I sometimes fancy that every great city must have been built by night.
At least, it is only at night that every part of a great city is
great. All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps
architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks. At
least, I think many people of those nobler trades that work by night
(journalists, policemen, burglars, coffee-stall keepers, and such
mistaken enthusiasts as refuse to go home till morning) must often have
stood admiring some black bulk of building with a crown of battlements
or a crest of spires and then burst into tears at daybreak to discover
that it was only a haberdasher’s shop with huge gold letters across the
face of it.
.....
I had a sensation of this sort the other day as I happened to be
wandering in the Temple Gardens towards the end of twilight. I sat down
on a bench with my back to the river, happening to choose such a place
that a huge angle and façade of building jutting out from the Strand
sat above me like an incubus. I dare say that if I took the same seat
to-morrow by daylight I should find the impression entirely false. In
sunlight the thing might seem almost distant; but in that half-darkness
it seemed as if the walls were almost falling upon me. Never before have
I had so strongly the sense which makes people pessimists in politics,
the sense of the hopeless height of the high places of the earth. That
pile of wealth and power, whatever was its name, went up above and
beyond me like a cliff that no living thing could climb. I had an
irrational sense that this thing had to be fought, that I had to fight
it; and that I could offer nothing to the occasion but an indolent
journalist with a walking-stick.
Almost as I had the thought, two windows were lit in that black, blind
face. It was as if two eyes had opened in the huge face of a sleeping
giant; the eyes were too close together, and gave it the suggestion of a
bestial sneer. And either by accident of this light or of some other, I
could now read the big letters which spaced themselves across the front;
it was the Babylon Hotel. It was the perfect symbol of everything that I
should like to pull down with my hands if I could. Reared by a detected
robber, it is framed to be the fashionable and luxurious home of
undetected robbers. In the house of man are many mansions; but there is
a class of men who feel normal nowhere except in the Babylon Hotel or
in Dartmoor Gaol. That big black face, which was staring at me with its
flaming eyes too close together, that was indeed the giant of all epic
and fairy tales. But, alas! I was not the giant-killer; the hour had
come, but not the man. I sat down on the seat again (I had had one wild
impulse to climb up the front of the hotel and fall in at one of the
windows), and I tried to think, as all decent people are thinking, what
one can really do. And all the time that oppressive wall went up in
front of me, and took hold upon the heavens like a house of the gods.
.....
It is remarkable that in so many great wars it has been the defeated
who have won. The people who were left worst at the end of the war
were generally the people who were left best at the end of the whole
business. For instance, the Crusades ended in the defeat of the
Christians. But they did not end in the decline of the Christians; they
ended in the decline of the Saracens. That huge prophetic wave of Moslem
power which had hung in the very heavens above the towns of Christendom,
that wave was broken, and never came on again. The Crusaders had saved
Paris in the act of losing Jerusalem. The same applies to that epic of
Republican war in the eighteenth century to which we Liberals owe our
political creed. The French Revolution ended in defeat: the kings came
back across a carpet of dead at Waterloo. The Revolution had lost its
last battle; but it had gained its first object. It had cut a chasm.
The world has never been the same since. No one after that has ever been
able to treat the poor merely as a pavement.
These jewels of God, the poor, are still treated as mere stones of the
street; but as stones that may sometimes fly. If it please God, you and
I may see some of the stones flying again before we see death. But here
I only remark the interesting fact that the conquered almost always
conquer. Sparta killed Athens with a final blow, and she was born again.
Sparta went away victorious, and died slowly of her own wounds. The
Boers lost the South African War and gained South Africa.
And this is really all that we can do when we fight something really
stronger than ourselves; we can deal it its death-wound one moment; it
deals us death in the end. It is something if we can shock and jar the
unthinking impetus and enormous innocence of evil; just as a pebble on
a railway can stagger the Scotch express. It is enough for the great
martyrs and criminals of the French revolution, that they have surprised
for all time the secret weakness of the strong. They have awakened and
set leaping and quivering in his crypt for ever the coward in the hearts
of kings.
.....
When Jack the Giant-Killer really first saw the giant his experience was
not such as has been generally supposed. If you care to hear it I will
tell you the real story of Jack the Giant-Killer. To begin with, the
most awful thing which Jack first felt about the giant was that he was
not a giant. He came striding across an interminable wooded plain, and
against its remote horizon the giant was quite a small figure, like a
figure in a picture--he seemed merely a man walking across the grass.
Then Jack was shocked by remembering that the grass which the man was
treading down was one of the tallest forests upon that plain. The man
came nearer and nearer, growing bigger and bigger, and at the instant
when he passed the possible stature of humanity Jack almost screamed.
The rest was an intolerable apocalypse.
The giant had the one frightful quality of a miracle; the more he became
incredible the more he became solid. The less one could believe in him
the more plainly one could see him. It was unbearable that so much of
the sky should be occupied by one human face. His eyes, which had stood
out like bow windows, became bigger yet, and there was no metaphor that
could contain their bigness; yet still they were human eyes. Jack’s
intellect was utterly gone under that huge hypnotism of the face that
filled the sky; his last hope was submerged, his five wits all still
with terror.
But there stood up in him still a kind of cold chivalry, a dignity of
dead honour that would not forget the small and futile sword in his
hand. He rushed at one of the colossal feet of this human tower, and
when he came quite close to it the ankle-bone arched over him like a
cave. Then he planted the point of his sword against the foot and leant
on it with all his weight, till it went up to the hilt and broke the
hilt, and then snapped just under it. And it was plain that the giant
felt a sort of prick, for he snatched up his great foot into his great
hand for an instant; and then, putting it down again, he bent over and
stared at the ground until he had seen his enemy.
Then he picked up Jack between a big finger and thumb and threw him
away; and as Jack went through the air he felt as if he were flying from
system to system through the universe of stars. But, as the giant had
thrown him away carelessly, he did not strike a stone, but struck soft
mire by the side of a distant river. There he lay insensible for several
hours; but when he awoke again his horrible conqueror was still in
sight. He was striding away across the void and wooded plain towards
where it ended in the sea; and by this time he was only much higher than
any of the hills. He grew less and less indeed; but only as a really
high mountain grows at last less and less when we leave it in a railway
train. Half an hour afterwards he was a bright blue colour, as are the
distant hills; but his outline was still human and still gigantic. Then
the big blue figure seemed to come to the brink of the big blue sea, and
even as it did so it altered its attitude. Jack, stunned and bleeding,
lifted himself laboriously upon one elbow to stare. The giant once more
caught hold of his ankle, wavered twice as in a wind, and then went over
into the great sea which washes the whole world, and which, alone of all
things God has made, was big enough to drown him.