I’ve been reading Chesterton recently, an activity that can be absolutely disastrous for anyone who has any pretensions to saying anything, at least according to one view of the situation. An assessment of and a love of absolutely everything seems to languidly roll off the tongue of that corpulent Christian with the lucidity of a stop sign in the mid-afternoon sun. I simply don’t know another author so capable of reducing the most convoluted machinations of scientists, philosophers, and maniacs into pockets of dissipating laughing gas while simultaneously aggrandizing a lark or a crumb of Worcestershire cheese to a point that one almost wants to fall down and venerate it.
If I want to tell you that the power of a piece of art is its limits–its frame, or that virtue can yield horror as well as happiness, or that reasonings are without foundation when they lack a faith in reason, Chesterton has swooped in before me. And if he hasn’t, it won’t be long before I discover that Lewis, Williams, or Hopkins have.
What I want to say is hardly new, and I can hardly hope to say it better than those giants, with their ink-stained hands and feather quill swords, already have.
It may or may not have been Samuel Johnson that declared it useless to write any more heroic couplets since Alexander Pope had perfected them. In any case, someone did. The idea is simple: a perfect thing scorns more of its kind. Once the sonnet is perfected, the sonnet is dead… well, frozen, at least. Greatness garrotes its imitations.
