Excerpt from a writer posing as journalist for whom journalistic scruples was something to which one must subject an exacting gaze
In a charming and artful essay of 1908 entitled “A Piece of Chalk,” G. K. Chesterton writes about taking some brown paper and colored chalks to the Sussex downs on a fine summer day to do Chestertonian drawings of “devils and seraphim, and blind old gods that men worshipped before the dawn of right, and saints in robes of angry crimson, and seas of strange green, and all the sacred or monstrous symbols that look so well in bright colours on brown paper.” But as he begins drawing Chesterton realizes that he has left behind “a most exquisite and essential” chalk—his white chalk. He goes on:
One of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals is that . . . white is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. . . . Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.
Since Chesterton wrote these bubbly words, the world has seen two world wars and a holocaust, and God seems to have switched to gray as the color of virtue—or decency, as we are now content to call it. The heroes and heroines of our time are the quiet, serious, obsessively hardworking people whose cumbersome abstentions from wrongdoing and sober avoidances of personal display have a seemliness that is like the wearing of drab colors to a funeral.
Janet Malcolm thing on the zeitgeist in the Potemkin art world village whose child all involved it took pains to raise.