There was another bit of symbolism that used to impress us (it is surprising how quickly one can pick up the habit of symbolizing) when we dallied around Beaconsfield. That was that Edmund Waller is buried under the big walnut tree in the churchyard:
Edmundi Waller hic jacet
id quantum morti cessit
And we thought it pleasant that Mr. Chesterton should have settled in the village sacred to the poet who wrote the loveliest poem ever written on girth—or, rather, on slenderness. You remember, of course, his “On a Girdle.”
The average person dearly loves a label—also a libel: and Mr. Chesterton’s gnomes—which are sometimes nuggets, sometimes merely nugæ, but always golden—are ticketed as “paradoxes” by those who have small inkling of what a paradox really is. The best definition was that of Don Marquis, our happiest native contemporary practitioner in this art, when he said that if the positive and negative poles of a truth are bent until they meet (or approach) a spark flashes across.
The paradox is the oldest outcry of the philosopher on contemplating the absurdity of the world. Originally a paradox was simply a surprise—a statement contrary to generally accepted opinion, and very likely untrue. As Hamlet said: “This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof.” But latterly we do not grant the virtue of paradox unless the epigram fulfils a double requirement: it must seem absurd; it must be true, or at any rate true enough to give the mind a sense of cheerful satisfaction. Its essence is that of surprise—which is the essence of humour.
The intellectual growth of humanity is shown by its increasing tolerance of the paradox. The greatest of all Paradoxers was crucified. Every true paradox is a little parable of human fallibility. A parabola is a conic section; a parable, one might say, is a comic section.
Mr. Chesterton once, in a delightful essay called “Christmas,” said something that lingers in our mind as an exhibition of the paradox both in its strength and weakness. He wrote:
It is not uncommon nowadays for the insane extremes in reality to meet. Thus I have always felt that brutal Imperialism and Tolstoian nonresistance were not only not opposite, but were the same thing. They are the same contemptible thought that conquest cannot be resisted, looked at from the two standpoints of the conqueror and the conquered. Thus again teetotalism and the really degraded gin-selling and dram-drinking have exactly the same moral philosophy. They are both based on the idea that fermented liquor is not a drink, but a drug.
Now a moment’s thought will show the reader that while these two paradoxes are equal in wit, they are not equal in truth. The second is gloriously true; the first, delightfully acute as it is, begs the question. For the Tolstoian will retort that he does not maintain that conquest cannot be resisted; but that, on the contrary, it is resisted and defeated by passive oppugnance.
The paradox holds the mirror up to nature, but it is not a plane mirror. It dignifies human nature by assuming that the mind is capable of viewing itself in the refraction of absurdity. Thoughtless people speak of the paradox as a reduction to absurdity. That is not so. There are some subjects that have to be elevated to absurdity.