Tremendous Trifles

A Piece of Chalk

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I remember one splendid morning, all blue and silver, in the summer

holidays when I reluctantly tore myself away from the task of doing

nothing in particular, and put on a hat of some sort and picked up

a walking-stick, and put six very bright-coloured chalks in my pocket.

I then went into the kitchen (which, along with the rest of the house,

belonged to a very square and sensible old woman in a Sussex village),

and asked the owner and occupant of the kitchen if she had any

brown paper. She had a great deal; in fact, she had too much; and she

mistook the purpose and the rationale of the existence of brown paper.

She seemed to have an idea that if a person wanted brown paper he must

be wanting to tie up parcels; which was the last thing I wanted to do;

indeed, it is a thing which I have found to be beyond my mental capacity.

Hence she dwelt very much on the varying qualities of toughness and

endurance in the material. I explained to her that I only wanted to draw

pictures on it, and that I did not want them to endure in the least;

and that from my point of view, therefore, it was a question, not of

tough consistency, but of responsive surface, a thing comparatively

irrelevant in a parcel. When she understood that I wanted to draw

she offered to overwhelm me with note-paper, apparently supposing

that I did my notes and correspondence on old brown paper wrappers

from motives of economy.

I then tried to explain the rather delicate logical shade, that I

not only liked brown paper, but liked the quality of brownness

in paper, just as I liked the quality of brownness in October woods,

or in beer, or in the peat-streams of the North. Brown paper

represents the primal twilight of the first toil of creation,

and with a bright-coloured chalk or two you can pick out points

of fire in it, sparks of gold, and blood-red, and sea-green,

like the first fierce stars that sprang out of divine darkness.

All this I said (in an off-hand way) to the old woman; and I put the brown

paper in my pocket along with the chalks, and possibly other things.

I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical

are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife,

for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things

in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age

of the great epics is past.

With my stick and my knife, my chalks and my brown paper,

I went out on to the great downs. I crawled across those colossal

contours that express the best quality of England, because they

are at the same time soft and strong. The smoothness of them

has the same meaning as the smoothness of great cart-horses,

or the smoothness of the beech-tree; it declares in the teeth

of our timid and cruel theories that the mighty are merciful.

As my eye swept the landscape, the landscape was as kindly

as any of its cottages, but for power it was like an earthquake.

The villages in the immense valley were safe, one could see,

for centuries; yet the lifting of the whole land was like

the lifting of one enormous wave to wash them all away.

I crossed one swell of living turf after another, looking for a place

to sit down and draw. Do not, for heaven's sake, imagine I was going

to sketch from Nature. I was going to draw devils and seraphim,

and blind old gods that men worshipped before the dawn of right,

and saints in robes of angry crimson, and seas of strange green,

and all the sacred or monstrous symbols that look so well in bright

colours on brown paper. They are much better worth drawing than Nature;

also they are much easier to draw. When a cow came slouching

by in the field next to me, a mere artist might have drawn it;

but I always get wrong in the hind legs of quadrupeds. So I drew

the soul of the cow; which I saw there plainly walking before me

in the sunlight; and the soul was all purple and silver, and had

seven horns and the mystery that belongs to all the beasts. But

though I could not with a crayon get the best out of the landscape,

it does not follow that the landscape was not getting the best out

of me. And this, I think, is the mistake that people make about the

old poets who lived before Wordsworth, and were supposed not to care

very much about Nature because they did not describe it much.

They preferred writing about great men to writing about great hills;

but they sat on the great hills to write it. They gave out much

less about Nature, but they drank in, perhaps, much more. They

painted the white robes of their holy virgins with the blinding

snow, at which they had stared all day. They blazoned the shields

of their paladins with the purple and gold of many heraldic sunsets.

The greenness of a thousand green leaves clustered into the live

green figure of Robin Hood. The blueness of a score of forgotten

skies became the blue robes of the Virgin. The inspiration went

in like sunbeams and came out like Apollo.

But as I sat scrawling these silly figures on the brown paper, it began

to dawn on me, to my great disgust, that I had left one chalk, and that a

most exquisite and essential chalk, behind. I searched all my pockets,

but I could not find any white chalk. Now, those who are acquainted

with all the philosophy (nay, religion) which is typified in the art

of drawing on brown paper, know that white is positive and essential.

I cannot avoid remarking here upon a moral significance. One of the

wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals, is this,

that white is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is

a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as

black. When, so to speak, your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses;

when it grows white-hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three

defiant verities of the best religious morality, of real Christianity,

for example, is exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of

religious morality is that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence

of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and

separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean

not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a

plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or

not seen.

Chastity does not mean abstention from s****l wrong; it means

something flaming, like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in

many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost

said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. In a sense our age

has realised this fact, and expressed it in our sullen costume.

For if it were really true that white was a blank and colourless

thing, negative and non-committal, then white would be used instead

of black and grey for the funeral dress of this pessimistic period.

We should see city gentlemen in frock coats of spotless silver

linen, with top hats as white as wonderful arum lilies. Which is

not the case.

I sat on the hill in a sort of despair. There was no town

nearer than Chichester at which it was even remotely probable

that there would be such a thing as an artist's colourman.

And yet, without white, my absurd little pictures would be as

pointless as the world would be if there were no good people in it.

I stared stupidly round, racking my brain for expedients.

Then I suddenly stood up and roared with laughter, again and again,

so that the cows stared at me and called a committee. Imagine a

man in the Sahara regretting that he had no sand for his hour-glass.

Imagine a gentleman in mid-ocean wishing that he had brought some

salt water with him for his chemical experiments. I was sitting on

an immense warehouse of white chalk. The landscape was made

entirely out of white chalk. White chalk was piled more miles until

it met the sky. I stooped and broke a piece off the rock I sat on;

it did not mark so well as the shop chalks do; but it gave the

effect. And I stood there in a trance of pleasure, realising that

this Southern England is not only a grand peninsula, and a tradition

and a civilisation; it is something even more admirable. It is a

piece of chalk.

In the 1600s, Balthasar Gracian, a jesuit priest wrote 300 aphorisms on living life called "The Art of Worldly Wisdom." Join our newsletter below and read them all, one at a time.