt at song.

— Twelve Types (1903).

“To make settled things strange”

Imagination has its highest use in a retrospective realization. The trumpet of imagination, like the trumpet of the Resurrection, calls the dead out of their graves. Imagination sees Delphi with the eyes of a Greek, Jerusalem with the eyes of a Crusader, Paris with the eyes of a Jacobin, and Arcadia with the eyes of a Euphuist. The prime function of imagination is to see our whole orderly system of life as a pile of stratified revolutions. In spite of all revolutionaries it must be said that the function of imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange; not so much to make wonders facts as to make facts wonders.

— The Defendant (1901).

Flattery, old and new

In more straightforward times flattery itself was more straightforward; falsehood itself was more true. A poor man wishing to please a rich man simply said that he was the wisest, bravest, tallest, strongest, most benevolent and most beautiful of mankind; and as even the rich man probably knew that he wasn’t that, the thing did the less harm. When courtiers sang the praises of a King they attributed to him things that were entirely improbable, as that he resembled the sun at noonday, that they had to shade their eyes when he entered the room, that his people could not breathe without him, or that he had with his single sword conquered Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. The safety of this method was its artificiality; between the King and his public image there was really no relation.

But the moderns have invented a much subtler and more poisonous kind of eulogy. The modern method is to take the prince or rich man, to give a credible picture of his type of personality, as that he is business-like, or a sportsman, or fond of art, or convivial, or reserved; and then enormously exaggerate the value and importance of these natural qualities. Those who praise Mr. Carnegie do not say that he is as wise as Solomon and as brave as Mars; I wish they did. It would be the next most honest thing to giving their real reason for praising him, which is simply that he has money. The journalists who write about Mr. Pierpont Morgan do not say that he is as beautiful as Apollo; I wish they did. What they do is to take the rich man’s superficial life and manner, clothes, hobbies, love of cats, dislike of doctors, or what not; and then with the assistance of this realism make the man out to be a prophet and a saviour of his kind, whereas he is merely a private and stupid man who happens to like cats or to dislike doctors.

The old flatterer took for granted that the King was an ordinary man, and set to work to make him out extraordinary. The newer and cleverer flatterer takes for granted that he is extraordinary, and that therefore even ordinary things about him will be of interest.

— All Things Considered (1908).

On physical courage

One of the deepest and most sagacious of the controversial answers of Dr. Johnson ran, I think, something like this: “Why, Sir, strictly speaking , physical courage is not a Christian virtue. Nevertheless, a Christian man should cultivate it; for he who has lost that virtue can never be certain of preserving any other.”

But in our own more refined age not only is courage not called Christian, but cowardice is actually called Christianity.  Motives entirely base, selfish, materialistic, and timid, are supposed to have some kind of savour of the Gospel about them so long as they lead to peace and not to war. Of course, every Christian man, if he be sane, thinks that peace is better than war; and if his horror of war is a compassion for stricken soldiers or an indignation at trampled rights, it is the sentiment of a Christian and even of a saint. But what I complain of is that this spiritual superiority is claimed by Pacifists whose motive is almost as elevated as Falstaff’s when he pretended to be a corpse on the battle-field of Shrewsbury. To keep the peace for money may be as wicked as to make war for money. These rhetoricians may call the merely physical case against war “an advance” in human ethics; but to me it seems not half so like advancing as it is like running away.

— The Illustrated London News, 21 June 1913.