The Advantages of Having One Leg - Page 2

hassock. William III.
died by falling over a molehill; I do not suppose that with all his
varied abilities he could have managed to fall over a mountain.
But when all this is allowed for, I repeat that we may ask a happy man
(not William III.) to put up with pure inconveniences, and even make
them part of his happiness. Of positive pain or positive poverty
I do not here speak. I speak of those innumerable accidental
limitations that are always falling across our path--bad weather,
confinement to this or that house or room, failure of appointments
or arrangements, waiting at railway stations, missing posts,
finding unpunctuality when we want punctuality, or, what is worse,
finding punctuality when we don't. It is of the poetic pleasures
to be drawn from all these that I sing--I sing with confidence
because I have recently been experimenting in the poetic pleasures
which arise from having to sit in one chair with a sprained foot,
with the only alternative course of standing on one leg like a stork--
a stork is a poetic simile; therefore I eagerly adopted it.

To appreciate anything we must always isolate it, even if
the thing itself symbolise something other than isolation.
If we wish to see what a house is it must be a house in some
uninhabited landscape. If we wish to depict what a man really
is we must depict a man alone in a desert or on a dark sea sand.
So long as he is a single figure he means all that humanity means;
so long as he is solitary he means human society; so long
as he is solitary he means sociability and comradeship.
Add another figure and the picture is less human--not more so.
One is company, two is none. If you wish to symbolise
human building draw one dark tower on the horizon; if you
wish to symbolise light let there be no star in the sky.
Indeed, all through that strangely lit season which we
call our day there is but one star in the sky--a large,
fierce star which we call the sun. One sun is splendid;
six suns would be only vulgar. One Tower Of Giotto is sublime;
a row of Towers of Giotto would be only like a row of white posts.
The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry
of nature in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love in
following the single woman; the poetry of religion in worshipping
the single star. And so, in the same pensive lucidity, I find
the poetry of all human anatomy in standing on a single leg.
To express complete and perfect leggishness the leg must stand
in sublime isolation, like the tower in the wilderness.
As Ibsen so finely says, the strongest leg is that which
stands most alone.

This lonely leg on which I rest has all the simplicity
of some Doric column. The students of architecture tell us
that the only