Tremendous Trifles | Page 4

I put the
brown paper in my pocket along with the chalks, and possibly other
things. I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how
poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife,
for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I
planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my
pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics
is past.
. . . . .
With my stick and my knife, my chalks and my brown paper, I went
out on to the great downs. I crawled across those colossal contours that
express the best quality of England, because they are at the same time
soft and strong. The smoothness of them has the same meaning as the
smoothness of great cart-horses, or the smoothness of the beech-tree; it
declares in the teeth of our timid and cruel theories that the mighty are
merciful. As my eye swept the landscape, the landscape was as kindly
as any of its cottages, but for power it was like an earthquake. The
villages in the immense valley were safe, one could see, for centuries;
yet the lifting of the whole land was like the lifting of one enormous
wave to wash them all away.
I crossed one swell of living turf after another, looking for a place to sit
down and draw. Do not, for heaven's sake, imagine I was going to
sketch from Nature. I was going to draw devils and seraphim, and blind
old gods that men worshipped before the dawn of right, and saints in
robes of angry crimson, and seas of strange green, and all the sacred or
monstrous symbols that look so well in bright colours on brown paper.
They are much better worth drawing than Nature; also they are much
easier to draw. When a cow came slouching by in the field next to me,
a mere artist might have drawn it; but I always get wrong in the hind
legs of quadrupeds. So I drew the soul of the cow; which I saw there
plainly walking before me in the sunlight; and the soul was all purple
and silver, and had seven horns and the mystery that belongs to all the

beasts. But though I could not with a crayon get the best out of the
landscape, it does not follow that the landscape was not getting the best
out of me. And this, I think, is the mistake that people make about the
old poets who lived before Wordsworth, and were supposed not to care
very much about Nature because they did not describe it much.
They preferred writing about great men to writing about great hills; but
they sat on the great hills to write it. They gave out much less about
Nature, but they drank in, perhaps, much more. They painted the white
robes of their holy virgins with the blinding snow, at which they had
stared all day. They blazoned the shields of their paladins with the
purple and gold of many heraldic sunsets. The greenness of a thousand
green leaves clustered into the live green figure of Robin Hood. The
blueness of a score of forgotten skies became the blue robes of the
Virgin. The inspiration went in like sunbeams and came out like
Apollo.
. . . . .
But as I sat scrawling these silly figures on the brown paper, it began to
dawn on me, to my great disgust, that I had left one chalk, and that a
most exquisite and essential chalk, behind. I searched all my pockets,
but I could not find any white chalk. Now, those who are acquainted
with all the philosophy (nay, religion) which is typified in the art of
drawing on brown paper, know that white is positive and essential. I
cannot avoid remarking here upon a moral significance. One of the
wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals, is this, that
white is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and
affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When, so to
speak, your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses; when it grows
white-hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three defiant verities of
the best religious morality, of real Christianity, for example, is exactly
this same thing; the chief assertion of religious morality is that white is
a colour. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral
dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular
smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge
or punishment; it means a plain