Beauties of Tennyson by Lord Alfred Tennyson
I always enjoy Tennyson, but I never imagined that one day Tennyson's lyrical, sentimental works would give me the creeps...oops!
But it happened! Just when I was reading Tennyson's laud of a little shell. Perhaps it was because I became hardened during the years, or is it that Tennyson, in this collection of poems, just became too sentimental?
Nevertheless, fortunately (perhaps I should say unfortunately), I still feel touched when reading the stanza:
There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate.
She is coming, my dove, my dear;
She is coming, my life, my fate;
The red rose cries, "She is near, she is near;"
And the white rose weeps, "She is late;"
The larkspur listens, "I hear, I hear;"
And the lily whispers, "I wait."
If we ignores the sentimental repetition, it is still a lovely passage describing yearning for one's lover, isn't it?
The Ball and the Cross by G. K. Chesterton
Chesterton is an author I became fond of after leaving school, although The Ball and The Cross is the first book that I read through.
Humorous, ironic, but never bitter. That's what Chesterton is and sometimes his writing leaves me the impression that if a satirist is harsh in his irony, the reason must that he cherishes humanity--instead of hating it--to much.
Then we have The Ball and the Cross. The Ball symbolizes the earth, thus nature or science, while the cross, naturally, symbolizes the religion--Christianity. The conflict between these two concepts is embodied through fighting between two persons: the atheist James Turnbull and the pious Roman Catholic Evan MacIan. However, as their duel is perpetually postponed by various disturbances, they finally reached kind of mutual understanding. They both give up their extremist attitudes and feel compassion for human race.
In a way Chesterton is always nostalgic. It seems that he detests those modernist social values, thus we have his comment upon machinery:
It is a characteristic of all things now called "efficient", which means
mechanical and calculated, that if they go wrong at all they go entirely
wrong. There is no power of retrieving a defeat, as in simpler and more
living organisms. A strong gun can conquer a strong elephant, but a wounded elephant can easily conquer a broken gun. Thus the Prussian monarchy in the eighteenth century, or now, can make a strong army merely by making the men afraid. But it does it with the permanent possibility that the men may some day be more afraid of their enemies than of their officers. Thus the drainage in our cities so long as it is quite solid means a general safety, but if there is one leak it means concentrated poison—an explosion of deathly germs like dynamite, a spirit of stink. Thus, indeed, all that excellent machinery which is the swiftest thing on earth in saving human labour is also the slowest thing on earth in resisting human interference. It may be easier to get chocolate for nothing out of a shopkeeper than out of an automatic machine. But if you did manage to steal the chocolate, the automatic machine would be much less likely to run after you.
Indeed Chesterton does not oppose science or technology, but I think he does oppose the mechanical way of modern society that favors efficiency rather than human complicity. But that does not mean Chesterton favors religion over science. What he favors, I think, is that, have faith but never goes too far, no matter what you believe in.