I was walking the other day in a kitchen garden, which I find has
somehow got attached to my premises, and I was wondering why I liked it.
After a prolonged spiritual self-analysis I came to the conclusion that
I like a kitchen garden because it contains things to eat. I do not mean
that a kitchen garden is ugly; a kitchen garden is often very beautiful.
The mixture of green and purple on some monstrous cabbage is much
subtler and grander than the mere freakish and theatrical splashing
of yellow and violet on a pansy. Few of the flowers merely meant for
ornament are so ethereal as a potato. A kitchen garden is as beautiful
as an orchard; but why is it that the word “orchard” sounds as beautiful
as the word “flower-garden,” and yet also sounds more satisfactory? I
suggest again my extraordinarily dark and delicate discovery: that it
contains things to eat.
The cabbage is a solid; it can be approached from all sides at once; it
can be realized by all senses at once. Compared with that the sunflower,
which can only be seen, is a mere pattern, a thing painted on a flat
wall. Now, it is this sense of the solidity of things that can only be
uttered by the metaphor of eating. To express the cubic content of a
turnip, you must be all round it at once. The only way to get all round
a turnip at once is to eat the turnip. I think any poetic mind that has
loved solidity, the thickness of trees, the squareness of stones, the
firmness of clay, must have sometimes wished that they were things
to eat. If only brown peat tasted as good as it looks; if only white
firwood were digestible! We talk rightly of giving stones for bread: but
there are in the Geological Museum certain rich crimson marbles,
certain split stones of blue and green, that make me wish my teeth were
stronger.
Somebody staring into the sky with the same ethereal appetite declared
that the moon was made of green cheese. I never could conscientiously
accept the full doctrine. I am Modernist in this matter. That the moon
is made of cheese I have believed from childhood; and in the course of
every month a giant (of my acquaintance) bites a big round piece out of
it. This seems to me a doctrine that is above reason, but not contrary
to it. But that the cheese is green seems to be in some degree actually
contradicted by the senses and the reason; first because if the moon
were made of green cheese it would be inhabited; and second because if
it were made of green cheese it would be green. A blue moon is said to
be an unusual sight; but I cannot think that a green one is much more
common. In fact, I think I have seen the moon looking like every other
sort of cheese except a green cheese. I have seen it look exactly like a
cream cheese: a circle of warm white upon a warm faint violet sky above
a cornfield in Kent. I have seen it look very like a Dutch cheese,
rising a dull red copper disk amid masts and dark waters at Honfleur.
I have seen it look like an ordinary sensible Cheddar cheese in an
ordinary sensible Prussian blue sky; and I have once seen it so naked
and ruinous-looking, so strangely lit up, that it looked like a Gruyere
cheese, that awful volcanic cheese that has horrible holes in it, as
if it had come in boiling unnatural milk from mysterious and unearthly
cattle. But I have never yet seen the lunar cheese green; and I
incline to the opinion that the moon is not old enough. The moon, like
everything else, will ripen by the end of the world; and in the last
days we shall see it taking on those volcanic sunset colours, and
leaping with that enormous and fantastic life.
But this is a parenthesis; and one perhaps slightly lacking in prosaic
actuality. Whatever may be the value of the above speculations, the
phrase about the moon and green cheese remains a good example of this
imagery of eating and drinking on a large scale. The same huge fancy
is in the phrase “if all the trees were bread and cheese,” which I have
cited elsewhere in this connection; and in that noble nightmare of a
Scandinavian legend, in which Thor drinks the deep sea nearly dry out
of a horn. In an essay like the present (first intended as a paper to
be read before the Royal Society) one cannot be too exact; and I will
concede that my theory of the gradual vire-scence of our satellite is
to be regarded rather as an alternative theory than as a law finally
demonstrated and universally accepted by the scientific world. It is a
hypothesis that holds the field, as the scientists say of a theory when
there is no evidence for it so far.
But the reader need be under no apprehension that I have suddenly gone
mad, and shall start biting large pieces out of the trunks of trees;
or seriously altering (by large semicircular mouthfuls) the exquisite
outline of the mountains. This feeling for expressing a fresh solidity
by the image of eating is really a very old one. So far from being a
paradox of perversity, it is one of the oldest commonplaces of religion.
If any one wandering about wants to have a good trick or test for
separating the wrong idealism from the right, I will give him one on the
spot. It is a mark of false religion that it is always trying to
express concrete facts as abstract; it calls sex affinity; it calls wine
alcohol; it calls brute starvation the economic problem. The test of
true religion is that its energy drives exactly the other way; it is
always trying to make men feel truths as facts; always trying to make
abstract things as plain and solid as concrete things; always trying to
make men, not merely admit the truth, but see, smell, handle, hear,
and devour the truth. All great spiritual scriptures are full of the
invitation not to test, but to taste; not to examine, but to eat. Their
phrases are full of living water and heavenly bread, mysterious manna
and dreadful wine. Worldliness, and the polite society of the world, has
despised this instinct of eating; but religion has never despised it.
When we look at a firm, fat, white cliff of chalk at Dover, I do not
suggest that we should desire to eat it; that would be highly abnormal.
But I really mean that we should think it good to eat; good for some
one else to eat. For, indeed, some one else is eating it; the grass that
grows upon its top is devouring it silently, but, doubtless, with an
uproarious appetite.