Cheese

MY forthcoming work in five volumes, “The Neglect of Cheese in European Literature,” is a work of such unprecedented and laborious detail that it is doubtful if I shall live to finish it. Some overflowings from such a fountain of information may therefore be permitted to sprinkle these pages.  I cannot yet wholly explain the neglect to which I refer.  Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.  Virgil, if I remember right, refers to it several times, but with too much Roman restraint. He does not let himself go on cheese.  The only other poet I can think of just now who seems to have had some sensibility on the point was the nameless author of the nursery rhyme which says: “If all the trees were bread and cheese” — which is, indeed a rich and gigantic vision of the higher gluttony.  If all the trees were bread and cheese there would be considerable deforestation in any part of England where I was living.  Wild and wide woodlands would reel and fade before me as rapidly as they ran after Orpheus.  Except Virgil and this anonymous rhymer, I can recall no verse about cheese. Yet it has every quality which we require in exalted poetry. It is a short, strong word; it rhymes to “breeze” and “seas” (an essential point); that it is emphatic in sound is admitted even by the civilisation of the modern cities.  For their citizens, with no apparent intention except emphasis, will often say, “Cheese it!” or even “Quite the cheese.”  The substance itself is imaginative. It is ancient — sometimes in the individual case, always in the type and custom.  It is simple, being directly derived from milk, which is one of the ancestral drinks, not lightly to be corrupted with soda-water. You know, I hope (though I myself have only just thought of it), that the four rivers of Eden were milk, water, wine, and ale. Aerated waters only appeared after the Fall.

But cheese has another quality, which is also the very soul of song. Once in endeavouring to lecture in several places at once, I made an eccentric journey across England, a journey of so irregular and even illogical shape that it necessitated my having lunch on four successive days in four roadside inns in four different counties. In each inn they had nothing but bread and cheese; nor can I imagine why a man should want more than bread and cheese, if he can get enough of it.  In each inn the cheese was good; and in each inn it was different.  There was a noble Wensleydale cheese in Yorkshire, a Cheshire cheese in Cheshire, and so on. Now, it is just here that true poetic civilisation differs from that paltry and mechanical civilisation which holds us all in bondage. Bad customs are universal and rigid, like modern militarism. Good customs are universal and varied, like native chivalry and self-defence. Both the good and bad civilisation cover us as with a canopy, and protect us from all that is outside. But a good civilisation spreads over us freely like a tree, varying and yielding because it is alive.  A bad civilisation stands up and sticks out above us like an umbrella — artificial, mathematical in shape; not merely universal, but uniform. So it is with the contrast between the substances that vary and the substances that are the same wherever they penetrate. By a wise doom of heaven men were commanded to eat cheese, but not the same cheese.  Being really universal it varies from valley to valley. But if, let us say, we compare cheese with soap (that vastly inferior substance), we shall see that soap tends more and more to be merely Smith’s Soap or Brown’s Soap, sent automatically all over the world.  If the Red Indians have soap it is Smith’s Soap. If the Grand Lama has soap it is Brown’s soap.  There is nothing subtly and strangely Buddhist, nothing tenderly Tibetan, about his soap. I fancy the Grand Lama does not eat cheese (he is not worthy), but if he does it is probably a local cheese, having some real relation to his life and outlook.  Safety matches, tinned foods, patent medicines are sent all over the world; but they are not produced all over the world.  Therefore there is in them a mere dead identity, never that soft play of slight variation which exists in things produced everywhere out of the soil, in the milk of the kine, or the fruits of the orchard.  You can get a whisky and soda at every outpost of the Empire: that is why so many Empire-builders go mad.  But you are not tasting or touching any environment, as in the cider of Devonshire or the grapes of the Rhine. You are not approaching Nature in one of her myriad tints of mood, as in the holy act of eating cheese.

When I had done my pilgrimage in the four wayside public-houses I reached one of the great northern cities, and there I proceeded, with great rapidity and complete inconsistency, to a large and elaborate restaurant, where I knew I could get many other things besides bread and cheese.  I could get that also, however; or at least I expected to get it; but I was sharply reminded that I had entered Babylon, and left England behind.  The waiter brought me cheese, indeed, but cheese cut up into contemptibly small pieces; and it is the awful fact that, instead of Christian bread, he brought me biscuits.  Biscuits — to one who had eaten the cheese of four great countrysides!  Biscuits — to one who had proved anew for himself the sanctity of the ancient wedding between cheese and bread! I addressed the waiter in warm and moving terms.  I asked him who he was that he should put asunder those whom Humanity had joined. I asked him if he did not feel, as an artist, that a solid but yielding substance like cheese went naturally with a solid, yielding substance like bread; to eat it off biscuits is like eating it off slates. I asked him if, when he said his prayers, he was so supercilious as to pray for his daily biscuits.  He gave me generally to understand that he was only obeying a custom of Modern Society. I have therefore resolved to raise my voice, not against the waiter, but against Modern Society, for this huge and unparalleled modern wrong.

~G.K. Chesterton

The Flying Vandal

THE curse of long distances, which is coming to be like the curse of large fortunes, threatens to have a very ruinous effect on one of the real glories of England. If there is one thing that the history of this country has preserved more than that of any other country it is the individuality of the small town. The turn of each street is unexpected; the feature of each market place is unique. They are in their very shape as quaint and elvish as their quaint and elvish names—Nether Wallop, or Stoke Poges, or Stow-in-the-Wold. Those who love liberty, those who love beauty, those who love the essential of English tradition, know that this variety turns England into Elfland.

But our immediate point is a particular fashion in which it is being swept away. The excuse is given that these angels and obstruction become death-traps when they are assailed with reckless and rapid motoring. Nobody seems to answer that reckless motoring is a danger to themselves. Old landmarks must be cleared away to give motorists a playground in which to play the fool, or a large and airy lethal chamber in which to commit suicide. It would puzzle the people of this mental caliber to tell them that in many great civilizations a man would have had to respect the gate and banner of an ancient municipality, or salute the gods of the city as he passed.

But, in any case, the following extraordinary principle is established. A monument in a market town does not belong to the market town; but only to a man who lives forty miles away to the south. To him the market is mere blur of dust and confused colours; he cares nothing about it; perhaps he does not even know its name. But he is the king of that city, who can order all monuments to fall. He can send pioneers on in front of him to cut down the oak under which Alfred sat or in which Charles was hidden, simply and solely because he cannot drive through the oak and will not bother to drive round it. He can knock off a large corner of a house in which Chaucer drank or Wolsey slept, simply because he prefers a curve to a corner when he is rushing blindly from Brighton to Charing Cross. The town he owns is not the town he inhabits, or even the town he wishes to reach. Never was there a safer or smoother form of imperial expansion. We have heard many tales of Big Bertha and the modern shelling of great cities from far away. The old English towns are to be shelled and shot to pieces from very far away. They are bombarded with cars, and not with cannon balls, and blown up with petrol instead of powder. But only long-range artillery is recognised as having any rights in the matter. The only principle recognised is that the village cross of Hugby-in-the-Hole must be immediately pulled down, to please a gentleman who lives in Mancheser and is very anxious to get to Margate.

G. K. C.

(Originally published in G.K.'s Weekly) 

Dragooning the Dragon

WE ALL KNOW people who think it wicked to tell children fairy tales which they are not required to believe, though of course not wicked to teach them false doctrines or false news which they are required to believe. They hold that the child must be guarded from the danger of supposing that all frogs turn into princesses or that any pumpkin will at any minute turn into a coach and six, and that he must rather reserve his faith for the sober truth told in the newspapers, which will tell him that all Socialists are Satanists or that the next Act of Parliament will mean work and wealth for all. We ourselves have generally found that children were quite sufficiently intelligent to question the first and that grown-up people were quite sufficiently stupid to swallow the second. It almost looks as if there were something wrong about education; or something wrong about growing up. But the latest news in the educational world is that a more moderate reform is under consideration; and the reformers admit that there is a distinction to be made. One or two fairy tales about pretty things like flowers or butterflies, it is loftily admitted, may do no harm. But fairy tales about dragons and giants, because they are ugly things, may have a dreadful effect upon the delicate instinct for beauty. Schoolmasters discussed the question recently in the light of the most recent psychology of aesthetics. For our part, we have seldom seen a schoolmaster who was half so decorative as a dragon. And though a giant may appear gross or grotesque, he is not necessarily less so when (as in the case of one or two professors) he is reduced to the dimensions of a dwarf. The human race must be a very horrible sight to the human child, if he is really so sensitive an aesthete as all that. But it must be admitted that the objection was not exclusively aesthetic, but also partly ethical. On moral grounds also it was urged that the child may read stories about beanstalks, but not stories about giants; the learned educationists having apparently forgotten that they both occur in the same story. Children, it appears, are not to read about giants and witches because it will encourage cruelty; as the child “will certainly sympathise with the torturers.” This would seem to be an extreme dogma of Original Sin by the Calvinist rather than the Catholic definition of it. Why a little boy reading about another little boy pursued by a dragon should suppose himself to be a dragon, which he is not, instead of a boy, which he is, we have no idea; we suppose it is the dragon complex. Anyhow, psychologists suffer from what may be called the contradiction complex; and we need not say that they contradict themselves flatly even on that one small point. For they also say that the tale of the dragon will produce morbid terror and panic; so that it would almost seem as if the little boy were a little boy after all. But he is a rather curious little boy, who exultantly enjoys eating himself at the same moment that he is mad and miserable with fear of being eaten by himself; his complexity is evidently very complex indeed. Meanwhile, it might perhaps be pointed out that a child generally goes very eagerly to his father or his friend for the experience of fairy tales; whereas he can remain in complete isolation and ignorance, and still have the experience of fear. The child learns without being taught that life contains some element of enmity. His own dreams would provide him with dragons; what the legend provides is St. George.

~ G. K. C.
(Originally published in G.K.'s Weekly)

Saint George Killing the Dragon. By Bernat Martorell.

Tempera on wood, 1430-35; Art Institute, Chicago.

Poem: Crooked

THE little picture of the Mother of God
Hangs crooked upon the wall,
Blue and bright gold like a butterfly pinned askew,
Only it does not fall,
As, stooping ever and falling never, an eagle
Hangs winged over all.

And it suddenly seemed that the whole long room was tilted
Like a cabin in stormy seas;
The solid table and strong upstanding lamp and the inkstand
Leaned like stiff shrubs in a breeze
And the windows looked out upon slanted plains and meadows
As on slanted seas.

And I knew in a flash that the whole wide world was sliding;
Ice and not land.
And men were swaying and sliding, and nations staggered
And could not stand:
Going down to the ends of the earth, going down to destruction,
On either hand.

And knowing the whole world stiff with the crack of doom,
I pick up my pen and correct and makes notes, and write small:
And go on with the task of the day, seeing and unseeing
What hangs over all:
The awful eyes of Our Lady, who hangs so straight
Upon the crooked wall.

G. K. C.
(in G.K.’s Weekly)

The Glory of Grey

I SUPPOSE that, taking this summer as a whole, people will not call it an appropriate time for praising the English climate. But for my part I will praise the English climate till I die — even if I die of the English climate.  There is no weather so good as English weather.  Nay, in a real sense there is no weather at all anywhere but in England.  In France you have much sun and some rain; in Italy you have hot winds and cold winds; in Scotland and Ireland you have rain, either thick or thin; in America you have hells of heat and cold, and in the Tropics you have sunstrokes varied by thunderbolts.  But all these you have on a broad and brutal scale, and you settle down into contentment or despair. Only in our own romantic country do you have the strictly romantic thing called Weather; beautiful and changing 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 a deuce of a pose it was. This cannot truly be said of the greatest of their continental models or rivals.  Poussin and Claude painted objects, ancient cities or perfect Arcadian shepherds through a clear medium of the climate.  But in the English painters Weather is the hero; with Turner an Adelphi hero, taunting, flashing and fighting, melodramatic but really magnificent.  The English climate, a tall and terrible protagonist, robed in rain and thunder and snow and sunlight, fills the whole canvas and the whole foreground. I admit the superiority of many other French things besides French art. But I will not yield an inch on the superiority of English weather and weather-painting. Why, the French have not even got a word for Weather: and you must ask for the weather in French as if you were asking for the time in English.

Then, again, variety of climate should always go with stability of abode. The weather in the desert is monotonous; and as a natural consequence the Arabs wander about, hoping it may be different somewhere. But an Englishman’s house is not only his castle; it is his fairy castle. Clouds and colours of every varied dawn and eve are perpetually touching and turning it from clay to gold, or from gold to ivory. There is a line of woodland beyond a corner of my garden which is literally different on every one of the three hundred and sixty-five days.  Sometimes it seems as near as a hedge, and sometimes as far as a faint and fiery evening cloud. The same principle (by the way) applies to the difficult problem of wives.  Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy.  So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem.

Now, among the heresies that are spoken in this matter is the habit of calling a grey day a “colourless” day.  Grey is a colour, and can be a very powerful and pleasing colour.  There is also an insulting style of speech about “one grey day just like another.” You might as well talk about one green tree just like another. A grey clouded sky is indeed a canopy between us and the sun; so is a green tree, if it comes to that.  But the grey umbrellas differ as much as the green in their style and shape, in their tint and tilt. One day may be grey like steel, and another grey like dove’s plumage. One may seem grey like the deathly frost, and another grey like the smoke of substantial kitchens.  No things could seem further apart than the doubt of grey and the decision of scarlet. Yet grey and red can mingle, as they do in the morning clouds: and also in a sort of warm smoky stone of which they build the little towns in the west country.  In those towns even the houses that are wholly grey have a glow in them; as if their secret firesides were such furnaces of hospitality as faintly to transfuse the walls like walls of cloud. And wandering in those westland parts I did once really find a sign-post pointing up a steep crooked path to a town that was called Clouds. I did not climb up to it; I feared that either the town would not be good enough for the name, or I should not be good enough for the town. Anyhow, the little hamlets of the warm grey stone have a geniality which is not achieved by all the artistic scarlet of the suburbs; as if it were better to warm one’s hands at the ashes of Glastonbury than at the painted flames of Croydon.

Again, the enemies of grey (those astute, daring and evil-minded men) are fond of bringing forward the argument that colours suffer in grey weather, and that strong sunlight is necessary to all the hues of heaven and earth.  Here again there are two words to be said; and it is essential to distinguish.  It is true that sun is needed to burnish and bring into bloom the tertiary and dubious colours; the colour of peat, pea-soup, Impressionist sketches, brown velvet coats, olives, grey and blue slates, the complexions of vegetarians, the tints of volcanic rock, chocolate, cocoa, mud, soot, slime, old boots; the delicate shades of these do need the sunlight to bring out the faint beauty that often clings to them.  But if you have a healthy negro taste in colour, if you choke your garden with poppies and geraniums, if you paint your house sky-blue and scarlet, if you wear, let us say, a golden top-hat and a crimson frock-coat, you will not only be visible on the greyest day, but you will notice that your costume and environment produce a certain singular effect. You will find, I mean, that rich colours actually look more luminous on a grey day, because they are seen against a sombre background and seem to be burning with a lustre of their own. Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange about them, at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the phantasmal garden of a witch. A bright blue sky is necessarily the high light of 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 red lost 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 bursting into green and gold.  So we may be perpetually reminded of the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself; and when there is grey weather in our hills or grey hairs in our heads, perhaps they may still remind us of the morning.

~G.K. Chesterton: Alarms and Discursions

Sed Ex Deo Nati Sunt

God, in an idle mood one day
Fashioned His image out of clay,
And as He turned the lovely head,
“I will put Reason there,” He said,
And whispered as He set the eyes,
“Be very wise, be very wise.”

And as He formed the tender lips
With beauty-feeling finger tips,
“Be open, Ephphatha,” He cried,
“Tell of My glory far and wide.”
And softly as the ears He laid,
“Be unafraid, be unafraid.”

And swiftly as the body grew,
The hands within His own He drew,
“I will place power here,” and pressed
The upturned palms to East and West;
“I give him freedom of the will,
For good or ill, for good or ill.”

The slender feet He firmly made
One over other gently laid;
“The feet of him who brings good news
Bathed in the cool of mountain dews,
Earth shall they walk and shall not stray
The narrow way, the narrow way."

The Father said, “This is my Son,”
And breathed the breath of life thereon.
“Him first and last of all things made,
Angels shall worship;” and He bade
Michael, Gabriel, Uriel stand
On either hand, on either hand.

When God had made the perfect Man,
The Word with Him ere worlds began,
There rushed the flaming fires of heaven
Athwart the mighty planets seven
And fell in showers of starry mirth
His Peace on earth, His Peace on earth.

~Frances Chesterton: in G.K.’s Weekly  

"Men dying in agonies to find a place where no man can live"

"THUS because we are not in a civilization which believes strongly in oracles or sacred places, we see the full frenzy of those who killed themselves to find the sepulchre of Christ. But being in a civilization which does believe in this dogma of fact for fact's sake, we do not see the full frenzy of those who kill themselves to find the North Pole. I am not speaking of a tenable ultimate utility, which is true both of the Crusades and the polar explorations. I mean merely that we do see the superficial and aesthetic singularity, the startling quality, about the idea of men crossing a continent with armies to conquer the place where a man died. But we do not see the aesthetic singularity and the startling quality of men dying in agonies to find a place where no man can live — a place only interesting because it is supposed to be the meeting-place of some lines that do not exist."

~G.K. Chesterton: Heretics, XX. Concluding Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy.

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