The Everlasting ManChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The Everlasting Man
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Catholic Church -- Apologetic works; Christianity and other religions; Religion
But if a man has got into a mood in which he is _not_ able to feel this
sort of wonder, then his cure must begin right at the other end. We must
now suppose that he has drifted into a dull mood, in which somebody
sitting on a horse means no more than somebody sitting on a chair. The
wonder of which Wyndham spoke, the beauty that made the thing seem an
equestrian statue, the meaning of the more chivalric horseman, may have
become to him merely a convention and a bore. Perhaps they have been
merely a fashion; perhaps they have gone out of fashion; perhaps they
have been talked about too much or talked about in the wrong way;
perhaps it was then difficult to care for horses without the horrible
risk of being horsy. Anyhow, he has got into a condition when he cares
no more for a horse than for a towel-horse. His grandfather’s charge at
Balaclava seems to him as dull and dusty as the album containing such
family portraits. Such a person has not really become enlightened about
the album; on the contrary, he has only become blind with the dust. But
when he has reached _that_ degree of blindness, he will not be able to
look at a horse or a horseman at all until he has seen the whole thing
as a thing entirely unfamiliar and almost unearthly.
Out of some dark forest under some ancient dawn there must come towards
us, with lumbering yet dancing motions, one of the very queerest of the
prehistoric creatures. We must see for the first time the strangely
small head set on a neck not only longer but thicker than itself, as the
face of a gargoyle is thrust out upon a gutter-spout, the one
disproportionate crest of hair running along the ridge of that heavy
neck like a beard in the wrong place; the feet, each like a solid club
of horn, alone amid the feet of so many cattle; so that the true fear is
to be found in showing not the cloven but the uncloven hoof. Nor is it
mere verbal fancy to see him thus as a unique monster; for in a sense a
monster means what is unique, and he is really unique. But the point is
that when we thus see him as the first man saw him, we begin once more
to have some imaginative sense of what it meant when the first man rode
him. In such a dream he may seem ugly, but he does not seem
unimpressive; and certainly that two-legged dwarf who could get on top
of him will not seem unimpressive. By a longer and more erratic road we
shall come back to the same marvel of the man and the horse; and the
marvel will be, if possible, even more marvellous. We shall have again a
glimpse of St. George; the more glorious because St. George is not
riding on the horse, but rather riding on the dragon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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