Chesterton on being a poet
And now for my next quote from GK Chesterton. This is Father Brown is defence of a poet accused of being a murderer. I love this, plus some of Chesterton's other comments on poets:
‘Well, that barrister doesn’t know what a poet is. He doesn’t understand that a poet’s eccentricities wouldn’t seem eccentric to other poets. He thinks it odd that Orm should walk about in a beautiful garden for two hours, with nothing to do. God bless my soul! a poet would think nothing of walking about in the same backyard for ten hours if he had a poem to do. Orm’s own counsel was quite as stupid. It never occurred to him to ask Orm the obvious question.’
‘What question do you mean?’ asked the other.
‘Why that poem he was making up, of course,’ said Father Brown rather impatiently. ‘What line he was stuck at, what epithet he was looking for, what climax he was trying to work up to. If there were any educated people in court, who know what literature is, they would have known well enough whether he had had anything genuine to do. You’d have asked a manufacturer about the conditions of his factory; but nobody seems to consider the conditions under which poetry is manufactured. It’s done by doing nothing.’
‘That’s all very well,’ replied the detective; ‘but why did he hide? Why did he climb up that crooked little stairway and stop there; it led nowhere.’
‘Why, because it led nowhere, of course,’ cried Father Brown explosively. ‘Anybody who clapped eyes on that blind alley ending in mid-air might have known an artist would want to go there, just as a child would.’
He stood blinking for a moment, and then said apologetically: ‘I beg your pardon; but it seems odd that none of them understand these things. And then there was another thing. Don’t you know that everything has, for an artist, one aspect or angle that is exactly right? A tree, a cow, and a cloud, in a certain relation only, mean something; as three letters, in one order only, mean a word. Well, the view of that illuminated garden from that unfinished bridge was the right view of it. It was as unique as the fourth dimension. It was a sort of fairy foreshortening; it was like looking down at heaven and seeing all the stars growing on trees and that luminous pond like a moon fallen flat on the fields in some happy nursery tale. He could have looked at it for ever. If you told him the path led nowhere, he would tell you it had led him to the country at the end of the world ...
GK Chesterton The Secret of Father Brown