In Topsy-Turvy Land

Last week, in an idle metaphor, I took the tumbling of trees
and the secret energy of the wind as typical of the visible world
moving under the violence of the invisible. I took this metaphor
merely because I happened to be writing the article in a wood.
Nevertheless, now that I return to Fleet Street (which seems to me,
I confess, much better and more poetical than all the wild woods
in the world), I am strangely haunted by this accidental comparison.
The people's figures seem a forest and their soul a wind.
All the human personalities which speak or signal to me seem to have
this fantastic character of the fringe of the forest against the sky.
That man that talks to me, what is he but an articulate tree?
That driver of a van who waves his hands wildly at me to tell me
to get out of the way, what is he but a bunch of branches stirred
and swayed by a spiritual wind, a sylvan object that I can continue
to contemplate with calm? That policeman who lifts his hand
to warn three omnibuses of the peril that they run in encountering
my person, what is he but a shrub shaken for a moment with that
blast of human law which is a thing stronger than anarchy?
Gradually this impression of the woods wears off. But this
black-and-white contrast between the visible and invisible, this deep
sense that the one essential belief is belief in the invisible as against
the visible, is suddenly and sensationally brought back to my mind.
Exactly at the moment when Fleet Street has grown most familiar (that is,
most bewildering and bright), my eye catches a poster of vivid violet,
on which I see written in large black letters these remarkable words:
"Should Shop Assistants Marry?"

. . . . .

When I saw those words everything might just as well
have turned upside down. The men in Fleet Street might
have been walking about on their hands. The cross of
St. Paul's might have been hanging in the air upside down.
For I realise that I have really come into a topsy-turvy country;
I have come into the country where men do definitely believe
that the waving of the trees makes the wind. That is to say,
they believe that the material circumstances, however black
and twisted, are more important than the spiritual realities,
however powerful and pure. "Should Shop Assistants Marry?" I am
puzzled to think what some periods and schools of human history
would have made of such a question. The ascetics of the East
or of some periods of the early Church would have thought
that the question meant, "Are not shop assistants too saintly,
too much of another world, even to feel the emotions of the sexes?"
But I suppose that is not what the purple poster means.
In some pagan cities it might have meant,