But the splendor of furrowed fields is this: that like all brave things they are made straight, and therefore they bend. In everything that bows gracefully there must be an effort at stiffness. Bows are beautiful when they bend only because they try to remain rigid; and sword-blades can curl like silver ribbons only because they are certain to spring straight again. But the same is true of every tough curve of the tree-trunk, of every strong-backed bend of the bough; there is hardly any such thing in Nature as a mere droop of weakness. Rigidity yielding a little, like justice swayed by mercy, is the whole beauty of the earth. The cosmos is a diagram just bent beautifully out of shape. Everything tries to be straight; and everything just fortunately fails.
The foil may curve in the lunge; but there is nothing beautiful about beginning the battle with a crooked foil. So the strict aim, the strong doctrine, may give a little in the actual fight with facts; but that is no reason for beginning with a weak doctrine or a twisted aim. Do not be an opportunist; try to be theoretic at all the opportunities; fate can be trusted to do all the opportunist part of it. Do not try to bend, any more than the trees try to bend. Try to grow straight, and life will bend you.
Alas! I am giving the moral before the fable; and yet I hardly think that otherwise you could see all that I mean in that enormous vision of the plowed hills. These great furrowed slopes are the oldest architecture of man; the oldest astronomy was his guide, the oldest botany his object. And for geometry, the mere word proves my case.
But when I looked at those torrents of plowed parallels, that great rush of rigid lines, I seemed to see the whole huge achievement of democracy. Here was more equality; but equality seen in bulk is more superb than any supremacy. Equality free and flying, equality rushing over hill and dale, equality charging the world—that was the meaning of those military furrows, military in their identity, military in their energy. They sculptured hill and dale with strong curves merely because they did not mean to curve at all. They made the strong lines of landscape with their stiffly driven swords of the soil. It is not only nonsense, but blasphemy, to say that man has spoilt the country. Man has created the country; it was his business, as the image of God. No hill, covered with common scrub or patches of purple heath, could have been so sublimely hilly as that ridge up to which the ranked furrows rose like aspiring angels. No valley, confused with needless cottages and towns, can have been so utterly valleyish as that abyss into which the down-rushing furrows raged like demons into the swirling pit.
It is the hard lines of discipline and equality that mark out a landscape and give it all its mold and meaning. It is just because the lines of the furrow are ugly and even that the landscape is living and superb. As I think I have remarked before, the Republic is founded on the plow.
SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS
- Explain the figures of speech that occur in the essay.
- Why did Mr. Chesterton use so many figures of speech?
- How can you account for his poetic language?
- What leads him to think the furrows beautiful?
- What meaning does the writer find in the plowed field?
- Explain in full the last paragraph of the essay.
- In what respect is the Republic, “founded on the plow”?
- What does the essay show concerning Mr. Chesterton's personality?
- In what respects is his style original?
- By what means does he gain emphasis?