第41章 THE MYSTAGOGUE(1)

Whenever you hear much of things being unutterable and indefinable and impalpable and unnamable and subtly indescribable,then elevate your aristocratic nose towards heaven and snuff up the smell of decay.It is perfectly true that there is something in all good things that is beyond all speech or figure of speech.But it is also true that there is in all good things a perpetual desire for expression and concrete embodiment;and though the attempt to embody it is always inadequate,the attempt is always made.If the idea does not seek to be the word,the chances are that it is an evil idea.If the word is not made flesh it is a bad word.

Thus Giotto or Fra Angelieo would have at once admitted theologically that God was too good to be painted;but they would always try to paint Him.And they felt (very rightly)that representing Him as a rather quaint old man with a gold crown and a white beard,like a king of the elves,was less profane than resisting the sacred impulse to express Him in some way.That is why the Christian world is full of gaudy pictures and twisted statues which seem,to many refined persons,more blasphemous than the secret volumes of an atheist.The trend of good is always towards Incarnation.But,on the other hand,those refined thinkers who worship the Devil,whether in the swamps of Jamaica or the salons of Paris,always insist upon the shapelessness,the wordlessness,the unutterable character of the abomination.They call him "horror of emptiness,"as did the black witch in Stevenson's Dynamiter;they worship him as the unspeakable name;as the unbearable silence.They think of him as the void in the heart of the whirlwind;the cloud on the brain of the maniac;the toppling turrets of vertigo or the endless corridors of nightmare.It was the Christians who gave the Devil a grotesque and energetic outline,with sharp horns and spiked tail.It was the saints who drew Satan as comic and even lively.The Satanists never drew him at all.

And as it is with moral good and evil,so it is also with mental clarity and mental confusion.There is one very valid test by which we may separate genuine,if perverse and unbalanced,originality and revolt from mere impudent innovation and bluff.The man who really thinks he has an idea will always try to explain that idea.The charlatan who has no idea will always confine himself to explaining that it is much too subtle to be explained.The first idea may really be very outree or specialist;it may really be very difficult to express to ordinary people.But because the man is trying to express it,it is most probable that there is something in it,after all.The honest man is he who is always trying to utter the unutterable,to describe the indescribable;but the quack lives not by plunging into mystery,but by refusing to come out of it.

Perhaps this distinction is most comically plain in the case of the thing called Art,and the people called Art Critics.It is obvious that an attractive landscape or a living face can only half express the holy cunning that has made them what they are.It is equally obvious that a landscape painter expresses only half of the landscape;a portrait painter only half of the person;they are lucky if they express so much.

And again it is yet more obvious that any literary description of the pictures can only express half of them,and that the less important half.