The downside of borrowing a book from the library is that parting with it is such sweet sorrow. I've already renewed "Varied Types" but now tis time to return it...and yet ...I've grown accustomed to it. [Cue music].
I've grown accustomed to its faceOh let's not go quietly into that good night - how about some last excerpts for olde time's sake?
It almost makes the day begin
I've grown accustomed to the binding and the pages quaintly old
Its heft, its type, its chapters, its words
Are second nature to me now
Like breathing out and breathing in
I was serenely independent and content before we met
Surely I could always be that way again and yet
I've grown accustomed to this book, accustomed to this wit
Accustomed to this book.
The centre of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel. The boast of the realist is that he cuts into the heart of life; but he makes a very shallow incision...
*
One of the values we have really lost in recent fiction is the value of eloquence. The modern literary artist is compounded of almost every man except the orator...The ancient sea of human passion upon which high words and great phrases are the resplendent foam is just now at a low ebb. We have even gone the length of congratulating ourselves because we can see the mud and the monsters at the bottom...
In another age...prose [rose] into a chant...[as] Meg Merrilies hurled at Ellangowan, at the rulers of Britain:
"Ride your ways, Laird of Ellangowan; ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram --this day have ye quenched seven smoking hearths. See if the fire in your ain parlour burns the blyther for that. Ye have riven the thack of seven cottar houses. Look if your ain roof-tree stands the faster for that. Ye may stable your stirks in the sheilings of Dern-cleugh. See that the hare does not couch on the hearthstone of Ellangowan. Ride your ways, Godfrey Bertrain."
A man will not reach eloquence if he is afraid of bombast, just as a man will not jump a hedge if he is afraid of a ditch...Scott's bombast, therefore, will always be stirring to anyone who approaches it, as he should approach all of literature, as a little child. An appreciation of Scott might be made almost a test of decadence. If ever we lose touch with this one most reckless and defective writer, it will be a proof to us that we have erected round ourselves a false cosmos, a world of lying and horrible perfection, leaving outside of it Walter Scott and that strange old world which is as confused and as indefensible and as inspiring and as healthy as he. --Chesterton's "Varied Types"
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