Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton

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• The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say. When Shakespeare says (in one of the long philosophical speeches which Mr. Shaw does not quote because they do not happen to be pessimistic), For valour is not Love a Hercules, Still climbing trees in the Hesperides†1— it is difficult, or rather impossible, to use any other language to express what he conveys. You cannot convey a sense of sunrise and an ancient hope and the colours of the ends of the earth. But if Mr. Shaw thinks that the lines mean, "Is not the sexual instinct like Hercules in the matter of valour, and is it not like him in the garden of the Hesperides and climbing a tree?" I can assure him most sincerely of his mistake. (查看原文)

  田晨彤 2019-05-24 05:52:34

• He had an atmosphere or spirit—an atmosphere not confined to him but common in some degree to the whole of the England before the Puritans. And about this atmosphere or spirit there is one particular thing to be remarked. It can be remarked best by simply reading such a play as "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The quality I mean may be called the comic supernatural. The greater part of that world, like the more thinking part of our modern world, believed in a general way in the existence of things deeper and higher than man himself, in energies beyond his energy, in destinies beyond his ken. In short, they believed in gods, in devils; and they also believed in fairies. We have mysticism in the modern world, but all our mysticism is sad mysticism; at the best it is serious mysticism; it is neve... (查看原文)

  田晨彤 2019-05-24 06:50:24

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