For When Boys Or Soldiers Or Poets, Or Any Other Blossoms And Prides
Of Nature, Are For Lying Steady In
The shade and letting the Mind
commune with its Immortal Comrades, up comes Authority busking about
and eager as though
It were a duty to force the said Mind to burrow
and sweat in the matter of this very perishable world, its temporary
habitation.
'Up,' says Authority, 'and let me see that Mind of yours doing
something practical. Let me see Him mixing painfully with
circumstance, and botching up some Imperfection or other that shall at
least be a Reality and not a silly Fantasy.'
Then the poor Mind comes back to Prison again, and the boy takes his
horrible Homer in the real Greek (not Church's book, alas!); the Poet
his rough hairy paper, his headache, and his cross-nibbed pen; the
Soldier abandons his inner picture of swaggering about in ordinary
clothes, and sees the dusty road and feels the hard places in his
boot, and shakes down again to the steady pressure of his pack; and
Authority is satisfied, knowing that he will get a smattering from the
Boy, a rubbishy verse from the Poet, and from the Soldier a long and
thirsty march. And Authority, when it does this commonly sets to work
by one of these formulae: as, in England north of Trent, by the
manifestly false and boastful phrase, 'A thing begun is half ended',
and in the south by 'The Beginning is half the Battle'; but in France
by the words I have attributed to the Proverb-Maker, _'Ce n'est que le
premier pas qui coute'._
By this you may perceive that the Proverb-Maker, like every other
Demagogue, Energumen, and Disturber, dealt largely in metaphor - but
this I need hardly insist upon, for in his vast collection of
published and unpublished works it is amply evident that he took the
silly pride of the half-educated in a constant abuse of metaphor.
There was a sturdy boy at my school who, when the master had carefully
explained to us the nature of metaphor, said that so far as he could
see a metaphor was nothing but a long Greek word for a lie.
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