tivity. But it seems strange that they
always rebuke it as if it were a blind vulgarity like the red
plush of a parvenu; a mere insensibility to a mere incongruity.
For in fact the insensibility is in the critics and not the artists.
It is an insensibility not to an accidental incongruity but to an
artistic contrast. Indeed it is an insensibility of a somewhat
tiresome kind, which can often be noticed in those sceptics who
make a science of folk-lore. The mark of them is that they fail
to see the importance of finding the upshot or climax of a tale,
even when it is a fairy-tale. Since the old devotional doctors
and designers were never tired of insisting on the sufferings of
the holy poor to the point of squalor, and simultaneously insisting
on the sumptuousness of the subject kings to the point of swagger,
it would really seem not entirely improbable that they may have been
conscious of the contrast themselves. I confess this is an insensibility,
not to say stupidity, in the sceptics and simplifiers, which I
find very fatiguing. I do not mind a man not believing a story,
but I confess I am bored stiff (if I may be allowed the expression)
by a man who can tell a story without seeing the point of
the story, considered as a story or even considered as a lie.
And a man who sees the rags and the royal purple as a clumsy
inconsistency is merely missing the meaning of a deliberate design.
He is like a man who should hear the story of King Cophetua and the beggar
maid and say doubtfully that it was hard to recognise it as really _a
mariage de convenance_; a phrase which (I may remark in parenthesis but
not without passion) is not the French for "a marriage of convenience,"
any more than _hors d'oeuvre_ is the French for "out of work";
but may be more rightly rendered in English as "a suitable match."
But nobody thought the match of the king and the beggar maid
conventionally a suitable match; and nobody would ever have
thought the story worth telling if it had been. It is like saying
that Diogenes, remaining in his tub after the offer of Alexander,
must have been unaware of the opportunities of Greek architecture;
or like saying that Nebuchadnezzar eating grass is clearly inconsistent
with court etiquette, or not to be found in any fashionable cookery book.
I do not mind the learned sceptic saying it is a legend or a lie;
but I weep for him when he cannot see the gist of it, I might even
say the joke of it. I do not obje