A PIECE OF CHALK
Q-What was the controversy between the old woman and writer on the brown paper?
In the summer holidays he went into the kitchen (which along with the rest of the house) by putting six very bright colored chalks in his pocket. He asked the owner of the kitchen if she had any brown paper. She mistook the purpose and the rationale of the existence of brown paper. She seemed to have an idea that if a person wanted brown paper he must be waiting to tie up parcels, which was the last thing he wanted to do indeed. Hence she dwelt very much on the varying qualities of toughness and endurance in the material. He explained to her that he only wanted to draw pictures on it, and he did not want them to endure in the least; and that from his point of view, therefore, it was a question not of tough consistency but of responsive surface, a thing comparatively irrelevant in a parcel. When she understood that he wanted to draw she offered to overwhelm him with notepaper, apparently supposing that he did his notes and correspondence on old brown paper wrappers from motives of economy. He then tried to explain the rather delicate logical shade, that he not only liked brown paper, but quality of brownness in paper. After that he put that brown paper in his pocket and other things and went out on to the great downs.
Q- What type of drawing did the writer do in the story? Discuss his thoughts about nature.
When he went on to the great downs, he crawled across those colossal counters that express the best quality of England, because they are at the same time soft and strong. His eyes swept the landscape, landscape was as kindly as any of it’s cottages, but for power it was like an earthquake. The villages in the immense valley were safe, one could see, for centuries; yet the lifting of the whole land was like lifting of one enormous wave to wash them all away. He crosses one swell of living turf after another, looking for a place to sit down or draw. He was going to sketch from Nature. He was going to draw 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. They are much better worth drawing than Nature; also they are much easier to draw. He drew the soul of the cow, which he saw there plainly walking before him, in the sunlight; and he soul was all purple and silver and have seven horns and the mystery belongs to all the beasts. But though he did not find the best crayon which get the best effect of landscape. He thought the old poets were supposed not to care about Nature because they did describe it much. He had left one chalk, and that a most exquisite and essential chalk, behind. One of the wise and awful truths which this brown paper art reveals, is this, that white is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing.