Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/213

THE GUILT OF MR. CHESTERTON 187 dumpy Dante tripping beside a big blond Virgil. But instead of the light from this Flambeau falling on sins of an ever-increasing freshness and fantasy — outrages so utterly outrageous that we laugh at them as at the red-hot pokers and battered policemen of pantomime — we pass into places where things unspeakable prowl and spawn, as though we were indeed winding down the circles of some hell. " Mud- stains, blood-stains." There are dipsomaniacs and blotched paramours ; the lost faces of idiots leer out of the darkness, blind women are murdered, there are new and more fearful forms of fratricide ; and in this heavy atmosphere of horror quiet details swell and twist like things seen in an ill dream. The physical uglinesses are bad enough — Norman Bohun's smashed head "a hideous splash like a star of blackness and blood." But far more dreadful is the way some peaceful secondary thing — a group of trees, or a distant passer-by, or a quiet country church — will suddenly writhe out of its place and rush into the foreground, waxing horribly, like a face in a fever, as though struggling to express something too monstrous for speech : — The village church was hewn out of ancient and silent stone, bearded with fungoids and stained with the nests of birds. And yet, when they saw it from below, it sprang like a fountain at the stars ; and when they saw it, as now, from above, it poured like a cataract into a voiceless pit. For these two men on the tower were left alone with the most terrible aspect of Gothic ; the mon- strous foreshortening and disproportion, the dizzy perspectives, the glimpses of great things small and small things great ; a topsy- turvydom of stone in mid-air. A carved bird or beast at a corner seemed like some vast walking or flying dragon wasting the pastures and villages below. The whole atmosphere was dizzy and dangerous, as if men were upheld in air on the gyrating wings of colossal genii ; and the whole of the old church seemed to sit upon the sunlit country like a cloudburst.