Alarms and Discursions | Page 6

in these monsters of the Apocalypse. It
is, I suppose, the idea that beings really more beautiful or more
universal than we are might appear to us frightful and even confused.
Especially they might seem to have senses at once more multiplex and
more staring; an idea very imaginatively seized in the multitude of eyes.
I like those monsters beneath the throne very much. But I like them

beneath the throne. It is when one of them goes wandering in deserts
and finds a throne for himself that evil faiths begin, and there is
(literally) the devil to pay--to pay in dancing girls or human sacrifice.
As long as those misshapen elemental powers are around the throne,
remember that the thing that they worship is the likeness of the
appearance of a man.
That is, I fancy, the true doctrine on the subject of Tales of Terror and
such things, which unless a man of letters do well and truly believe,
without doubt he will end by blowing his brains out or by writing badly.
Man, the central pillar of the world must be upright and straight;
around him all the trees and beasts and elements and devils may crook
and curl like smoke if they choose. All really imaginative literature is
only the contrast between the weird curves of Nature and the
straightness of the soul. Man may behold what ugliness he likes if he is
sure that he will not worship it; but there are some so weak that they
will worship a thing only because it is ugly. These must be chained to
the beautiful. It is not always wrong even to go, like Dante, to the brink
of the lowest promontory and look down at hell. It is when you look up
at hell that a serious miscalculation has probably been made.
Therefore I see no wrong in riding with the Nightmare to-night; she
whinnies to me from the rocking tree-tops and the roaring wind; I will
catch her and ride her through the awful air. Woods and weeds are alike
tugging at the roots in the rising tempest, as if all wished to fly with us
over the moon, like that wild amorous cow whose child was the
Moon-Calf. We will rise to that mad infinite where there is neither up
nor down, the high topsy-turveydom of the heavens. I will answer the
call of chaos and old night. I will ride on the Nightmare; but she shall
not ride on me.

The Telegraph Poles
My friend and I were walking in one of those wastes of pine-wood
which make inland seas of solitude in every part of Western Europe;
which have the true terror of a desert, since they are uniform, and so

one may lose one's way in them. Stiff, straight, and similar, stood up all
around us the pines of the wood, like the pikes of a silent mutiny. There
is a truth in talking of the variety of Nature; but I think that Nature
often shows her chief strangeness in her sameness. There is a weird
rhythm in this very repetition; it is as if the earth were resolved to
repeat a single shape until the shape shall turn terrible.
Have you ever tried the experiment of saying some plain word, such as
"dog," thirty times? By the thirtieth time it has become a word like
"snark" or "pobble." It does not become tame, it becomes wild, by
repetition. In the end a dog walks about as startling and undecipherable
as Leviathan or Croquemitaine.
It may be that this explains the repetitions in Nature, it may be for this
reason that there are so many million leaves and pebbles. Perhaps they
are not repeated so that they may grow familiar. Perhaps they are
repeated only in the hope that they may at last grow unfamiliar.
Perhaps a man is not startled at the first cat he sees, but jumps into the
air with surprise at the seventy-ninth cat. Perhaps he has to pass
through thousands of pine trees before he finds the one that is really a
pine tree. However this may be, there is something singularly thrilling,
even something urgent and intolerant, about the endless forest
repetitions; there is the hint of something like madness in that musical
monotony of the pines.
I said something like this to my friend; and he answered with sardonic
truth, "Ah, you wait till we come to a telegraph post."
My friend was right, as he occasionally is in our discussions, especially
upon points of fact. We had crossed the pine forest by one of its paths
which happened to follow the wires of the provincial telegraphy; and
though the poles occurred at long intervals they made a difference
when they came. The instant we