Chesterton: "Very Big Ideas in Very Small Spaces"

On art and limitation and "very big ideas in very small spaces":

"Meanwhile the philosophy of toy theatres is worth any one's consideration. All the essential morals which modern men need to learn could be deduced from this toy. Artistically considered, it reminds us of the main principle of art, the principle which is in most danger of being forgotten in our time. I mean the fact that art consists of limitation; the fact that art is limitation. Art does not consist in expanding things. Art consists of cutting things down, as I cut down with a pair of scissors my very ugly figures of St. George and the Dragon. Plato, who liked definite ideas, would like my cardboard dragon; for though the creature has few other artistic merits he is at least dragonish. The modern philosopher, who likes infinity, is quite welcome to a sheet of the plain cardboard. . . . .

"This especially is true of the toy theatre; that, by reducing the scale of events it can introduce much larger events. Because it is small it could easily represent the earthquake in Jamaica. Because it is small it could easily represent the Day of Judgment. Exactly in so far as it is limited, so far it could play easily with falling cities or with falling stars. Meanwhile the big theatres are obliged to be economical because they are big. When we have understood this fact we shall have understood something of the reason why the world has always been first inspired by small nationalities. The vast Greek philosophy could fit easier into the small city of Athens than into the immense Empire of Persia. In the narrow streets of Florence Dante felt that there was room for Purgatory and Heaven and Hell. He would have been stifled by the British Empire. Great empires are necessarily prosaic; for it is beyond human power to act a great poem upon so great a scale. You can only represent very big ideas in very small spaces. My toy theatre is as philosophical as the drama of Athens."

--G.K. Chesterton,
     --from his essay "The Toy Theatre" from Tremendous Trifles

Montaigne's "Grotesques and Monstrous Bodies"

The opening sentences from Montaigne's essay "On Friendship" strike a chord:

As I was observing the way in which a painter in my employment goes about his work, I felt tempted to imitate him.  He chooses the best spot, in the middle of each wall, as the place for a picture, which he elaborates with all his skill; and the empty space all round he fills with grotesques; which are fantastic paintings with no other charm than their variety and strangeness.  And what are these things of mine, indeed, but grotesques and monstrous bodies, pieced together from sundry limbs, with no definite shape, and with no order, sequence, or proportion except by chance.

--Michel de Montaigne, 

(translated by J.M. Cohen, Penguin Books, 1958)

Three Coins from Guy Davenport

I love Guy Davenport's fine collection of critical essays: The Geography of the Imagination.  He had such a breadth and depth of knowledge, literary and humane, that he was able to bring to bear at a moment's notice, or so it feels, time and again.  Many of the essays began as lectures, composed while Davenport walked from his house to the university.  I wish I'd been in more than a few of those classes.

Here, I just want to share three quotations plucked almost at random from that fine book.

"Translation involves two languages; the translator is in constant danger of inventing a third that lies between, a treacherous nonexistent language suggested by the original and not recognized by the language into which the original is being transposed."

--from "Another Odyssey"


"Plutarch in the first structuralist study of myth, Isis and Osiris, demonstrates that there is no one way of telling the tales of the tribe. A myth is a pattern, not a script."

-- from "That Faire Field of Enna"



"Sir Walter Scott, out hunting and with some good lines suddenly in his head, brought down a crow, whittled a pen from a feather, and wrote the poem on his jacket in crow's blood."

--from "Finding"