Fancies Versus FadsChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
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Fancies Versus Fads
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
English essays -- 20th century
I will give two examples from my own most personal circle; I could give
hundreds from hearsay. I know a child who screamed steadily for hours if
he had been taken past the Albert Memorial. This was not a precocious
precision or excellence in his taste in architecture. Nor was it a
premature protest against all that gimcrack German culture which nearly
entangled us in the downfall of the barbaric tyranny. It was the fear of
something which he himself described with lurid simplicity as The Cow
with the India-rubber Tongue. It sounds rather a good title for a creepy
short story. At the base of the Albert Memorial (I may explain for those
who have never enjoyed that monument) are four groups of statuary
representing Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. America especially is
very overwhelming; borne onward on a snorting bison who plunges forward
in a fury of western progress, and is surrounded with Red Indians,
Mexicans, and all sorts of pioneers, O pioneers, armed to the teeth. The
child passed this transatlantic tornado with complete coolness and
indifference. Europe however is seated on a bull so mild as to look like
a cow; the tip of its tongue is showing and happened to be discoloured
by weather; suggesting, I suppose, a living thing coming out of the dead
marble. Now nobody could possibly foretell that a weather-stain would
occur in that particular place, and fill that particular child with that
particular fancy. Nobody is likely to propose meeting it by forbidding
graven images, like the Moslems and the Jews. Nobody has said (as yet)
that it is bad morals to make a picture of a cow. Nobody has even
pleaded that it is bad manners for a cow to put its tongue out. These
things are utterly beyond calculation; they are also beyond counting,
for they occur all over the place, not only to morbid children but to
any children. I knew this particular child very well, being a rather
older child myself at the time. He certainly was not congenitally timid
or feeble-minded; for he risked going to prison to expose the Marconi
Scandal and died fighting in the Great War.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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