up under the title of ‘Great Expectations.’
Wherever humanity is he would have us face it and make
something of it, swallow it with a holy cannibalism,
and assimilate it with the digestion of a giant.
We must take these trippers as he would have taken
them, and tear out of them their tragedy and their
farce. Do you remember now what the angel said
at the sepulchre? ’Why seek ye the living
among the dead? He is not here; he is risen.’”
With that we came out suddenly on the wide stretch
of the sands, which were black with the knobs and
masses of our laughing and quite desperate democracy.
And the sunset, which was now in its final glory,
flung far over all of them a red flush and glitter
like the gigantic firelight of Dickens. In that
strange evening light every figure looked at once
grotesque and attractive, as if he had a story to tell.
I heard a little girl (who was being throttled by another
little girl) say by way of self-vindication, “My
sister-in-law ’as got four rings aside her weddin’
ring!”
I stood and listened for more, but my friend went
away.
In Topsy-Turvy Land
Last week, in an idle metaphor, I took the tumbling
of trees and the secret energy of the wind as typical
of the visible world moving under the violence of
the invisible. I took this metaphor merely because
I happened to be writing the article in a wood.
Nevertheless, now that I return to Fleet Street (which
seems to me, I confess, much better and more poetical
than all the wild woods in the world), I am strangely
haunted by this accidental comparison. The people’s
figures seem a forest and their soul a wind.
All the human personalities which speak or signal to
me seem to have this fantastic character of the fringe
of the forest against the sky. That man that
talks to me, what is he but an articulate tree?
That driver of a van who waves his hands wildly at
me to tell me to get out of the way, what is he but
a bunch of branches stirred and swayed by a spiritual
wind, a sylvan object that I can continue to contemplate
with calm? That policeman who lifts his hand
to warn three omnibuses of the peril that they run
in encountering my person, what is he but a shrub
shaken for a moment with that blast of human law which
is a thing stronger than anarchy? Gradually this
impression of the woods wears off. But this
black-and-white contrast between the visible and invisible,
this deep sense that the one essential belief is belief
in the invisible as against the visible, is suddenly
and sensationally brought back to my mind. Exactly
at the moment when Fleet Street has grown most familiar
(that is, most bewildering and bright), my eye catches
a poster of vivid violet, on which I see written in
large black letters these remarkable words: “Should
Shop Assistants Marry?”
