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Title: First and Last

Author: H. Belloc

Release Date: April 19, 2003 [eBook #7352]
[Most recently updated: April 14, 2023]

Language: English

Produced by: Tonya Allen, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FIRST AND LAST ***




FIRST AND LAST

BY H. BELLOC




CONTENTS

 ON WEIGHING ANCHOR
 THE REVEILLON
 ON CHEESES
 THE CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY
 THE INVENTOR
 THE VIEWS OF ENGLAND
 THE LUNATIC
 THE INHERITANCE OF HUMOUR
 THE OLD GENTLEMAN’S OPINIONS
 ON HISTORICAL EVIDENCE
 THE ABSENCE OF THE PAST
 ST. PATRICK
 THE LOST THINGS
 ON THE READING OF HISTORY
 THE VICTORY
 REALITY
 ON THE DECLINE OF THE BOOK
 JOSÉ MARIA DE HEREDIA
 NORMANDY AND THE NORMANS
 THE OLD THINGS
 THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS
 THE ROMAN ROADS IN PICARDY
 THE REWARD OF LETTERS
 THE EYE-OPENERS
 THE PUBLIC
 ON ENTRIES
 COMPANIONS OF TRAVEL
 ON THE SOURCES OF RIVERS
 ON ERROR
 THE GREAT SIGHT
 THE DECLINE OF A STATE
 ON PAST GREATNESS
 MR. THE DUKE: THE MAN OF MALPLAQUET
 THE GAME OF CARDS
 “KING LEAR”
 THE EXCURSION
 THE TIDE
 ON A GREAT WIND
 THE LETTER
 THE REGRET
 THE END OF THE WORLD




FIRST AND LAST




On Weighing Anchor


Personally I should call it “Getting It up,” but I have always seen it
in print called “weighing anchor”—and if it is in print one must bow to
it. It does weigh.

There are many ways of doing it. The best, like all good things, has
gone for ever, and this best way was for a thing called a capstan to
have sticking out from it, movable, and fitted into its upper rim,
other things called capstan-bars. These, men would push singing a song,
while on the top of the capstan sat a man playing the fiddle, or the
flute, or some other instrument of music. You and I have seen it in
pictures. Our sons will say that they wish they had seen it in
pictures. Our sons’ sons will say it is all a lie and was never in
anything but the pictures, and they will explain it by some myth or
other.

Another way is to take two turns of a rope round a donkey-engine,
paying in and coiling while the engine clanks. And another way on
smaller boats is a sort of jack arrangement by which you give little
jerks to a ratchet and wheel, and at last It looses Its hold. Sometimes
(in this last way) It will not loose Its hold at all.

Then there is a way of which I proudly boast that it is the only way I
know, which is to go forward and haul at the line until It comes—or
does not come. If It does not come, you will not be so cowardly or so
mean as to miss your tide for such a trifle. You will cut the line and
tie a float on and pray Heaven that into whatever place you run, that
place will have moorings ready and free.

When a man weighs anchor in a little ship or a large one he does a
jolly thing! He cuts himself off and he starts for freedom and for the
chance of things. He pulls the jib a-weather, he leans to her slowly
pulling round, he sees the wind getting into the mainsail, and he feels
that she feels the helm. He has her on a slant of the wind, and he
makes out between the harbour piers. I am supposing, for the sake of
good luck, that it is not blowing bang down the harbour mouth, nor, for
the matter of that, bang out of it. I am supposing, for the sake of
good luck to this venture, that in weighing anchor you have the wind so
that you can sail with it full and by, or freer still, right past the
walls until you are well into the tide outside. You may tell me that
you are so rich and your boat is so big that there have been times when
you have anchored in the very open, and that all this does not apply to
you. Why, then, your thoughts do not apply to me nor to the little boat
I have in mind.

In the weighing of anchor and the taking of adventure and of the sea
there is an exact parallel to anything that any man can do in the
beginning of any human thing, from his momentous setting out upon his
life in early manhood to the least decision of his present passing day.
It is a very proper emblem of a beginning. It may lead him to that kind
of muddle and set-back which attaches only to beginnings, or it may get
him fairly into the weather, and yet he may find, a little way outside,
that he has to run for it, or to beat back to harbour. Or, more
generously, it may lead him to a long and steady cruise in which he
shall find profit and make distant rivers and continue to increase his
log by one good landfall after another. But the whole point of weighing
anchor is that he has chosen his weather and his tide, and that he is
setting out. The thing is done.

You will very commonly observe that, in land affairs, if good fortune
follows a venture it is due to the marvellous excellence of its
conductor, but if ill fortune, then to evil chance alone. Now, it is
not so with the sea.

The sea drives truth into a man like salt. A coward cannot long pretend
to be brave at sea, nor a fool to be wise, nor a prig to be a good
companion, and any venture connected with the sea is full of venture
and can pretend to be nothing more. Nevertheless there is a certain
pride in keeping a course through different weathers, in making the
best of a tide, in using cats’ paws in a dull race, and, generally, in
knowing how to handle the thing you steer and to judge the water and
the wind. Just because men have to tell the truth once they get into
tide water, what little is due to themselves in their success thereon
they are proud of and acknowledge.

If your sailing venture goes well, sailing reader, take a just pride in
it; there will be the less need for me to write, some few years hence,
upon the art of picking up moorings, though I confess I would rather
have written on that so far as the fun of writing was concerned. For
picking up moorings is a far more tricky and amusing business than
Getting It up. It differs with every conceivable circumstance of wind,
and tide, and harbour, and rig, and freeboard, and light; and then
there are so many stories to tell about it! As—how once a poor man
picked up a rich man’s moorings at Cowes and was visited by an
aluminium boat, all splendid in the morning sun. Or again—how a
stranger who had made Orford Haven (that very difficult place) on the
very top of an equinoctial springtide, picked up a racing mark-buoy,
taking it to be moorings, and dragged it with him all the way to
Aldborough, and that right before the town of Orford, so making himself
hateful to the Orford people.

But I digress....




The Reveillon


There was in the regiment with which I served a man called Frocot,
famous with his comrades because he had seen The Dead, for this
experience, though common among the Scotch, is rare among the French, a
sister nation. This man Frocot could neither write nor read, and was
also the strongest man I ever knew. He was quite short and exceedingly
broad, and he could break a penny with his hands, but this gift of
strength, though young men value it so much, was thought little of
compared with his perception of unseen things, for though the men, who
were peasants, professed to laugh at it, and him, in their hearts they
profoundly believed. It had been made clear to us that he could see and
hear The Dead one night in January during a snowstorm, when he came in
and woke me in barrack-room because he had heard the Loose Spur. Our
spurs were not buckled on like the officers’; they were fixed into the
heel of the boot, and if a nail loosened upon either side the spur
dragged with an unmistakable noise. There was a sergeant who (for some
reason) had one so loosened on the last night he had ever gone the
rounds before his death, for in the morning as he came off guard he
killed himself, and the story went about among the drivers that
sometimes on stable guard in the thick of the night, when you watched
all alone by the lantern (with your three comrades asleep in the straw
of an empty stall), your blood would stop and your skin tauten at the
sound of a loose spur dragging on the far side of the stable, in the
dark. But though many had heard the story, and though some had
pretended to find proof for it, I never knew a man to feel and know it
except this man Frocot on that night. I remember him at the foot of my
bed with his lantern waking me from the rooted sleep of bodily fatigue,
standing there in his dark blue driver’s coat and staring with terrible
eyes. He had undoubtedly heard and seen, but whether of himself from
within, imagining, or, as I rather believe, from without and
influenced, it is impossible to say. He was rough and poor, and he came
from the Forest of Ardennes.

The reason I remember him and write of him at this season is not,
however, this particular and dreadful visitation of his, but a folly or
a vision that befell him at this time of the year, now seventeen years
ago; for he had Christmas leave and was on his way from garrison to his
native place, and he was walking the last miles of the wood. It was the
night before Christmas. It was clear, and there was no wind, but the
sky was overcast with level clouds and the evening was very dark. He
started unfed since the first meal of the day; it was dark three hours
before he was up into the high wood. He met no one during all these
miles, and his body and his mind were lonely; he hoped to press on and
be at his father’s door before two in the morning or perhaps at one.
The night was so still that he heard no noise in the high wood, not
even the rustling of a leaf or a twig crackling, and no animal ran in
the undergrowth. The moss of the ride was silent under his heavy tread,
but now and then the steel of his side-arm clicked against a metal
button of the great cloak he wore. This sharp sound made him so
conscious of himself that he seemed to fill that forest with his own
presence and to be all that was, there or elsewhere. He was in a mood
of unreal and not holy things. The mood, remaining, changed its aspect,
and now he was so far from alone that all the trunks around him and the
glimmers of sky between bare boughs held each a spirit of its own, and
with the powerful imagination of the unlearned he could have spoken and
held communion with the trees; but it would have an evil communion, for
he felt this mood of his take on a further phase as he went deeper and
deeper still into these forests. He felt about him uneasily the sense
of doom. He was in that exaltation of fancy or dream when faint appeals
are half heard far off, but not by our human ears, and when whatever
attempts to pierce the armour of our mortality appeals to us by wailing
and by despairing sighs. It seemed to him that most unhappy things
passed near him in the air, and that the wood about him was full of
sobbing. Then, again, he felt his own mind within him begin to be
occupied by doubtful troubles worse than these terrors, an anxious
straining for ill news, for bitter and dreadful news, mixed with a
confused certitude that such news had come indeed, disturbed and
haunted him; and all the while about him in that stillness the rushing
of unhappy spirits went like a secret storm. He was clouded with the
mingled emotions of apprehension and of fatal mourning; he attempted to
remember the expectations that had failed him, friends untrue, and the
names of parents dead; but he was now the victim of this strange night
and unable (whether from hunger or fatigue, or from that unique power
of his to discern things beyond the world) to remember his life or his
definite aims at all, or even his own name. He was mixed with the whole
universe about him, and was suffering some loss so grievous that very
soon the gait of his march and his whole being were informed by a large
and final despair.

It was in this great and universal mood (granted to him as a seer,
though he was a common man) that he saw down the ride, but somewhat to
one side of it in the heart of the high wood, a great light shining
from a barn or shed that stood there in the undergrowth, and to this
light, though his way naturally led him to it, he felt also impelled by
an influence as strong as or stronger than the despair that had filled
his soul and all the woods around. He went on therefore quickly,
straining with his eyes, and when he came into the light that shone out
from this he saw a more brilliant light within, and men of his own kind
adoring; but the vision was confused, like light on light or like
vapours moving over bright metals in a cauldron, and as he gazed his
mind became still and the dread left him altogether. He said it was
like shutting a gentleman’s great oaken door against a driving storm.

This is the story he told me weeks after as we rode together in the
battery, for he hid it in his heart till the spring. As I say, I
believed him.

He was an unlearned man and a strong; he never worshipped. He was of
that plain stuff and clay on which has worked since all recorded time
the power of the Spirit.

He said that when he left (as he did rapidly leave) that light, peace
also left him, but that the haunting terror did not return. He found
the clearing and his father’s hut; fatigue and the common world indeed
returned, but with them a permanent memory of things experienced.

Every word I have written of him is true.




On Cheeses


If antiquity be the test of nobility, as many affirm and none deny
(saving, indeed, that family which takes for its motto “Sola Virtus
Nobilitas,” which may mean that virtue is the only nobility, but which
may also mean, mark you, that nobility is the only virtue—and anyhow
denies that nobility is tested by the lapse of time), _if_, I say,
antiquity be the only test of nobility, then cheese is a very noble
thing.

But wait a moment: there was a digression in that first paragraph which
to the purist might seem of a complicated kind.

Were I writing algebra (I wish I were) I could have analysed my
thoughts by the use of square brackets, round brackets, twiddly
brackets, and the rest, all properly set out in order so that a Common
Fool could follow them.

But no such luck! I may not write of algebra here; for there is a rule
current in all newspapers that no man may write upon any matter save
upon those in which he is more learned than all his human fellows that
drag themselves so slowly daily forward to the grave.

So I had to put the thing in the very common form of a digression, and
very nearly to forget that great subject of cheese which I had put at
the very head and title of this.

Which reminds me: had I followed the rule set down by a London
journalist the other day (and of the proprietor of his paper I will say
nothing—though I might have put down the remark to his proprietor) I
would have hesitated to write that first paragraph. I would have
hesitated, did I say? Griffins’ tails! Nay—Hippogriffs and other things
of the night! I would not have dared to write it at all! For this
journalist made a law and promulgated it, and the law was this: that no
man should write that English which could not be understood if all the
punctuation were left out. Punctuation, I take it, includes brackets,
which the Lord of Printers knows are a very modern part of punctuation
indeed.

Now let the horripilised reader look up again at the first paragraph
(it will do him no harm), and think how it would look all written out
in fair uncials like the beautiful Gospels of St. Chad, which anyone
may see for nothing in the cathedral of Lichfield, an English town
famous for eight or nine different things: as Garrick, Doctor Johnson,
and its two opposite inns. Come, read that first paragraph over now and
see what you could make of it if it were written out in uncials—that
is, not only without punctuation, but without any division between the
words. Wow! As the philosopher said when he was asked to give a plain
answer “Yes” or “No.”

And now to cheese. I have had quite enough of digressions and of
follies. They are the happy youth of an article. They are the
springtime of it. They are its riot. I am approaching the middle age of
this article. Let us be solid upon the matter of cheese.

I have premised its antiquity, which is of two sorts, as is that of a
nobleman. First, the antiquity of its lineage; secondly, the antiquity
of its self. For we all know that when we meet a nobleman we revere his
nobility very much if he be himself old, and that this quality of age
in him seems to marry itself in some mysterious way with the antiquity
of his line.

The lineage of cheese is demonstrably beyond all record. What did the
faun in the beginning of time when a god surprised him or a mortal had
the misfortune to come across him in the woods? It is well known that
the faun offered either of them cheese. So he knew how to make it.

There are certain bestial men, hangers-on of the Germans, who would
contend that this would prove cheese to be acquired by the Aryan race
(or what not) from the Dolichocephalics (or what not), and there are
certain horrors who descend to imitate these barbarians—though
themselves born in these glorious islands, which are so steep upon
their western side. But I will not detain you upon these lest I should
fall head foremost into another digression and forget that my article,
already in its middle age, is now approaching grey hairs.

At any rate, cheese is very old. It is beyond written language. Whether
it is older than butter has been exhaustively discussed by several
learned men, to whom I do not send you because the road towards them
leads elsewhere. It is the universal opinion of all most accustomed to
weigh evidence (and in these I very properly include not only such
political hacks as are already upon the bench but sweepingly every
single lawyer in Parliament, since any one of them may tomorrow be a
judge) that milk is older than cheese, and that man had the use of milk
before he cunningly devised the trick of squeezing it in a press and by
sacrificing something of its sweetness endowed it with a sort of
immortality.

The story of all this has perished. Do not believe any man who
professes to give it you. If he tells you some legend of a god who
taught the Wheat-eating Race, the Ploughers, and the Lords to make
cheese, tell him such tales are true symbols, but symbols only. If he
tells you that cheese was an evolution and a development, oh!
then!—bring up your guns! Open on the fellow and sweep his intolerable
lack of intelligence from the earth. Ask him if he discovers reality to
be a function of time, and Being to hide in clockwork. Keep him on the
hop with ironical comments upon how it may be that environment can act
upon Will, while Will can do nothing with environment—whose proper name
is mud. Pester the provincial. Run him off the field.

But about cheese. Its noble antiquity breeds in it a noble diffusion.

This happy Christendom of ours (which is just now suffering from an
indigestion and needs a doctor—but having also a complication of
insomnia cannot recollect his name) has been multifarious
incredibly—but in nothing more than in cheese!

One cheese differs from another, and the difference is in sweeps, and
in landscapes, and in provinces, and in countrysides, and in climates,
and in principalities, and in realms, and in the nature of things.
Cheese does most gloriously reflect the multitudinous effect of earthly
things, which could not be multitudinous did they not proceed from one
mind.

Consider the cheese of Rocquefort: how hard it is in its little box.
Consider the cheese of Camembert, which is hard also, and also lives in
a little box, but must not be eaten until it is soft and yellow.
Consider the cheese of Stilton, which is not made there, and of
Cheddar, which is. Then there is your Parmesan, which idiots buy rancid
in bottles, but which the wise grate daily for their use: you think it
is hard from its birth? You are mistaken. It is the world that hardens
the Parmesan. In its youth the Parmesan is very soft and easy, and is
voraciously devoured.

Then there is your cheese of Wensleydale, which is made in Wensleydale,
and your little Swiss cheese, which is soft and creamy and eaten with
sugar, and there is your Cheshire cheese and your little Cornish
cheese, whose name escapes me, and your huge round cheese out of the
Midlands, as big as a fort whose name I never heard. There is your
toasted or Welsh cheese, and your cheese of Pont-l’evêque, and your
white cheese of Brie, which is a chalky sort of cheese. And there is
your cheese of Neufchâtel, and there is your Gorgonzola cheese, which
is mottled all over like some marbles, or like that Mediterranean soap
which is made of wood-ash and of olive oil. There is your Gloucester
cheese called the Double Gloucester, and I have read in a book of
Dunlop cheese, which is made in Ayrshire: they could tell you more
about it in Kilmarnock. Then Suffolk makes a cheese, but does not give
it any name; and talking of that reminds me how going to Le Quesnoy to
pass the people there the time of day, and to see what was left of that
famous but forgotten fortress, a young man there showed me a cheese,
which he told me also had no name, but which was native to the town,
and in the valley of Ste. Engrace, where is that great wood which shuts
off all the world, they make their cheese of ewe’s milk and sell it in
Tardets, which is their only livelihood. They make a cheese in
Port-Salut which is a very subtle cheese, and there is a cheese of
Limburg, and I know not how many others, or rather I know them, but you
have had enough: for a little cheese goes a long way. No man is a
glutton on cheese.

What other cheese has great holes in it like Gruyere, or what other is
as round as a cannon-ball like that cheese called Dutch? which reminds
me:—

Talking of Dutch cheese. Do you not notice how the intimate mind of
Europe is reflected in cheese? For in the centre of Europe, and where
Europe is most active, I mean in Britain and in Gaul and in Northern
Italy, and in the valley of the Rhine—nay, to some extent in Spain (in
her Pyrenean valleys at least)—there flourishes a vast burgeoning of
cheese, infinite in variety, one in goodness. But as Europe fades away
under the African wound which Spain suffered or the Eastern barbarism
of the Elbe, what happens to cheese? It becomes very flat and similar.
You can quote six cheeses perhaps which the public power of Christendom
has founded outside the limits of its ancient Empire—but not more than
six. I will quote you 253 between the Ebro and the Grampians, between
Brindisi and the Irish Channel.

I do not write vainly. It is a profound thing.




The Captain of Industry


The heir of the merchant Mahmoud had not disappointed that great
financier while he still lived, and when he died he had the
satisfaction of seeing the young man, now twenty-five years of age,
successfully conducting his numerous affairs, and increasing (fabulous
as this may seem) the millions with which his uncle entrusted him.

Shortly after Mahmoud’s death the prosperity of the firm had already
given rise to a new proverb, and men said: “Do you think I am
Mahmoud’s-Nephew?” when they were asked to lend money or in some other
way to jeopardize a few coppers in the service of God or their
neighbour.

It was also a current expression, “He’s rich as Mahmoud’s-Nephew,” when
comrades would jest against some young fellow who was flusher than
usual, and could afford a quart or even a gallon of wine for the
company; while again the discontented and the oppressed would mutter
between their teeth: “Heaven will take vengeance at last upon these
Mahmoud’s-Nephews!” In a word, “Mahmoud’s-Nephew” came to mean
throughout the whole Caliphate and wherever the True Believers spread
their empire, an exceedingly wealthy man. But Mahmoud himself having
been dead ten years and his heir the fortunate head of the
establishment being now well over thirty years of age, there happened a
very inexplicable and outrageous accident: he died—and after his death
no instructions were discovered as to what should be done with this
enormous capital, no will could be found, and it happened moreover to
be a moment of great financial delicacy when the manager of each
department in the business needed all the credit he could get.

In such a quandary the Chief Organizer and confidential friend, Ahmed,
upon whom the business already largely depended, and who was so
circumstanced that he could draw almost at will upon the balances,
imagined a most intelligent way of escaping from the difficulties that
would arise when the death of the principal was known.

He caused a quantity of hay, of straw, of dust and of other worthless
materials to be stuffed into a figure of canvas; this he wrapped round
with the usual clothes that Mahmoud’s-Nephew had worn in the office, he
shrouded the face with the hood which his chief had commonly worn
during life, and having so dressed the lay figure and secretly buried
the real body, he admitted upon the morning after the death those who
first had business with his master.

He met them at the door with smiles and bows, saying: “You know,
gentlemen, that like most really successful men, my chief is as silent
as his decisions are rapid; he will listen to what you have to say, and
it will be a plain yes or no at the end of it.”

These gentlemen came with a proposal to sell to the firm for the sum of
one million dinars a barren rock in the Indian Sea, which was not even
theirs, and on which indeed not one of them had ever set eyes. Their
claim to advance so original a proposal was that to their certain
knowledge two thousand of the wealthiest citizens of their town were
willing to buy the rock again at a profit from whoever should be its
possessor during the next few weeks in the fond hope of selling it once
again to provincials, clerics, widows, orphans, and in general the
uninstructed and the credulous—among whom had been industriously spread
the report that the rock in question consisted of one solid and
flawless diamond.

These gentlemen sitting round the table before the shrouded figure laid
down their proposals, whereupon the manager briefly summed up what they
had said, and having done so, replied: “Gentlemen, his lordship is a
man of few words; but you will have your answer in a moment if you will
be good enough to rise, as he is at this moment expecting a deputation
from the Holy Men who are entreating him to provide the cost of a
mosque in one of the suburbs.”

The proposers of the bargain rose, greatly awed and pleased by the
silence and dignity of the financier who apparently remained for a
moment discussing their proposals without gesture and in a tone too low
for them to hear, while his manager bent over to listen.

“It is ever so,” said one of them, “you may ever know the greatest men
by their silence.”

“You are right,” said another, “he is not one to be easily deceived.”

The manager in a moment or two rejoined them at the door. “Gentlemen,”
he said, smiling, “my chief has heard your arguments and has expressed
his assent to your conditions.”

They went out, delighted at the success of their mission, and
congratulated Ahmed upon the financier’s genius.

“He does not,” said the manager, laughing in hearty agreement, “bestow
himself as a present upon all and sundry. Nor is he often caught
indulging in short bouts of sleep, nor are flies diabolically left to
repose undisturbed upon his features—but you must excuse me, I hear the
Holy Men,” and indeed from the inner room came a noise of speechifying
in that doleful sing-song which is associated in Bagdad with the
practice of religion.

The gentlemen who had thus had the luck to interview Mahmoud’s-Nephew
with such success in the matter of the Diamond Island, soon spread
about the news, and confirmed their fellow-citizens in the certitude
that a great financier is neither talkative nor vivacious. “Still
waters run deep,” they said, and all those to whom they said it nodded
in a wise acquiescence. Nor had the Manager the least difficulty in
receiving one set of customers after another and in negotiating within
three weeks an infinite amount of business, all of which confirmed
those who had the pleasure of an audience with the stuffed dummy that
great fortunes were made and retained by reticence and a contempt for
convivial weakness.

At last the ingenious man of affairs, to whom the whole combination was
due, was not a little disturbed to receive from the Caliph a note
couched in the following terms:

“The Commander of the Faithful and the Servant of the Merciful whose
name be exalted, to the Nephew of Mahmoud:

“My Lord:—

“It has been the custom since the days of my grandfather (May his soul
see God!) for the more wealthy of the Faithful to be called to my
councils, and upon my summoning them thither it has not been unusual
for them to present sums varying in magnitude but always proportionate
to their total fortunes. My court will receive signal honour if you
will present yourself after the morning prayer of the day after
to-morrow. My treasurer will receive from you with gratitude and
remembrance upon the previous day and not later than noon, the sum of
one million dinars.”

Here, indeed, was a perplexity. The payment of the money was an easy
matter and was duly accomplished; but how should the lay figure which
did duty in such domestic scenes as the negotiation of loans, the
bullying of debtors, the purchase of options, and the cheating of the
innocent and the embarrassed, take his place in the Caliph’s council
and remain undiscovered? For great as was the reputation of
Mahmoud’s-Nephew for discretion and for golden silence, such as are
proper to the accumulation of great wealth, there would seem a
necessity in any political assembly to open the mouth from time to
time, if only for the giving of a vote.

But Ahmed, who had by this time accumulated into his own hands the
millions formerly his master’s, finally solved the problem. Judicious
presents to the servants of the palace and the public criers made his
way the easier, and on the summoning of the council Mahmoud’s-Nephew,
whose troublesome affection of the throat was now publicly discussed,
was permitted to bring into the council-room his private secretary and
manager.

Moreover at the council, as at his private office, the continued
taciturnity of the millionaire could not but impress the politicians as
it had already impressed the financial world.

“He does not waste his breath in tub-thumping,” said one, looking
reverently at the sealed figure.

“No,” another would reply, “they may ridicule our old-fashioned,
honest, quiet Mohammedan country gentlemen, but for common sense I will
back them against all the brilliant paradoxical young fellows of our
day.”

“They say he is very kind at heart and lovable,” a third would then
add, upon which a fourth would bear his testimony thus:

“Yes, and though he says nothing about it, his charitable gifts are
enormous.”

By the second meeting of the council the lay figure had achieved a
reputation of so high a sort that the Caliph himself insisted upon
making him a domestic adviser, one of the three who perpetually
associated with the Commander of the _Faithful_ and directed his
policy. For the universal esteem in which the new councillor was held
had affected that Prince very deeply.

Here there arose a crux from which there could be no escape, as one of
the three chief councillors, Mahmoud’s-Nephew, must speak at last and
deliver judgments!

The Manager, first considering the whole business, and next adding up
his private gains, which he had carefully laid out in estates of which
the firm and its employés knew nothing, decided that he could afford to
retire. What might happen to the general business after his withdrawal
would not be his concern.

He first gave out, therefore, that the millionaire was taken
exceedingly ill, and that his life was despaired of: later, within a
few hours, that he was dead.

So far from attempting to allay the panic which ensued, Ahmed frankly
admitted the worst.

With cries of despair and a confident appeal to the justice of Heaven
against such intrigues, the honest fellow permitted the whole of the
vast business to be wound up in favour of newcomers, who had not
forgotten to reward him, and soothing as best he could the ruined
crowds of small investors who thronged round him for help and advice,
he retired under an assumed name to his highly profitable estates,
which were situated in the most distant provinces of the known world.

As for Mahmoud’s-Nephew, three theories arose about him which are still
disputed to this day:

The first was that his magnificent brain with its equitable judgment
and its power of strict secrecy, had designed plans too far advanced
for his time, and that his bankruptcy was due to excess of wisdom.

The second theory would have it that by “going into politics” (as the
phrase runs in Bagdad) he had dissipated his energies, neglected his
business, and that the inevitable consequences had followed.

The third theory was far more reasonable. Mahmoud’s-Nephew, according
to this, had towards the end of his life lost judgment; his garrulous
indecision within the last few days before his death was notorious: in
the Caliph’s council, as those who should best know were sure, one
could hardly get a word in edgewise for his bombastic self-assurance;
while in matters of business, to conduct a bargain with him was more
like attending a public meeting than the prosecution of negotiations
with a respectable banker.

In a word, it was generally agreed that Mahmoud’s-Nephew’s success had
been bound up with his splendid silence, his fall, bankruptcy, and
death, with a lesion of the brain which had disturbed this miracle of
self-control.




The Inventor


I had a day free between two lectures in the south-west of England, and
I spent it stopping at a town in which there was a large and very
comfortable old posting-house or coaching-inn. I had meant to stay some
few hours there and to take the last train out in the evening, and I
had meant to spend those hours alone and resting; but this was not
permitted me, for just as I had taken up the local paper, which was a
humble, reasonable thing, empty of any passion and violence and very
reposeful to read, a man came up and touched my left elbow sharply: a
gesture not at all to my taste nor, I think, to that of anyone who is
trying to read his paper.

I looked up and saw a man who must have been quite sixty years of age.
He had on a soft, felt slouch hat, a very old and greenish black coat;
he stooped and shuffled; he was clean-shaven, with long grey hair, and
his eyes were astonishingly bright and piercing and set close together.

He said, “I beg your pardon.”

I said, “Eh, what?”

He said again “I beg your pardon” in the tones of a man who almost
commands, and having said this he put his hat on the table, dragged a
chair quite close to mine, and pulled a folded bunch of foolscap sheets
out of his pocket. His manner was that of a man who engages your
attention and has a right to engage it. There were no preliminaries and
there was no introduction. This was apparently his manner, and I
submitted.

“I have here,” he said, fixing me with his intense eyes, “the plans for
a speedometer.”

“Oh!” said I.

“You know what a speedometer is?” he asked suspiciously.

I said yes. I said it was a machine for measuring the speed of
vehicles, and that it was compounded of two (or more) Greek words.

He nodded; he was pleased that I knew so much, and could therefore
listen to his tale and understand it. He pulled his grey baggy trousers
up over the knee, settled himself, sitting forward, and opened his
document. He cleared his throat, still fixing me with those eyes of
his, and said—

“Every speedometer up to now has depended upon the same principle as a
Watt’s governor; that is, there are two little balls attached to each
by a limb to a central shaft: they rise and fall according to their
speed of rotation, and this movement is indicated upon a dial.”

I nodded.

He cleared his throat again. “Of course, that is unsatisfactory.”

“Damnably!” said I, but this reply did not check him.

“It works tolerably well at high speeds; at low speeds it is useless;
and then again there is a very rapid fluctuation, and the instrument is
of only approximate precision.”

“Not it!” said I to encourage him.

“There is one exception,” he continued, “to this principle, and that is
a speedometer which depends upon the introduction of resistance into a
current generated by a small magneto. The faster the magneto turns the
stronger the current generated, and the change is indicated upon a
dial.”

“Yes,” said I sadly, “as in the former case so in this; the change of
speed is indicated upon a dial.” And I sighed.

“But this method also,” he went on tenaciously, “has its defects.”

“You may lay to that,” I interrupted.

“It has the defect that at high speeds its readings are not quite
correct, and at very low speeds still less so. Moreover, it is said
that it slightly deteriorates with the passage of time.”

“Now that,” I broke in emphatically, “is a defect I have discovered
in——”

But he put up his hand to stop me. “It slightly deteriorates, I say,
with the passage of time.” He paused a moment impressively. “No one has
hitherto discovered any system which will accurately record the speed
of a vehicle or of any rotary movement and register it at the lowest as
at the highest speeds.” He paused again for a still longer period in
order to give still greater emphasis to what he had to say. He
concluded in a new note of sober triumph: “I have solved the problem!”

I thought this was the end of him, and I got up and beamed a
congratulation at him and asked if he would drink anything, but he only
said, “Please sit down again and I will explain.”

There is no way of combating this sort of thing, and so I sat down, and
he went on:

“It is perfectly simple....” He passed his hand over his forehead. “It
is so simple that one would say it must have been thought of before;
but that is what is always said of a great invention.... Now I have
here” (and he opened out his foolscap) “the full details. But I will
not read them to you; I will summarize them briefly.”

“Have you a plan or anything I could watch?” said I a little anxiously.

“No,” he answered sharply, “I have not, but if you like I will draw a
rough sketch as I go along upon the margin of your newspaper.”

“Thank you,” I said.

He drew the newspaper towards him and put it on his knee. He pulled out
a pencil; he held the foolscap up before his eye, and he began to
describe.

“The general principle upon which my speedometer reposes,” he said
solemnly, “is the coordination of the cylinder and the cone upon an
angle which will have to be determined in practice, and will probably
vary for different types. But it will never fall below 15 nor rise over
43.”

“I should have thought——” I began, but he told me I could not yet have
grasped it, and that he wished to be more explicit.

“On a king bolt,” he said, occasionally consulting his notes, “runs a
pivot in bevel which is kept in place by a small hair-spring, which
spring fits loosely on the Conkling Shaft.”

“Exactly,” said I, “I see what is coming.”

But he wouldn’t let me off so easily.

“Yes, of course you are going to say that the whole will be keyed
together, and that the T-pattern nuts on a movable shank will be my
method of attachment to the fixed portion next to the cam? Eh? So it
is, but” (and here his eye brightened), “_anyone_ could have arranged
that. My particularity is that I have a freedom of movement even at the
lowest speeds, and an accuracy of notation even at the highest, which
is secured in a wholly novel manner ... and yet so simply. What do you
think it is?”

I affected to look puzzled, and thought for a moment. “I cannot
imagine,” said I, “unless——”

“No,” he interrupted, “do not try to guess it, for you never will. _I
turn the flange inward_ on a Wilkinson lathe and give it a parabolic
section so that the axes are always parallel to each other and to the
shaft.... There!”

I had no idea the man could be so moved: there was jubilation in his
voice.

“There!” he said again, as though some effort of the brain had
exhausted him. “It can’t be touched, mind you,” he added suspiciously;
“I’ve taken out the provisional patents. There’s one man I know wants
to fight it in the courts as an infringement on Wilkinson’s own patent,
but it can’t be touched!” He shook his head decisively. “No! my
lawyer’s certain of that—and so’m I!”

Here there was a break in his communications, so to speak, and he had
apparently run out. It was not for me to wind him up again. I watched
him with a sombre relief as he stood up again to full height, leaned
his head back, and sighed profoundly with satisfaction and with
completion. He folded up his specification and put it in his pocket
again. He tore off the incomprehensible sketch he had made with his
pencil while he was speaking, and put it by me on the mantelshelf. “You
might like to keep it,” he said pathetically; “it’s a document, that
is; it will be famous some day.” He looked at it lovingly, almost as
though he was going to take it back again: but he thought better of it.

I was waiting, I will not say itching, for him to take his leave, when
a god or demon, that same perhaps which had treated the poor fellow as
a jest for a whole lifetime, inspired him to take a very false step
indeed. He had already taken up his hat and was turning as though to go
to the door, when the unfortunate thought struck him.

“What would you do?” he said.

“How do you mean?” I answered.

“Why, what would you do to try and get it taken up and talked about?”

Then it was my turn, and I let him have it.

“You must get the Press and the Government to work together,” I said
rapidly, “and particularly in connection with the new Government
Service of Camion’s Fettle-Trains and Cursory Circuits.”

He nodded like one who thoroughly understands and desires to hear more.

“Speed,” I added nonchalantly, “and the measure of it are of course
essentials in their case.”

He nodded again.

“And they have never really settled the problem ... especially about
Fettle-Trains.”

“No,” said he ponderously, “so I understand.”

“Well now,” I went on, full of the chase, “you will naturally ask me
who are you to go to?” I scratched my nose. “You know the Fusionary
Office, as we call it? It is really, of course, a part of the
Stannaries. But the Chief Permanent Secretary likes to have it called
the Fusionary Office; it’s his vanity.”

“Yes,” said he eagerly, “yes, go on!”

“They always have the same hours,” I said, “four to eleven.”

“Four to _what_?” he asked, looking up.

“To eleven,” I repeated sharply; “but you’d much better call round
about three.”

He looked bewildered.

“Don’t interrupt,” I said, seeing him open his lips, “or I shall lose
the thread. It’s rather complicated. You call at three by the little
door in Whitehall on the Embankment side towards the Horse Guards
looking south, and _don’t_ ring the bell.”

“Why not?” he asked. I thought for the moment he might begin to cry.

“Oh, well,” I said testily, “you mustn’t ask those questions. All these
institutions are very old institutions with habits and prejudices of
their own. You mustn’t ring the bell, that’s all; they don’t like it;
you must just wait until they open; and then, if you take _my_ advice,
don’t write a note or ask to interview the First Analyist. Don’t do any
of the usual things, but just fill up one of the regular Treasury forms
and state that you have come with regard to the Perception and
Mensuration advertisements.”

His face was pained and wrinkled as he heard me, but he said, “I beg
your pardon ... but shall I have it all explained to me at the office?”

“Certainly not!” I said, aghast; “it’s just because you might have so
much difficulty there that I’m explaining everything to you.”

“Yes, I know,” he said doubtfully; “thank you.”

“I hope you’ll try and follow what I say,” I continued a little
wearily; “I have special opportunities for knowing.... Political, you
know.”

“Certainly,” he said, “certainly; but about those forms?”

“Well,” I said, “you didn’t suppose they supplied them, did you?”

“I almost did,” he ventured.

“Oh, you did,” said I, with a loud laugh, “well, you’re wrong there.
However, I dare say I’ve got one on me.” He looked up eagerly as I felt
in my pockets. I brought out a telegraph blank, two letters, and a
tobacco pouch. I looked at them for a moment. “No,” said I, “I haven’t
got one; it’s a pity, but I’ll tell you who will give you one; you know
the place opposite, where the bills are drafted?”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” he said, admitting ignorance for the first time
in this conversation and perhaps in his life.

“Well,” said I impatiently, “never mind, anyone will show you. Go
there, and if they don’t give you a form they’ll show you a copy of
Paper B, which is much the same thing.”

“Thank you,” said he humbly, and he got up to move out. He was going a
little groggily, his eyes were dull and sodden. He presented all the
aspect of a man under a heavy strain.

“You’ve got it all clear, I hope?” I asked cheerfully as he neared the
door.

“Oh, yes!” he said. “Thank you; yes!”

“Anything else?” I shouted as he passed out into the courtyard.
“Anything else I can do? You’ll always find me in the room over the
office, Room H, down the little iron staircase,” I nodded genially to
him as he disappeared.

In this way did we exchange, the Inventor and I, those expert
confidences and mutual aids in either’s technical skill which are too
rarely discovered in modern travel.




The Views of England


England is a country with edges and with a core. It is a country very
small for the number of people who live in it, and very appreciable to
the eye for the traveller who travels on foot or in a boat from place
to place. Considering the part it has in the making of the world, it
might justly be compared to a jewel which is very small and very
valuable and can almost be held in the hand. The physical appreciation
of England is to be reached by an appreciation of landscape.

It so happens that England is traversed by remarkable and sudden
ranges; hills with a sharp escarpment overlooking great undulating
plains. This is not true of any other one country of Europe, but it is
true of England, and a man who professes to consider, to understand, to
criticize, to defend, and to love this country, must know the Pennines,
the Cotswolds, the North and the South Downs, the Chilterns, the
Mendips, and the Malverns; he must know Delamere Forest, and he must
know the Hill of Beeston, from which all Cheshire may be perceived. If
he knows these heights and has long considered the prospects which they
afford, he can claim to have seen the face of England.

It is deplorable that our modern method of travel does cut us off from
such experiences. They were not only common to, they were necessary to
our fathers; the roads would not be at the expense of tunnelling
through hills, and (what is more important) when those men who most
mould the knowledge of the country by the country (the people who deal
with its soil, who live separate upon its separate farms) visited each
other upon horses; and horses, unlike railway trains, cannot climb
hills. They puff, they heave, they snort, as do railway trains, but
they climb them well.

On this account, because the roads for the carriages went over hills,
and because the method of visiting even a near neighbour would permit
you to go over hills, the England of quite a little time ago was
familiar with the half-dozen great landscapes of England. You may see
it in that most individual, that most peculiar, and, I think, that most
glorious school of painters, the English landscape painter, Constable
with his thick colours, Turner with his wonderment, and even the
portrait painters in their backgrounds depend upon the view of the
plains from a height. To-day our landscape painters sometimes do the
same, but the market for that emotion is capricious, it is no longer
the secure and natural way of presenting England to English eyes.

If you will consider these plains at the foot of the English hills you
will find in them the whole history of the country, and the whole
meaning of it as well. Two occur to me first: The view of the Weald
(both Kentish and Sussex) through which the influence of Europe
perpetually approached the island, not only in the crisis of the Roman
or the Norman invasions, but in a hundred episodes stretched out
through two thousand years—and the view of the Thames Valley as one
gets it on a clear day from the summits of the North Downs when one
looks northward and sees very faintly the Chilterns along the horizon.

This last is obscured by London. One needs a very particular
circumstance in which to appreciate it. The air must be dry and clear,
there must be little or no wind, or if there is a wind it must be a
strong one from the south and west that has already driven the smoke
from the western edge of the town. When this is so, a man looks right
across to the sandy heights just north of the Thames, and far beyond he
sees the Chilterns, like a landfall upon the rim of the world. He looks
at all that soil on which the government of this country has been
rooted. He sees the hill of Windsor. He overlooks, though he cannot
perceive at so great a distance, the two great schools of the rich; he
has within one view the principal Castle of the Kings, the place of
their council, and the cathedral of their capital city: so true is it
that the Thames made England.

Then, if you consider the upper half of that valley, the view is from
the ridge of the Berkshire hills, or, better still, from Cumnor, or
from the clump of trees above Faringdon. From such look-outs the
astonishing loneliness which England has had the strength to preserve
in this historic belt of land profoundly strikes a man. You can see to
your left and, a long way off, the hill where, as is most probable,
Alfred thrust back the Pagans, and so saved one-half of Christendom.
Oxford is within your landscape. The roll upwards in a glacis of the
Cotswold, the nodal point of the Roman roads at Cirencester, and the
ancient crossings of the Thames.

From the Cotswold again westward you look over a sheer wall and see one
of those differences which make up England. For the passage from the
Upper Thames to the flat and luxuriant valley floor of the Severn is a
transition (if it be made by crossing the hills) more sudden than that
between many countries abroad. Had our feudalism cut England into
provinces we should here have two marked provincial histories marching
together, for the natural contrast is greater than between Normandy and
Brittany at any part of their march or between Aragon and Castile at
any part of theirs. I do not know what it is, but the view of the
jagged Malvern seen above the happy mists of autumn, when these mists
lie like a warm fleece upon the orchards of the vale, preserving them
of a morning until the strengthening of the sun, the sudden aspect, I
say, of those jagged peaks strikes one like a vision of a new world.
How many men have thought it! How often it ought to be written down! It
hangs in the memory of the traveller like a permanent benediction, and
remains in his mind a standing symbol of peace.

I have no space to speak of how from Beeston you see all Cheshire; the
Vale Royal to your left, and the main plain of the county to your
right. The whole stretch is framed in with definite hills, the last and
highly marked line of the Pennines bounds the view upon the east; upon
the west the first of the Welsh hills stands sharply in a long even
line against the fading sun; and on the north you see the height of
Delamere. There are three other views in the North of England, the
first easy, the last two difficult to obtain, all between them making
up a true picture of what the North of England is. The first (and it is
very famous) is the view over the industrial ferment of South
Lancashire, seen from the complete silence of the hills round the Peak.
No matter where you cross that summit, even if you take the high road
from the Snake Inn to Glossop, where the easiest, and therefore the
least striking, passage has been chosen, much more if you follow the
wild heights a little to the south until you come to a more abrupt
descent on which there are not even paths, there comes a point where
there is presented to you in one great offering, without introduction,
a vision of the vast energies of England.

I remember once in winter when the sun sets early (it was December, and
seven years ago) coming upon this sight. The clouds were so arranged
after an Atlantic storm that all the heaven (which here is always
spacious and noble) was covered with a rolling curtain as though a man
had pulled it with his hands. But far off, westward, there was a broad
red band of sunset, and against this the smoke, the tall stacks, the
violence and the wealth of that cauldron. One could almost hear the
noise. It did arrest one; it was as though someone had painted
something unreal, to be a mystical emblem, and to sum up in one picture
all those million despairs, misfortunes, chances, disciplines, and
acquirements which make up the character of Lancashire men. This vision
also many men have seen and many men shall write of. Very rarely upon
the surface of the earth does the soul take on so immediate and obvious
a physical body as does the soul of that industrial world in the view
of which I speak.

And the two other views are, first, that difficult one which one must
pick and choose but which can be obtained from several sites
(especially at the end of Wensleydale), and which is the view of that
rich, old, and agricultural Yorkshire, from which the county draws its
traditions and in which, perhaps, the truest spirit of the county still
abides; for Yorkshire is at heart farmer, and possibly after three
generations of a town, a man from this part of England still looks more
lively when he sees a lively horse put before him for judgment. Second,
the view from Cross Fell, very, very difficult to obtain, for often
when one climbs Cross Fell in sunny weather, one gets up over the Scar
under the threat of cloud, and one only reaches the summit by the time
the evening or the mist has fallen; but if one has the luck to see the
view of which I speak, then one sees all that rugged remaining part of
the Northwest exactly as the Romans saw it, and as it has been for two
thousand years, with the high land of the lakes and the stony nature
and the sparseness of all the stretch about one, and the approach to a
foreign land.

I have often thought when I have heard men blaming the story of England
or her present mood for false reasons, or, what is worse, praising her
for false reasons; when I have heard the men of the cities talking wild
talk got from maps and from print, or the disappointed men talking wild
talk of another kind, expecting impossible or foreign perfections from
their own kindred—I have often thought, I say, when I have heard the
folly upon either side (and the mass of it daily increases)—that it
would be a wholesome thing if one could take such a talker and make him
walk from Dover to the Solway, exercising some care that he should rise
before the sun, and that he should see in clear weather the views of
which I speak. A man who has done that has seen England—not the name or
the map or the rhetorical catchword, but the thing. And it does not
take so very long.




The Lunatic


Those who are interested in what simple straightforward people call the
Pathology of Consciousness have gathered a great body of evidence upon
the various manias that affect men, and there is an especially
interesting department of this which concerns illusion upon matters
which in the sane are determinable by the senses and common experience.
Thus one man will believe himself to be the Emperor of China, another
to be William Shakespeare or some other impossible person, though one
would imagine that his every accident of daily life would convince him
to the contrary.

I had recently occasion to watch one of the most harmless and yet one
of the most striking of these illusions in a private asylum which has
specialized, if I may so express myself, upon men of letters. The case
was harmless and even benign, for the poor fellow was not of a
combative disposition to begin with, was of too careful and dignified a
temperament to show more than slight irritation if his delusion were
contradicted. This misfortune, however, very rarely overtook him, for
those who came to visit him were warned to humour his whim. This
eccentricity I will now describe.

He imagined, nay he was convinced, that he was existing fifty years in
the future, and that the interest of his conversation for others would
lie in his reminiscence of the state of society in which we are
actually living today. If anyone who had not been warned was imprudent
enough to suggest that the conversation was taking place in 1909 would
smile gently, nod, and say rather bitterly, “Yes, I know, I know,” as
though recognizing a universal plot against him which he was too weary
to combat. But when he had said this he would continue to talk on as
though both parties to the conversation were equally convinced that the
year was really 1960 or thereabouts. Whether to add zest to what he
said or from some part of his malady consonant with all the rest, my
poor friend (who had been a journalist and will very possibly be a
journalist again) presupposed that the whole structure of society as we
now know it had changed and that his reminiscences were those of a past
time which, on account of some great revolution or other, men
imperfectly comprehended, so that it must be of the highest interest
and advantage to listen to the testimony of an eye-witness upon them.

What especially delighted him (for he was a zealous admirer of the
society he described) was the method of government.

“There was no possibility of going wrong,” he said to me with curious
zeal, “not a shadow of danger! It would be difficult for you to
understand now how easily the system worked!” And here he sighed
profoundly. “And why on earth,” he continued, “men should have
destroyed such an instrument when they had it is more than I can
understand. There it was in every country in Europe; there were
elections; all the men voted. And mind you, the elections were not so
very far apart. Most people living at one election could remember the
last, so there was no time for abuses to spring up.... Well, everybody
voted. If a man wanted one thing he voted one way, and if he wanted
another thing he voted the other way. The people for whom he voted
would then meet, and with a sense of duty which I cannot exaggerate
they would work month after month exactly to reproduce the will of
those who had appointed them. It was a great time!”

“Yet,” said I, “even so there must have been occasional divergences
between what these people did and what the nation wanted.”

“I see what you mean,” he said, musing, “you mean that all the devotion
in the world, the purest of motives and the most devoted sense of duty,
could not keep the elected always in contact with the electors. You are
right. But you must remember that in every country there was a
machinery, with regard to the most important measures at least, which
could throw the matter before the electors to be re-decided. I can
remember no important occasion upon which the machinery was not brought
into use.”

“But, after all, the value of the decisions of the electorate you are
describing,” said I, continuing to humour him, “would depend upon the
information which the electorate had received as well as upon their
judgment.”

“As for their judgment,” he said, a little shortly, “it is not for our
time to criticize theirs. Human judgment is not infallible, but I can
well remember how in every nation of Europe it was the fixed conviction
of the citizens that judgment was their chief characteristic, and
especially judgment in national affairs. I cannot believe that so
universal an attitude of the mind could have arisen had it not been
justified. But as for information, they had the Press ... a free
Press!” Here he fell into a reverie, so powerfully did his supposed
memories affect him.

I was willing to lead him on, because this kind of illness is best met
by sympathy, and also because I was not uninterested to discover how
his own trade had affected him.

“You would hardly understand it,” he said sadly; “what you hear from me
is nothing but words.... I wish I could have shown you one of those
great houses with information pouring in as rapid, as light, and as
clear, from every hidden corner of the world, digested by master brains
into the most lucid and terse presentment of it possible, and then
whirled out on great wheels to be distributed by the thousand and the
hundred thousand, to the hungry intelligence of Europe. There was
nothing escaped it—nothing. In every capital were crowds of men
dispatched from the other capitals of our civilization, moving with
ease in the wealthiest houses, and exquisitely in touch with the most
delicate phases of national life everywhere. And these men were such
experts in selection that a picture of Europe as a whole was presented
every morning to each particular part of Europe; and nowhere was this
more successfully accomplished than in my own beloved town of London.”

“It must have been useful,” I said, “not only for the political
purposes you describe, but also for investors. Indeed, I should imagine
that the two things ran together.”
“You are right,” he said with interest, “the wide knowledge which even
the poorest of the people possessed upon foreign affairs, through the
action of the Press, was, further, of the utmost and most beneficent
effect in teaching even the smallest proprietor what he need do with
his capital. A discovery of metallic ore—especially of gold—a new
invention, anything which might require development, was at once
presented in its most exact aspect to the reader.”

“It was probably upon that account,” said I, “that property was so
equally distributed, and that so general a prosperity reigned as you
have often described to me.”

“You are right,” said he; “it was mainly this accurate and universal
daily information which produced such excellent results.”

“But it occurs to me,” said I, by way of stimulating his conversation
with an objection, “that if so passionate and tenacious a habit of
telling the exact truth upon innumerable things was present in this old
institution of which you speak, it cannot but have bred a certain
amount of dissension, and it must sometimes even have done definite
harm to individuals whose private actions were thus exposed.”

“You are right,” said he; “the danger of such misfortunes was always
present, and with the greatest desire in the world to support only what
was worthy the writers of the journals of which I speak would
occasionally blunder against private interests; but there was a
remedy.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“Why, the law provided that in this matter twelve men called a jury,
instructed by a judge, after the matter had been fully explained to
them by two other men whose business it was to examine the truth boldly
for the sake of justice—I say the law provided that the twelve men
after this process should decide whether the person injured should
receive money from the newspaper or no, and if so, in what amount. And,
lest there should still be any manner of doubt, the judge was permitted
to set aside their verdict if he thought it unjust. To secure his
absolute impartiality as between rich and poor he was paid somewhat
over £100 a week, a large salary in those days, and he was further
granted the right of imprisoning people at will or of taking away their
property if he believed them to obstruct his judgment. Nor were these
the only safeguards. For in the case of very rich men, to whom justice
might not be done on account of the natural envy of their poorer
fellow-citizens, it was arranged that the jury should consist only of
rich men. In this way it was absolutely certain that a complete
impartiality would reign. We shall never see those days again,” he
concluded.

“But do you not think,” I said before I left him, “that the social
perfection of the kind you have described must rather have been due to
some spirit of the time than to particular institutions? For after all
the zealous love of justice and the sense of duty which you describe
are not social elements to be produced by laws.”

“Possibly,” he said, wearily, “possibly, but we shall never see it
again!”

And I left him looking into the fire with infinite sadness and
reflecting upon his lost youth and the year 1909: a pathetic figure,
and one whose upkeep during the period of his deficiency was a very
serious drain upon the resources of his family.




The Inheritance of Humour


There are some truths which seem to get old almost as soon as they are
born, and that simply because they are so astonishingly true that
people soon get to feel as though they have known them all their lives;
and such a truth is that which first one writer and then another in the
last five years has been insisting upon, until it is already a perfect
commonplace that nations do not know their own qualities. The inmost,
the characteristic thing, that which differentiates one community from
another, as tastes or colours differentiate things—_that_ a nation
hardly ever knows until it is pointed out to it by some foreigner or by
some observer from within. It cannot know it, because one cannot tell
the very atmosphere in which one lives. It is universal and therefore
unnoticed. Now, if this is true of any nation, it is particularly true
of England. And English people need to be told morning, noon, and
night, not indeed the particular national characteristic which they
have, since for this no particular name could be found, but rather what
its evidences are; as, for instance, spontaneity in design, a passion
for the mystical in poetry and the arts; a power in water-colour, in
which they are perhaps quite alone, and certainly the first in Europe;
and, above all, the chief, the master thing of all, humour.

There is not nor ever will be anything like English humour. It is a
thing quite apart, and by it for now more than two hundred years you
may know England. It does not puzzle the foreigner (as the more blatant
kind of intellectual man is too fond of boasting that it does); he
simply admires it as a rule and wonders at it always; sometimes he
actually dislikes it, but by it he knows that the thing he is reading
is English and has the savour and taste of England.

It is impossible to define it, because it is so full of stuff and so
organic a quality; but in our own time it was principally the pencil of
Charles Keene that has summed it up and presented it in a moment and at
once to the eye—the pencil of Charles Keene and that profound instinct
whereby he chose the legends for his drawing, whether he found them by
his own sympathy with the people or whether they were suggested to him
by friends.

It is the verdict of the men most competent perhaps to judge upon these
things that he had the greatest graphic power of his time, and that no
one had had that power to such an extent since Hogarth. Upon these
things the men of the trade must dispute; the layman cannot doubt that
he had here a genius and a genius comprehensively national. It is the
essence of a good draughtsman that what he wants to draw, that he
draws. The line that he desires to see upon the paper appears there as
his fingers move. It is a quality extremely rare in its perfection. And
Charles Keene had it in perfection, as in totally different manner had
the offensive and diseased talent of Beardsley.

But more important than the power to do is the quality of the thing
done, and the work of Charles Keene, multitudinous, varied, always
great, is an inheritance for English people comparable to the
inheritance they have in Dickens. It has also what Dickens had, a power
of representing, as it were, the essential English. Just that which
makes people say (with some truth) that Dickens never drew a gentleman
would make them say with equal truth that what was interesting in the
gentlemen of Charles Keene (and he perpetually drew them) was not the
externals upon which gentlemen so pride themselves, but the soul. Thus
I have in mind one picture wherein Keene drew a gentleman; true, he was
a gentleman who had just swallowed a bad oyster, and therefore he was a
man as well. I recall another of an old gentleman complaining of the
caterpillar on his chop: he is a gentleman of the professional rather
than the territorial classes, and, great heavens! what a power of line!
All you see beneath the round of his hat is the end of his nose, the
curve of his mouth, and two bushy ends of whiskers. Yet one can tell
all about that man; one could write a book on him. One knows his
economics, his religion, his accent, and what he thought of the Third
Napoleon and what of Garibaldi. I have called draughtsmanship of this
quality an inheritance—I might have called it perhaps with better
propriety a monument. It is possible that England in the near future
will look back with great envy, as she will certainly look back with
great pride, to the generation preceding our own: they were a solid and
a happy community of men. How much they owed to fortune, how much to
themselves, it is not the place of such random stuff as mine to
consider.

They were nearly impregnable in their island; they were not bellicose.
They made and sold for all the world. Whether the very different future
which we are now entering is to be laid to their door or to our own,
that generation will still remain one of the principal things in
English history, like the Elizabethan generation, or the group of men
who organized the Seven Years’ War, or the group of men who fought in
the Peninsula. And of that generation the note of health and of
stability is represented by its humour. I am not sure that of all
things educational to young men with no personal memory of that time,
and especially to young men with no family tradition of it to reflect
it in their books and their furniture; and—this yet more
particularly—to young men born out of England yet claiming communion
with England, the Anglo-Indians and the Colonials—I am not sure, I say,
that the thing most educational to these would not be some hundred of
Charles Keene’s drawings, for therein they would find what it was that
gave them the power and the wealth that can hardly be defended unless
its traditions are continued. Note how Victorian England dealt with the
humour of a Volunteer review; note how it dealt with the humour of
excessive wealth; and note how it dealt with the humour of schools and
of Dons. One might almost define it by negations. There is in all of it
no—but here I lack a word.... When things ring false it is because they
have got by exaggeration or by some other form of falsity _beside_
themselves. Appreciation of rank or even of worth becomes snobbishness;
appreciation of another’s judgment false taste; and patriotism, the
most beautiful, the noblest, the most necessary of the great emotions,
corrupts into something very vile indeed.

Well, the Victorians, and notably this man of whose power of the pencil
I am speaking, did lack that false savour, that savour of just missing
what one wishes to say or to feel, which haunts us to-day; and I should
imagine that whether it were cause or effect the salt present in the
preservation of the moral health of that society was humour. Let us
enjoy it like an heirloom. It is more national than the language; at
least it is more national than what the language has become under
foreign pressure; it is infinitely more national than our problems and
our tragedies. It is so national that—who knows?—it may crop up again
of itself one of these days; and may that not be long.




The Old Gentleman’s Opinions


I had occasion about a fortnight ago to meet a man more nearly ninety
than eighty years of age, who had had special opportunity for
discovering the changes of Europe during his long life. He was of the
English wealthier classes by lineage, but his mother had been of the
French nobility and a Huguenot. His father had been prominent in the
diplomacy of a couple of generations ago. He had travelled widely, read
perhaps less widely, but had known and appreciated an astonishing
number of his contemporaries.

I was interested (without any power of my own to judge whether his
decisions were right or wrong) to discover what most struck him in the
changes produced by that great stretch of years, all of which he had
personally observed: he was born just after Waterloo, and he could
remember the Reform Bill.

He surprised me by telling me, in the first place, that the material
changes and discoveries, enormous though they were in extent, were not,
in his view, the most striking. He was ready to leave it open whether
these material changes were the causes of moral changes more
remarkable, or merely effects concomitant with these. When I asked him
what had struck him most of the great material developments, he told me
the phonograph and the aeroplane among inventions; Mendel’s
observations in the sphere of experimental knowledge; and, in the
sphere of pure theory, the breakdown of many things that had been
dogmas of physical science in his early manhood.

Since I did not quite understand what he meant by this last, he gave
me, after some hesitation, a few examples: That the interior of the
earth was molten; that a certain limited number of elements—not all yet
isolated, but certainly few in their total—were at the base of all
material forms, and were immutable; that the ultimate unit of each of
these was a certain indivisible, eternal thing called the Atom; and so
forth.

He assured me that views of this sort, extending over a hundred or a
thousand other points, were so universally accepted in his time that to
dispute them was to be ranked with the unlettered or the fantastic. I
asked him if it were so in economics. He said: Yes, in England, where
there was a similar dogma of Free Trade: not abroad.

When I asked him why Mendel’s published experiments and the theory
based upon them had so much impressed him, he said because it was
almost the first attempt to apply to the speculative dogmas of biology
some standard demonstrably true; and here he wandered off to explain to
me why the commonly accepted views upon biology, which had so changed
thought in the latter part of his life, were associated with the name
of Darwin. Darwin, he assured me, had brought forward no new discovery,
but only a new hypothesis, and that only a small and particular
hypothesis, whereby to explain the general theory of transformism. This
theory, he told me—the unbroken descent of living organisms and their
physical connection with one another and with common parents—had been a
favourite idea from the beginning of history with many great thinkers,
from Lucretius to Buffon and from Augustus of Hippo to Lamarck.
Darwin’s, the old gentleman assured me, which he had defended with
infinite toil, was that the method in which this continuity of descent
proceeded was by an infinitely slow process of very small changes
differentiating each minute step from the one before and the one after
it, and these small changes Darwin’s hypothesis referred to a natural
selection. Nothing else in Darwin’s work, he assured me, was novel, and
yet it was the one thing which subsequent research had rendered more
and more doubtful. Darwin (he said) said nothing new that was also
true.

At this point I was moved to contradict the old gentleman, and to say
that one unquestioned contribution to science of Darwin, as novel as it
was secure, was his patient discovery of the work of earthworms, and of
its vast effect. The old gentleman was willing to admit that I was
right, but he said he was only speaking of Darwin in connection with
transformism and the whimsical way in which his private name (and his
errors) had become identified with evolution in general.

I asked him, since he had such a knowledge of men from observation, why
this was so.

“It seems at first sight,” he said, “as ridiculous as though we should
associate the theory of light with the name of Newton, who inclined to
the exploded corpuscular hypothesis, or the general conception of
orbital motion in the universe to the great Bacon, who, in point of
fact, rudely repudiated the Copernican theory in particular.”

“Did he, indeed?” said I, interested.

“I believe so,” said the old gentleman; “at any rate you were asking me
why Darwin, with his single contribution to the theory of transformism,
and that a doubtful one—or, to be accurate, an exploded one—should be
associated in the popular mind with the invention of so ancient a
theory as that of evolution. The reason is, I think, no more than that
he came at a particular moment when any man doing great quantities of
detailed work in this field was bound to stand out exaggeratedly. The
society in which he appeared had, until just before his day, accepted a
narrow cosmogony, quite unknown to its ancestors. Darwin’s book
certainly exploded that, and the mind of his time—ignorant as it was of
the past—was ready to accept the shattering of its father’s idols as a
new revelation.”

“But you were saying,” said I, when he had thus dealt harshly with a
great name, “that not the material but the moral changes of your time
seemed to you the greatest. Which did you mean?”

“Why, in the first place,” said the old man thoughtfully and with some
hesitation, “the curiously rapid decline of intelligence, or if you
will have it differently, the clouding of thought that has marked the
last thirty years. Men in my youth knew what they held and what they
did not hold. They knew why they held it or why they did not hold it;
but the attempt to enjoy the advantages of two contradictory systems at
the same time, and, what is worse, the consulting of a man as an
authority upon subjects he had never professed to know, are
intellectual phenomena quite peculiar to the later years of my life.”

I said we of the younger generation had all noticed it, as, for
instance, when an honest but imperfectly intelligent chemist was
listened to in his exposition of the nature of the soul, or a well-paid
religious official was content to expound the consolations of
Christianity while denying that Christianity was true.

“But,” I continued, “we are usually told that this unfortunate decline
in the express powers of the brain is due to the wide and imperfect
education of the populace at the present moment.”

“That is not the case,” answered the old man sharply, when I had made
myself clear by repeating my remarks in a louder tone, for he was a
little deaf.

“That is not the case. The follies of which I speak are not
particularly to be discovered among the poorer classes who have passed
through the elementary schools. _These_” (it was to the schools that he
was alluding with a comprehensive pessimism) “may account for the gross
decline apparent in the public manners of our people, but not for
faults which are peculiar to the upper and middle classes. It is not in
the populace, but in those wealthier ranks that you will find the sort
of intellectual decay of which I spoke.”

I asked him whether he thought the tricks it was now considered
cultured to play with mathematics came within the category of this
intellectual decay. The old gentleman answered me a little abruptly
that he could not judge what I was talking about.

“Why,” said I, “do you believe that parallel straight lines _converge_
or _diverge_?”

“Neither,” said he, a little bewildered. “If they are parallel they
cannot by definition either diverge or converge.”

“You are, then,” said I, “an old-fashioned adherent of the theory of
the parabolic universe?” At which sensible reply of mine the old man
muttered rather ill-temperedly, and begged me to speak of something
else.

I asked him whether the knowledge of languages had not declined in his
time. He said, somewhat emphatically, yes, and especially the knowledge
of French, assuring me that in his early years many a Fellow of a
College at Oxford or at Cambridge was capable of speaking that tongue
in such a fashion as to make himself understood. On the other hand, he
admitted that German and Spanish were more widely known than they had
been, and Arabic certainly far more widely diffused among those
officials of the Empire who took their work seriously.

When I asked him whether politics were more corrupt as time proceeded,
he said No, but more cynical; and as to morals he would not judge, for
he was certain that as one vice was corrected another appeared in its
place.

What he told me he most deplored in the social system of his country
was the power of the police and of the statistician by whom the
policeman was guided. This he ascribed to the growth of great towns, to
civic cowardice, and to a new taboo laid upon uniformed and labelled
public authorities, who are now regarded as sacred, and also
inordinately feared.

“In my youth,” he said, “there was a joke that every man in Paris was
known to the police. Today that is universally true, and no joke with
regard to every man in London. Our movements are marked, our earnings,
our expenses, and our most private affairs known to the innumerable
officials of the Treasury, our records of every sort, however intimate,
are exactly and correctly maintained. The obtaining of work and a
livelihood is dependent upon strong organizations. There is hardly an
ailment or a domestic habit, from drinking wine to eating turnips,
which some crank who has obtained the ear of a politician does not
control or threaten in the immediate future to control.”

“As for doctors!” he began, his voice cracking with indignation, “their
abominable....” but here the old gentleman fell into so violent a fit
of coughing that he nearly turned black in the face, and when I
respectfully slapped him on the back, in the hopes of granting him
relief, he made matters worse by shaking himself at me with an energy
worthy of 1842. His nurse rushed in, clapped him upon his pillows, and
was prepared to vent her wrath upon me for having caused this paroxysm,
when the old man’s exhaustion and laboured breathing captured all her
attention, and I had the opportunity to withdraw.




On Historical Evidence


The last book to be published upon the last Dauphin of France set me
thinking upon what seems to me the chief practical science in which
modern men should secure themselves. I mean the science of history—and
in this science almost all lies in the appreciation of evidence, for
one of the chief particular problems presented to the student of
history at the present moment is whether the Dauphin did or did not
survive his imprisonment in the Temple.

Let me first say why, to so many of us, the science of history and the
appreciation of the evidence upon which it depends is of the first
moment. It is because, short of vision or revelation, history is our
only extension of human experience. It is true that a philosophy common
to all citizens is necessary for a State if it is to live—but short of
that necessity the next most necessary factor is a knowledge of the
stuff of mankind: of how men act under certain conditions and impulses.
This knowledge may be acquired, and is in some measure, during the
experience of one wise lifetime, but it is indefinitely extended by the
accumulation of experience which history affords.

And what history so gives us is always of immediate and practical
moment.

For instance, men sometimes speak with indifference of the rival
theories as to the origin of European land tenure; they talk as though
it were a mere academic debate whether the conception of private
property in land arose comparatively late among Europeans or was native
and original in our race. But you have only to watch a big popular
discussion on that very great and at the present moment very living
issue, the moral right to the private ownership in land, to see how
heavily the historic argument weighs with every type of citizen. The
instinct that gives that argument weight is a sound one, and not less
sound in those who have least studied the matter than in those who have
most studied it; for if our race from its immemorial origins has
desired to own land as a private thing side by side with communal
tenures, then it is pretty certain that we shall not modify that
intention, however much we change our laws. If, on the other hand, it
could be shown that before the advent of a complex civilization
Europeans had no conception of private property in land, but treated
land as a thing necessarily and always communal, then you could ascribe
modern Socialist theories with regard to the land to that general
movement of harking back to the origins which Europe has been assisting
at through over a hundred years of revolution and of change.

It sounds cynical, but it is perfectly true, that much the largest
factor in the historical conception of men is assertion. It is
literally true that when men (with the exception of a very small
proportion of scholars who are also intelligent) consider the past, the
picture on which they dwell is a picture conveyed to them wholly by
authority and by unquestioned authority. There was never a time when
the original sources of history were more easily to be consulted by the
plain man; but whether because of their very number, or because the
habit is not yet formed, or because there are traditions of imaginary
difficulty surrounding such reading, original sources were perhaps
never less familiar to fairly educated opinion than they are today; and
therefore no type of book gives more pleasure when one comes across it
than those little cheap books, now becoming fairly numerous, in which
the original sources, and the original sources alone, are put before
the reader. Mr. Rait has already done such work in connection with Mary
Queen of Scots, and Mr. Archer did it admirably in connection with the
Third Crusade.

But apart from the importance of consulting original sources—which is
like hearing the very witnesses themselves in court—there is a factor
in historical judgment which by some unhappy accident is peculiarly
lacking in the professional historian. It is a factor to which no
particular name can be attached, though it may be called a department
of common sense. But it is a mental power or attitude easily
recognizable in those who possess it, and perhaps atrophied by the very
atmosphere of the study. It goes with the open air with a general
knowledge of men and with that rapid recognition of the way in which
things “fit in” which is necessarily developed by active life.

For instance, when you know the pace at which Harold marched down from
the north to Hastings you recognize, if you use that factor of historic
judgment of which I spake, that the affair was not barbaric. There must
have been fairly good roads, and there must have been a high
organization of transport. You have only to consider for a moment what
a column looks like, even if it be only a brigade, to see the truth of
that. Again, this type of judgment forbids anyone who uses it to
ascribe great popular movements (great massacres, great turmoils, and
so forth) to craft. It is a very common thing, especially in modern
history, to lay such things to the power of one or two wealthy or one
or two bloody leaders, but you have only to think for a few moments of
what a mob is to see the falsity of that. Craft can harness this sort
of explosive force, it can control it, or persuade it, or canalize it
to certain issues, but it cannot create it.

Again, this sort of sense easily recognizes in historic types the
parallels of modern experience. It avoids the error of thinking history
a mistake and making of the men and women who appear there something
remote from humanity, extreme, and either stilted or grandiose.

In aid of this last feature in historical judgment there is nothing of
such permanent value as a portrait. Obtain your conception (as, indeed,
most boys do) of the English early sixteenth century from a text, then
go and live with the Holbeins for a week and see what an enormously
greater thing you will possess at the end of it. It is indeed one of
the misfortunes of European history that from the fifth century to at
least the eleventh we are, so far as Western European history is
concerned, deprived of portraits. And by an interesting parallel the
writers of the dark time seemed to have had neither the desire nor the
gift of vivid description. Consider the dreariness of the
hagiographers, every one of them boasting the noble rank and the
conventional status of his hero, and you may say not one giving the
least conception of the man’s personality. You have the great
Gallo-Roman noble family of Ferreolus running down the centuries from
the Decline of the Empire to the climax of Charlemagne. Many of those
names stand for some most powerful individuality, yet all we have is a
formula, a lineage, with symbols and names in the place of living
beings, and even that established only by careful work, picking out and
sifting relationships from various lives. The men of that time did not
even think to tell us that there was such a thing as a family
tradition, nor did it seem important to them to establish its Roman
origin and its long succession in power.

Next it must be protested that the smallness and particularity of the
questions upon which historical discussion rages are no proof either of
its general purposelessness nor of _their_ insignificance. All advance
of knowledge proceeds in this fashion. Physical science affords
innumerable examples of the way in which progress has depended upon a
curiosity directed towards apparently insignificant things, and there
is something in the mind which compels it to select a narrow field for
the exercise of its acutest powers. Moreover, special points,
discussion upon which must evidently be lengthy and may be indefinite,
are peculiarly attractive to just that kind of man who by a love of
prolonged research enlarges the bounds of knowledge and at the same
time strengthens and improves for his fellows by continual exercise all
the instruments of their common trade. Take, for instance, this case of
the little Dauphin, Louis XVII. It really does not matter to day
whether the boy got away or whether he died in prison. It does not
prolong the line of the Capetians—the heir to that is present in the
Duke of Orleans. It does not even affect our view of any other
considerable part of history—save possibly the policy of Louis
XVIII—and it is of no direct interest to our pockets or to our
affections. Yet the masses of work which have accumulated round that
one doubt have solved twenty other doubts. They have illuminated all
the close of the Terror; they are beginning to make us understand that
most difficult piece of political psychology, the reaction of
Thermidor, and with it how Europeans lose their balance and regain it
in the course of their quasi-religious wars; for all our wars have
something in them of religion.

Three elements appear to enter into the judgment of history. First,
there is the testimony of human witnesses; next, there are the
non-human boundaries wherein the action took place, boundaries which,
by all our experience, impose fixed limits to action; thirdly, there is
that indefinable thing, that mystic power, which all nations deriving
from the theology of the Western Church have agreed to call, with the
schoolman, _common sense_; a general appreciation which transcends
particular appreciations and which can integrate the differentials of
evidence. Of this last it is quite impossible to afford a test or to
construct a measure; its presence in an argument is none the less as
readily felt as fresh air in a room; without it nothing is convincing
however laboured, with it, even though it rely upon slight evidence,
one has the feeling of walking on a firm road. But it must be “common
sense”—it must be of the sort, that is, which is common to man various
and general, and it is in this perhaps that history suffers most from
the charlatanism and ritual common to all great matters.

Men will have pomp and mystery surrounding important things, and
therefore the historians must, consciously or unconsciously, tend to
strut, to quote solemn authorities in support, and to make out the
vulgar unworthy of their confidence. Hence, by the way, the plague of
footnotes.

These had their origin in two sources: the desire to show that one was
honest and to prove it by a reference; the desire to elucidate some
point which it was not easy to elucidate in the text itself without
making the sentence too elaborate and clumsy. Either use may be seen at
its best in Gibbon. With the last generation they have served mainly,
and sometimes merely, for ritual adornment and terror, not to make
clearer or more honest, but to deceive. Thus Taine in his monstrously
false history of the Revolution revels in footnotes; you have but to
examine a batch of them with care to turn them completely against his
own conclusions—they are only put there as a sort of spiked paling to
warn off trespassers. Or, again, M. Thibaut, who writes under the name
of “Anatole France,” gives footnotes by the score in his romance of
Joan of Arc, apparently not even caring to examine whether they so much
as refer to his text, let alone support it. They seem to have been done
by contract.

Another ailment in this department is the negative one, whereby an
historian will leave out some aspect which to him, cramped in a study,
seems unimportant, but which any plain man moving in the world would
have told him to be the essential aspect of the whole matter. For
instance, when Napoleon left Madrid on his forced march to intercept
Sir John Moore before that general should have reached Benevente, he
thought Moore was at Valladolid, when as a fact he was at Sahagun. In
Mr. Oman’s history of the Peninsular War the error is put thus:
“Napoleon had not the comparatively easy task of cutting the road
between Valladolid and Astorga, but the much harder one of intercepting
that between Sahagun and Astorga.”

Why is this egregious nonsense? The facts are right and so are the
dates and the names, yet it makes one blush for Oxford history. Why?
Because the all-important element of _distance_ is omitted. The very
first question a plain man would ask about the case would be, “What
were the distances involved?” The academic historian doesn’t know, or,
at least, doesn’t say; yet without an appreciation of the distances the
statement has no value. As a fact the distances were such that in the
first case (supposing Moore had been at Valladolid) Napoleon would have
had to cover nearly three miles to Moore’s one to intercept him—an
almost superhuman task. In the second case (Moore being as a fact at
Sahagun) he would have had to go over _four miles_ to his opponent’s
one—an absolutely impossible feat.

To march _three_ miles to the enemy’s _one_ is what Mr. Oman calls “a
comparatively easy task”; to march four to his one is what Mr. Oman
calls a “much harder” task; and to write like that is what an informed
critic calls bad history.

The other two factors in an historical judgment can be more easily
measured.

The non-human elements which, as I have said, are irremovable (save to
miracle), are topography, climate, season, local physical conditions,
and so forth. They have two valuable characters in aid of history; the
first is that they correct the errors of human memory and support the
accuracy of details; the second is that they enable us to complete a
picture. We can by their aid “see” the physical framework in which an
action took place, and such a landscape helps the judgment of things
past as it does of things contemporary. Thus the map, the date, the
soil, the contours of Crécy field make the traditional spot at which
the King of Bohemia fell doubtful; the same factors make it certain
that Drouet did not plunge haphazard through Argonne on the night of
June 21, 1791, but that he must have gone by one path—which can be
determined.

Or, again, take that prime question, why the Prussians did not charge
at Valmy. On their failure to do so all the success of the Revolution
turned. A man may read Dumouriez, Kellermann, Pully, Botidoux,
Massenback, Goethe—there are fifty eye-witnesses at least whose
evidence we can collect, and I defy anyone to decide. (Brunswick
himself never knew.) But go to that roll of land between Valmy and the
high road; go after three days’ rain as the allies did, and you will
immediately learn. That field between the heights of “The Moon” and the
site of old Valmy mill, which is as hard as a brick in summer (when the
experts visit it), is a marsh of the worst under an autumn drizzle; no
one could have charged.

As for human testimony, three things appear: first, that the witness is
not, as in a law court, circumscribed. His relation may vary infinitely
in degree of proximity of time or space to the action, from that of an
eye-witness writing within the hour to that of a partisan writing at
tenth hand a lifetime after. That question of proximity comes first,
from the known action of the human mind whereby it transforms colours
and changes remembered things. Next there is the character of the
witness _for the purposes of his testimony_. Historians write, too
often, as though virtue—or wealth (with which they often confound
it)—were the test. It is not, short of a known motive for lying; a
murderer or a thief casually witnessing to a thing with which he is
familiar is worth more than the best man witnessing in a matter which
he understands ill. It was this error which ruined Croker’s essay on
Charlotte Robespierre’s Memoirs. Croker thought, perhaps wisely, that
all radicals were scoundrels; he could not accept her editor’s
evidence, and (by the way) the view of this amateur collector without a
tincture of historical scholarship actually imposed itself on Europe
for nearly seventy years!

And the third character in the witness is support: the support upon
converging lines of other human testimony, most of it indifferent, some
(this is essential) casual and by the way—deprived therefore of motive.

When I shall find these canons satisfied to oppose the strong
probability and tradition of the Dauphin’s death in prison I shall
doubt that death, but not before.




The Absence of the Past


It is perhaps not possible to put into human language that emotion
which rises when a man stands upon some plot of European soil and can
say with certitude to himself: “Such and such great, or wonderful, or
beautiful things happened here.”

Touch that emotion ever so lightly and it tumbles into the commonplace,
and the deadest of commonplace. Neglect it ever so little and the
Present (which is never really there, for even as you walk across
Trafalgar Square it is yesterday and tomorrow that are in your mind),
the Present, I say, or rather the immediate flow of things, occupies
you altogether. But there is a mood, and it is a mood common in men who
have read and who have travelled, in which one is overwhelmed by the
sanctity of a place on which men have done this or that a long, long
time ago.

Here it is that the gentle supports which have been framed for human
life by that power which launched it come in and help a man. Time does
not remain, but space does, and though we cannot seize the Past
physically we can stand physically upon the site, and we can have (if I
may so express myself) a physical communion with the Past by occupying
that very spot which the past greatness of man or of event has
occupied.

It was but the other day that, with an American friend at my side, I
stood looking at the little brass plate which says that here Charles
Stuart faced (he not only faced, but he refused) the authority of his
judges. I know not by what delicate mechanism of the soul that record
may seem at one moment a sort of tourist thing, to be neglected or
despised, and at another moment a portent. But I will confess that all
of a sudden, pointing out this very well-known record upon the brass
let into the stone in Westminster Hall, I suddenly felt the presence of
the thing. Here all that business was done: they were alive; they were
in the Present as we are. Here sat that tender-faced, courageous man,
with his pointed beard and his luminous eyes; here he was a living man
holding his walking-stick with the great jewel in the handle of it;
here was spoken in the very tones of his voice (and how a human voice
perishes!—how we forget the accents of the most loved and the most
familiar voices within a few days of their disappearance!); here the
small gestures, and all the things that make up a personality, marked
out Charles Stuart. When the soul is seized with such sudden and
positive conviction of the substantial past it is overwhelmed; and
Europe is full of such ghosts.

As you take the road to Paradise, about halfway there you come to an
inn, which even as inns go is admirable. You go into the garden of it,
and see the great trees and the wall of Box Hill shrouding you all
around. It is beautiful enough (in all conscience) to arrest one
without the need of history or any admixture of the pride of race; but
as you sit there on a seat in that garden you are sitting where Nelson
sat when he said goodbye to his Emma, and if you will move a yard or
two you will be sitting where Keats sat biting his pen and thinking out
some new line of his poem.

What has happened? These two men with their keen, feminine faces, these
two great heroes of a great time in the great story of a great people
of this world, are not there. They are nowhere. But the site remains.
Philosophers can put in formulae the crowd of suggestions that rush
into the mind when one’s soul contemplates the perpetual march and
passage of mortality. But they can do no more than give us formularies:
they cannot give us replies. What are we? What is all this business?
Why does the mere space remain and all the rest dissolve?

There is a lonely place in the woods of Chilham, in the County of Kent,
above the River Stour, where a man comes upon an irregular earthwork
still plainly marked upon the brow of the bluff. Nobody comes near this
place. A vague country lane, or rather track; goes past the wet soil of
it, plunges into the valley beyond, and after serving a windmill joins
the high road to Canterbury. Well, that vague track is the ancient
British road, as old as anything in this Island, that took men from
Winchester to the Straits of Dover. That earthwork is the earthwork (I
could prove it, but this is not the place) where the British stood
against the charge of the Tenth Legion, and first heard, sounding on
their bronze, the arms of Caesar. Here the river was forded; here the
little men of the South went up in formation; here the Barbarian broke
and took his way, as the opposing General has recorded, through devious
woodland paths, scattering in the pursuit; here began the great history
of England.

Is it not an enormous business merely to stand in such a place? I think
so.

I know a field to the left of the Chalons Road, some few miles before
you get to Ste. Menehould. There used to be an inn by the roadside
called “The Sign of the Moon.” It has disappeared. There used to be a
ramshackle windmill beyond the field, a mile or so from the road, on an
upland swell of land, but that also has gone, and had been gone for
some time before I knew the field of which I write. It is a bare fold
of land with one or two little scrubby spinneys alongside the plough.
And for the rest, just the brown earth and the sky. There are days on
which you will see a man at work somewhere within that mile, others on
which it is completely deserted. Here it is that the French Revolution
was preserved. Here was the Prussian charge. On the deserted, ugly lump
of empty earth beyond you were the three batteries that checked the
invaders. It was all alive and crowded for one intense moment with the
fate of Christendom. Here, on the place in which you are standing and
gazing, young Goethe stood and gazed. That meaningless stretch of
coarse grass supported Brunswick and the King of Prussia, and the
brothers of the King of France, as they stood windswept in the rain,
watching the failure of the charge. It is the field of Valmy. Turn on
that height and look back westward and you see the plains rolling out
infinitely; they are the plains upon which Attila was crushed; but
there is no one there.

All men have remarked that night and silence are august, and I think
that if this quality in night and silence be closely examined it will
be found to consist, in part at least, in this: that either of them
symbolizes Absence. By a paradox which I will not attempt to explain,
but which all have felt, it is in silence and in darkness that the Past
most vividly returns, and that this absence of what once was possesses,
nay, obtrudes itself upon the mind: it becomes almost a sensible thing.
There is much to be said for those who pretend, imagine, or perhaps
have experienced under such conditions the return of the dead. The mood
of darkness and of silence is a mood crammed with something that does
not remain, as space remains, that is limited by time, and is a
creature of time, and yet something that has an immortal right to
remain.

Now, I suppose that in that sentence where I say things mortal have
immortal rights to permanence, the core of the whole business is
touched upon. And I suppose that the great men who could really think
and did not merely fire off fireworks to dazzle their contemporaries—I
suppose that Descartes, for instance, if he were here sitting at my
table—could help me to solve that contradiction; but I sit and think
and cannot solve it.

“What,” says the man upon his own land, inherited perhaps and certainly
intended for his posterity—“what! Can you separate me from this? Are
not this and I bound up inextricably?” The answer is “No; you are not
so far as any observer of this world can discover. Space is in no way
possessed by man, and he who may render a site immortal in one of our
various ways, the captain who there conquered, the poet who there
established his sequence of words, cannot himself put forward a claim
to permanence within it at all.”

There was a woman of charming vivacity, whose eyes were ever ready for
laughter, and whose tone of address of itself provoked the noblest of
replies. Many loved her; all admired. She passed (I will suppose) by
this street or by that; she sat at table in such and such a house;
Gainsborough painted her; and all that time ago there were men who had
the luck to meet her and to answer her laughter with their own. And the
house where she moved is there and the street in which she walked, and
the very furniture she used and touched with her hands you may touch
with your hands. You shall come into the rooms that she inhabited, and
there you shall see her portrait, all light and movement and grace and
beatitude.

She is gone altogether, the voice will never return, the gestures will
never be seen again. She was under a law; she changed, she suffered,
she grew old, she died; and there was her place left empty. The not
living things remain; but what counted, what gave rise to them, what
made them all that they are, has pitifully disappeared, and the
greater, the infinitely greater, thing was subject to a doom
perpetually of change and at last of vanishing. The dead surroundings
are not subject to such a doom. Why?

All those boys who held the line of the low ridge or rather swell of
land from Hougoumont through the Belle Alliance have utterly gone. More
than dust goes, more than wind goes; they will never be seen again.
Their voices will never be heard—they are not. But what is the mere
soil of the field without them? What meaning has it save for their
presence?

I could wish to understand these things.




St. Patrick


If there is one thing that people who are not Catholic have gone wrong
upon more than another in the intellectual things of life, it is the
conception of a Personality. They are muddled about it where their own
little selves are concerned, they misappreciate it when they deal with
the problems of society, and they have a very weak hold of it when they
consider (if they do consider) the nature of Almighty God.

Now, personality is everything. It was a Personal Will that made all
things, visible and invisible. Our hope of immortality resides in this,
that we are persons, and half our frailties proceed from a
misapprehension of the awful responsibilities which personality
involves or a cowardly ignorance of its powers of self-government.

The hundred and one errors which this main error leads to include a bad
error on the nature of history. Your modern non-Catholic or
anti-Catholic historian is always misunderstanding, underestimating, or
muddling the role played in the affairs of men by great and individual
Personalities. That is why he is so lamentably weak upon the function
of legend; that is why he makes a fetish of documentary evidence and
has no grip upon the value of tradition. For traditions spring from
some personality invariably, and the function of legend, whether it be
a rigidly true legend or one tinged with make-believe, is to interpret
Personality. Legends have vitality and continue, because in their
origin they so exactly serve to explain or illustrate some personal
character in a man which no cold statement could give.

Now St. Patrick, the whole story and effect of him, is a matter of
Personality. There was once—twenty or thirty years ago—a whole school
of dunderheads who wondered whether St. Patrick ever existed, because
the mass of legends surrounding his name troubled them. How on earth
(one wonders) do such scholars consider their fellow-beings! Have they
ever seen a crowd cheering a popular hero, or noticed the expression
upon men’s faces when they spoke of some friend of striking power
recently dead? A great growth of legends around a man is the very best
proof you could have not only of his existence but of the fact that he
was an origin and a beginning, and that things sprang from his will or
his vision. There were some who seemed to think it a kind of favour
done to the indestructible body of Irish Catholicism when Mr. Bury
wrote his learned Protestant book upon St. Patrick. It was a critical
and very careful bit of work, and was deservedly praised; but the
favour done us I could not see! It is all to the advantage of
non-Catholic history that it should be sane, and that a great
Protestant historian should make true history out of a great historical
figure was a very good sign. It was a long step back towards common
sense compared with the German absurdities which had left their victims
doubting almost all the solid foundation of the European story; but as
for us Catholics, we had no need to be told it. Not only was there a
St. Patrick in history, but there is a St. Patrick on the shores of his
eastern sea and throughout all Ireland to-day. It is a presence that
stares you in the face, and physically almost haunts you. Let a man
sail along the Leinster coast on such a day as renders the Wicklow
Mountains clear up-weather behind him, and the Mourne Mountains perhaps
in storm, lifted clearly above the sea down the wind. He is taking some
such course as that on which St. Patrick sailed, and if he will land
from time to time from his little boat at the end of each day’s
sailing, and hear Mass in the morning before he sails further
northward, he will know in what way St. Patrick inhabits the soil which
he rendered sacred.

We know that among the marks of holiness is the working of miracles.
Ireland is the greatest miracle any saint ever worked. It is a miracle
and a nexus of miracles. Among other miracles it is a nation raised
from the dead.

The preservation of the Faith by the Irish is an historical miracle
comparable to nothing else in Europe. There never was, and please God
never can be, so prolonged and insanely violent a persecution of men by
their fellow-men as was undertaken for centuries against the Faith in
Ireland: and it has completely failed. I know of no example in history
of failure following upon such effort. It had behind it in combination
the two most powerful of the evil passions of men, terror and greed.
And so amazing is it that they did not attain their end, that
perpetually as one reads one finds the authors of the dreadful business
now at one period, now at another, assuming with certitude that their
success is achieved. Then, after centuries, it is almost suddenly
perceived—and in our own time—that it has not been achieved and never
will be.

What a complexity of strange coincidences combined, coming out of
nothing as it were, advancing like spirits summoned on to the stage,
all to effect this end! Think of the American Colonies; with one little
exception they were perhaps the most completely non-Catholic society of
their time. Their successful rebellion against the mother country meant
many things, and led to many prophecies. Who could have guessed that
one of its chief results would be the furnishing of a free refuge for
the Irish?

The famine, all human opinion imagined, and all human judgment was
bound to conclude, was a mortal wound, coming in as the ally of the
vile persecution I have named. It has turned out the very contrary.
From it there springs indirectly the dispersion, and that power which
comes from unity in dispersion, of Irish Catholicism.

Who, looking at the huge financial power that dominated Europe, and
England in particular, during the youth of our own generation, could
have dreamt that in any corner of Europe, least of all in the poorest
and most ruined corner of Christendom, an effective resistance could be
raised?

Behind the enemies of Ireland, furnishing them with all their modern
strength, was that base and secret master of modern things, the usurer.
He it was far more than the gentry of the island who demanded toll,
and, through the mortgages on the Irish estates, had determined to
drain Ireland as he has drained and rendered desert so much else. Is it
not a miracle that he has failed?

Ireland is a nation risen from the dead; and to raise one man from the
dead is surely miraculous enough to convince one of the power of a
great spirit. This miracle, as I am prepared to believe, is the last
and the greatest of St. Patrick’s.

When I was last in Ireland, I bought in the town of Wexford a coloured
picture of St. Patrick which greatly pleased me. Most of it was green
in colour, and St. Patrick wore a mitre and had a crosier in his hand.
He was turning into the sea a number of nasty reptiles: snakes and
toads and the rest. I bought this picture because it seemed to me as
modern a piece of symbolism as ever I had seen: and that was why I
bought it for my children and for my home.

There was a few pence change, but I did not want it. The person who
sold me the picture said they would spend the change in candles for St.
Patrick’s altar. So St. Patrick is still alive.




The Lost Things


I never remember an historian yet, nor a topographer either, who could
tell me, or even pretend to explain by a theory, how it was that
certain things of the past utterly and entirely disappear.

It is a commonplace that everything is subject to decay, and a
commonplace which the false philosophy of our time is too apt to
forget. Did we remember that commonplace we should be a little more
humble in our guesswork, especially where it concerns prehistory; and
we should not make so readily certain where the civilization of Europe
began, nor limit its immense antiquity. But though it is a commonplace,
and a true one, that all human work is subject to decay, there seems to
be an inexplicable caprice in the method and choice of decay.

Consider what a body of written matter there must have been to instruct
and maintain the technical excellence of Roman work. What a mass of
books on engineering and on ship-building and on road-making; what
quantities of tables and ready-reckoners, all that civilization must
have produced and depended upon. Time has preserved much verse, and not
only the best by any means, more prose, particularly the theological
prose of the end of the Roman time. The technical stuff, which must, in
the nature of things, have been indefinitely larger in amount, has
(save in one or two instances and allusions) gone.

Consider, again, all that mass of seven hundred years which was called
Carthage. It was not only seven hundred years of immense wealth, of
oligarchic government, of a vast population, and of what so often goes
with commerce and oligarchy—civil and internal peace. A few stones to
prove the magnitude of its municipal work, a few ornaments, a few
graves—all the rest is absolutely gone. A few days’ marches away there
is an example I have quoted so often elsewhere that I am ashamed of
referring to it again, but it does seem to me the most amazing example
of historical loss in the world. It is the site of Hippo Regius. Here
was St. Augustine’s town, one of the greatest and most populous of a
Roman province. It was so large that an army of eighty thousand men
could not contain it, and even with such a host its siege dragged on
for a year. There is not a sign of that great town today.

A suburb, well without the walls—to be more accurate, a neighbouring
village—carries on the name under the form of Bona, and that is all. A
vast, fertile plain of black rich earth, now largely planted with
vineyards, stands where Hippo stood. How can the stones have gone? How
can it have been worth while to cart away the marble columns? Why are
there no broken statues on such a ground, and no relics of the gods?

Nay, the wells are stopped up from which the people drank, and the
lining of the wells is not to be discovered in the earth, and the
foundations of the walls, and even the ornaments of the people and
their coins, all these have been spirited away.

Then there are the roads. Consider that great road which reached from
Amiens to the main port of Gaul, the Portus Itius at Boulogne. It is
still in use. It was in use throughout the Middle Ages. Up that road
the French Army marched to Crécy. It points straight to its goal upon
the sea coast. Its whole purpose lay in reaching the goal. For some
extraordinary reason, which I have never seen explained or even guessed
at, there comes a point as it nears the coast where it suddenly ceases
to be.

No sand has blown over it. It runs through no marshes; the land is firm
and fertile. Why should that, the most important section of the great
road which led northward from Rome, have failed, and have failed so
recently, in the history of man? Where this great road crosses streams
and might reasonably be lost, at its _pontes_, its bridges, it has
remained, and is of such importance as to have given a name to a whole
countryside—_Ponthieu_. But north of that it is gone.

Nearly every Roman road of Gaul and Britain presents something of the
same puzzle in some parts of its course. It will run clear and
followable enough, or form a modern highway for mile upon mile, and
then not at a marsh where one would expect its disappearance, nor in
some desolate place where it might have fallen out of use, but in the
neighbourhood of a great city and at the very chief of its purpose, it
is gone. It is so with the Stane Street that led up from the garrison
of Chichester and linked it with the garrison of London. You can
reconstruct it almost to a yard until you reach Epsom Downs. There you
find it pointing to London Bridge, and remaining as clear as in any
other part of its course: much clearer than in most other sections. But
try to follow it on from Epsom Racecourse, and you entirely fail. The
soil is the same; the conditions of that soil are excellent for its
retention; but a year’s work has taught me that there is no
reconstructing it save by hypothesis and guesswork from this point to
the crossing of the Thames.

What happened to all that mass of local documents whereby we ought to
be able to build up the territorial scheme and the landed regime of old
France? Much remains, if you will, in the shape of chance charters and
family papers. Even in the archives of Paris you can get enough to whet
your curiosity. But not even in one narrow district can you obtain
enough to reconstruct the whole truth. There is not a scholar in Europe
who can tell you exactly how land was owned and held, even, let us say,
on the estates of Rheims or by the family of Condé. And men are ready
to quarrel as to how many peasants owned and how much of their present
ownership was due to the Revolution, evidence has already become so
wholly imperfect in that tiny stretch of historical time.

But, after all, perhaps one ought not to wonder too much that material
things should thus capriciously vanish. Time, which has secured Timgad
so that it looks like an unroofed city of yesterday, has swept and
razed Laimboesis. The two towns were neighbours—one was taken and the
other left—and there is no sort of reason any man can give for it.
Perhaps one ought not too much to wonder, for a greater wonder still is
the sudden evaporation and loss of the great movements of the human
soul. That what our ancestors passionately believed or passionately
disputed should, by their descendants in one generation or in two,
become meaningless, absurd, or false—this is the greatest marvel and
the greatest tragedy of all.




On the Reading of History


Let me at the beginning of this short article present two facts to the
reader. Neither can be disputed, and that is why I call them facts and
put them in the forefront before I begin upon my theories.

The first fact is that the record of what men have done in the past and
how they have done it is the chief positive guide to present action.
The second fact is that most men must now receive the impression of the
past through reading.

Put these two facts together and you get the fundamental truth that
upon the right reading of history the right use of citizenship in
England today will depend. It will of course depend upon other things
as well: chiefly upon the human conscience; for if you were to pack off
to an island a hundred families as ignorant as any human families can
be of tradition, and wholly ignorant of positive history, those
families would yet be able to create a human society and the voice of
God within them would give just limits to their actions.

Still, of those factors in civic action amenable to civic direction,
conscious and positively effective, there is nothing to compare with
the right teaching and the right reading of history. Now teaching is
today ruined. The old machinery by which the whole nation could be got
to know all essential human things, has been destroyed, and the
teaching of history in particular has been not only ruined but rendered
ridiculous. There is no historical school properly so-called in modern
England; that is, there is no organization framed with the sole object
of extending and co-ordinating historical knowledge and of choosing men
for their capacity to discover upon the one hand and to teach upon the
other. There is nothing approaching to it in the two ancient
universities, because the choice of teachers there depends upon a
multitude of considerations quite separate from those mentioned, and
the capacity to discover, to know, and to teach history, though it
_may_ be present in a tutor, will only be accidentally so present:
while as for co-ordination of knowledge, there is no attempt at it.
Even where very hard work is done, and, when it concerns local history,
very useful work, history as a general study is not grasped because the
universities have not grasped it.

History is to be had by the modern Englishman from his own reading
only; and I am here concerned with the question how he shall read
history with profit.

To read history with profit, history must be true, or at any rate the
reader must have a power of discerning what is true in the midst of
much that may be false. I will bargain, for instance, that in the
summer of 1899 the great mass of men, and especially the great mass of
men who had passed through the universities, were under the impression
that armies had left England for the purpose of conquest in distant
countries with invariable success: that that success had been unique,
unsupported and always decisive, and that the wealth of the country
after each success had increased, not diminished. In other words, had
history been studied even by the tiny minority who have education today
in England, Sir William Butler would have counted more than the Joels,
and the late Mr. Barnato (as he called himself); the South African War
would not have taken place in a society which knew its past.

Again, you may pick almost any phrase referring to the Middle Ages out
of any newspaper—if you are a man read in the Middle Ages—and you will
find in it not only a definite historical falsehood with regard to the
fact referred to, or the analogy drawn, but also a false philosophy.

For instance, the other day I read this phrase with regard to the
burial of a certain gentleman of my neighbourhood in Sussex: “We are
surely past the phase of mediaeval thought in which it was imagined
that a few words spoken over the lifeless clay would determine the fate
of the soul for all eternity.” Just notice the myriad falsehoods of a
phrase like that! I will not discuss what is connoted by the words
“past the phase of mediaeval thought”—it connotes of course that the
human mind changes fundamentally with the centuries, and therefore that
whatever we think is probably wrong, and that what we are sure of we
cannot be sure of, an absurd conclusion. I will only note the
historical falsehoods. When on earth did the “Middle Ages” lay down
that a “few words over lifeless clay determined the fate of the soul
for all eternity”? On the contrary, the Middle Ages laid it down—it was
their peculiar doctrine—that it was impossible to determine the fate of
the soul; that no one could tell the fate of any one individual soul;
that it was a grievous sin, among the most grievous of sins, to affirm
positive knowledge that any individual had lost his soul. More than
this, the Middle Ages were peculiar in their insistence upon the
doctrine that a man might have been very bad and might have had all the
appearance of having lost his soul so far as human judgment went, and
yet was liable to a midway place between salvation and damnation, and
they affirmed that this midway place did not lead to either fate but
necessarily to salvation and to salvation only.

Again, whatever could help the human soul to salvation was by the most
rigorous theological definition of the Middle Ages applicable only
before death. After death the fate of the soul was sealed, and the man
once dead, the “lifeless clay” (as the journalist put it—and the Middle
Ages was the only source from which he got the idea of clay at all),
whether it were that of a Pope or of some random highwayman, had no
effect whatsoever upon the fate of the soul. The greatest saint might
have offered the most solemn sacrifice on its behalf for years, and if
the soul were damned his sacrifice would have been of no avail.

I have taken this example absolutely at random. But the modern reader,
apart from sentences as clearly provocative of criticism as this, is
perpetually coming across references, allusions, and parallels which
take a certain course of human European and English history for
granted. How is he to distinguish when that course is rightly drawn
from when it is wrongly drawn?

Thus in some newspaper article written by an able man, and dealing, let
us say, with the territorial army, one might come across a sentence
like this: “Napoleon himself used troops so raw that they were actually
drilled on the march to the battlefield.” That would be a perfectly
true statement. Any amount of criticism of it lies in connexion with
Mr. Haldane’s scheme, but still it is a true piece of history. Napoleon
did get raw recruits into his battalions just before any one of his
famous marches began, and drill them on the way to victory. In the next
column of the newspaper the reader may be presented with a sentence
like this: “The captures of English by privateers in the Revolutionary
War should teach us what foreign cruisers can do.”

There were plenty of captures by privateers in the Revolutionary Wars;
if I remember rightly, many many hundreds, all discreetly hidden from
the common or garden reader until party politics necessitated their
resurrection a hundred years after the event, but they have nothing
whatsoever to do with modern circumstances.

Both statements are true then, and yet one can be truthfully applied
today, while the other cannot.

How is the plain reader to distinguish between two historical truths,
one of which is a useful modern analogy, the other of which is a
ludicrously misleading one?

The reader, it would seem, has no criterion by which to distinguish
what has been withheld from him and what has been emphasized; he may,
from his knowledge of the historian’s character or bias, stand upon his
guard, but he can do little more.

There is another difficulty. It is less subtle and less common, but it
exists. I mean brute lying. You do not often get the lie direct in
official history; it would be too dangerous a game to play in the face
of the critics, though some historians, and notably the French
historian Taine, have played it boldly enough, and have stated
dogmatically, as historical happenings, things that never happened and
that they knew never happened. But the plain or brute historical lie is
more commonly found in the pages of ephemeral journalism. Thus the
other day, with regard to the Budget, I saw some financial operation
alluded to as comparable with “the pulling out of Jews’ teeth for money
in the Middle Ages.” When did anyone in the Middle Ages pull out a
Jew’s teeth for money? There is just one very doubtful story told about
King John, and that story is told without proof by one of John’s worst
enemies, in a mass of other accusations many of which can be proved to
be false.

Again, I turn to an Oxford History of the French Revolution, and I find
the remark that the massacres of September were organized by the men
from Marseilles. They were not organized by the men from Marseilles.
The men from Marseilles had nothing to do with them, and the fact has
been public property since the publication of Pollio and Marcel’s
monograph twenty years ago.

What criterion can the ordinary reader choose when he is confronted by
difficulties of this sort? I will suggest to him one which seems to me
by far the most valuable. It is the reading of firsthand authorities.
It is all a matter of habit. When the original authorities upon which
history is based were difficult to get at, when few of those in foreign
tongues had been translated, and when those that had been published
were published in the most expensive form, the ordinary reader had to
depend upon an historian who would summarize for him the reading of
another. The ordinary reader was compelled to read secondary history or
none. Now secondary history is among the most valuable of literary
efforts; where evidence is slight, the judgment of an historian who
knows from other reading the general character of the period, is most
valuable. Where evidence is abundant, and therefore confusing, the
historian used to the selection and weighing of it performs a most
valuable function. Still, the reader who is not acquainted with
original authorities does not really know history and is at the mercy
of whatever myth or tradition may be handed to him in print.

We should remember that today, even in England, original authorities
are quite easy to get at. Two little books, for instance, occur to me
out of hundreds: Mr. Rait’s book on Mary Stuart and Mr. Archer’s on the
Third Crusade. In each of these the reader gets in a cheap form, in
modern and readable English, the kind of evidence upon which historians
base their history, and he can use that evidence in the light of his
own knowledge of human nature and his own judgment of human life.

Or again, if he wants to know what the Romans really knew or said they
knew about the German tribes who, as pirates, so greatly influenced the
history of England, let him get Mr. Rouse’s edition of Grenewey’s
translation of the Germania in Blackie’s series of English texts; it
will only cost sixpence, and for that money he will get a bit of
Caesar’s Gallic War and the Agricola as well. But the list nowadays is
a very long one, luckily, and the lay reader has only to choose what
period he would like to read up, and he will find for nearly every one
first-hand evidence ready, cheap and published in a readable modern
form. That he should take such first-hand evidence is the very best
advice that any honest historian can give.




The Victory


The study of history, like the exploration, the thorough exploration,
of any other field, leads one to perpetual novelties, miracles, and
unexpected things; and I, in the study of the revolutionary wars, came
across the story of a battle which completely possessed my spirit.

It would not be to my purpose here to give its name. It is not among
the most famous; it is not Waterloo, nor Leipsic, nor Austerlitz, nor
even Jemappes. The more I read into the night the more I perceived that
upon the issue of that struggle depended the fate of the modern world.
So completely did the notes of Carnot and a few private letters that
had been put before me absorb my attention that I will swear the
bugle-calls of those two days (for it was a two-days’ struggle) sounded
more clearly in my ears than the rumble of the London streets, and, as
this died out with the advance of the night and the approach of
morning, I was living entirely upon that ridge in Flanders, watching,
as a man watches an arena, whether the new things or the old should be
victorious. It was the new that conquered.

From that evening I was determined to visit this place of which so far
I had but read, and to see how far it might agree with the vision I had
had of it, and to people actual fields with the ghosts of dead
soldiers. And for the better appreciation of the drama I chose the
season and the days on which the fight had been driven across that
rolling land, and I came there, as the Republicans had come, a little
before the dawn.

The hillside was silent and deserted, more even than are commonly such
places, though silence and desertion seem the common atmosphere of all
the fields on which such fates have been decided. A man looking over
Carthage Bay, especially a man looking at those sodden pools that were
the sound harbours of Carthage, might be in an uninhabited world; and
the loop of the Trebbia is the same, and the edge of Fontenoy; and even
here in England that hillside looking south up which the Normans
charged at Battle is a quiet and a drowsy sort of place.... So it was
here in Flanders.

For two miles as I ascended by the little sunken lane which the extreme
right wing had followed in the last attack I saw neither man nor beast,
but only the same stubble of the same autumn fields, and the same
colder sun shining upon the empty uplands until I reached the crest
where the Hungarian and the Croat had met the charge, and had disputed
the little village for two hours—a dispute upon which hung your fate
and mine and that of Europe.

It was a tiny little village, seven or eight houses together and no
more, with a crazy little wooden steeple to its church all twisted
awry, large barns, and comfortable hedgerows of the Northern kind; and
from it one looked out westwards over an infinity of country, following
low crest after low crest, down on to the French plains. I went into
the inn of the place to drink, and found the cobbler there complaining
that wealth disturbed the natural equality of men. Then I wandered out,
pacing this point and that which I knew accurately from my maps, and
thinking of the noise of the war. Behind the little church, upon a
ramshackle green not large enough to pitch the stumps for
single-wicket, was the modest monument, a cock in bronze, crowing, and
the word “Victory” stamped into the granite of the pedestal; the whole
thing, I suppose, not ten feet high. The bronze was very well done; it
savoured strongly of Paris and looked odd in this abandoned little
place. But every time my eyes sank from the bronze, to look at some
other point in the landscape to identify the emplacement of such and
such a battery or the gully that had concealed the advance of such and
such a troop, my glance perpetually returned to that word “VICTORY,”
sculptured by itself upon the stone. It was indeed a victory; it was a
victory which, for its huge unexpectedness, for the noise of it, for
the length of time during which it was in doubt, for its final success,
there is no parallel, and yet it is by no means among the famous
battles of the world. And though the French count it one among the
thousand of their battles, I doubt whether even in Paris most men would
recognize it for the hammer-blow it was. The men of the time hardly
knew it, though Carnot guessed at it, and now to-day in Sorbonne I
think that regal fight is taking its true place.

So I went down the eight miles of front northward along the ridge; for
even that battle, a hundred and more years ago, had an extended front
of this kind. I recognized the tall majestic fringe of beeches from
which had issued the last of the Royalist regiments bearing for the
last time upon a European field the white flag of the Bourbon Monarchy;
I came beyond it to the combe fringed with its semicircle of underbrush
in which Coburg had massed his guns in the last effort to break the
French centre when his flank was turned. I came to the main highway,
very broad, straight, and paved, which cuts this battlefield in two,
and then beyond it to the central position whose capture had made the
final manoeuvre possible.

All Wednesday the Grenadiers, German, tall, padded, smart, and stout,
had held their ground. It was not until Thursday, and by noon, that
they were slowly driven up the hill by the ragged lads, the Gauls,
shoeless, some not in uniform at all, half-mutinous, drunk with pain
and glory. And I remembered, as the scene returned to me, that this
battle, like so many of the Revolution, had been a battle of men
against boys; how grey and veteran and trained in arms were the
Austrians and the Prussians, their allies, how strict in orders, how
calm: and what children the Terror had called up by force from the
exhausted fields of remote French provinces, to break them here against
the frontier, like water against a wall...!

There was a little chap, twelve years old, a drummer; he had crept and
crawled by hedgerows till he found himself behind the line of those
volleying Grenadiers. There, “before his side,” and breaking all rules,
he had sounded the roll of the charge. They cut him down and killed
him, and the roll of his drum ceased hard. A generation or more later,
digging for foundations at this spot, the builders of the Peace came
upon his bones, the little bones of a child heaped pell-mell with
skeletons of the fallen giants round him.

I went back into the town in whose defence the battle had been waged,
and there I saw again in bronze this little lad, head high and mouth
open, a-beating of his drum, and again the word “VICTORY.”

All that effort was undertaken, all those young men and children
killed, for something that was to happen for the salvation of the
world; it has not come. All that iron resistance of the German line had
been forged and organized till it almost conquered, till it almost
thwarted, the Republic, and it also had been organized for the defence,
and, as some thought, for the salvation, of the world. Some great good
was to have come by the storming of that hill, or some great good by
the defeat of the impetuous charge. Well, the hill was stormed, and (if
you will) at Leipsic the effort which had stormed it was rolled back.
What has happened to the High Goddess whom that youth followed, and
worshipped as they say, and what to the Gods whom their enemies
defended? The ridge is exactly the same.




Reality


A couple of generations ago there was a sort of man going mournfully
about who complained of the spread of education. He had an ill-ease in
his mind. He feared that book learning would bring us no good, and he
was called a fool for his pains. Not undeservedly—for his thoughts were
muddled, and if his heart was good it was far better than his head. He
argued badly or he merely affirmed, but he had strong allies (Ruskin
was one of them), and, like every man who is sincere, there was
something in what he said; like every type which is numerous, there was
a human feeling behind him: and he was very numerous.

Now that he is pretty well extinct we are beginning to understand what
he meant and what there was to be said for him. The greatest of the
French Revolutionists was right—“After bread, the most crying need of
the populace is knowledge.” But what knowledge?

The truth is that secondary impressions, impressions gathered from
books and from maps, are valuable as adjuncts to primary impressions
(that is, impressions gathered through the channel of our senses), or,
what is always almost as good and sometimes better, the interpreting
voice of the living man. For you must allow me the paradox that in some
mysterious way the voice and gesture of a living witness always convey
something of the real impression he has had, and sometimes convey more
than we should have received ourselves from our own sight and hearing
of the thing related.

Well, I say, these secondary impressions are valuable as adjuncts to
primary impressions. But when they stand absolute and have hardly any
reference to primary impressions, then they may deceive. When they
stand not only absolute but clothed with authority, and when they
pretend to convince us even against our own experience, they are
positively undoing the work which education was meant to do. When we
receive them merely as an enlargement of what we know and make of the
unseen things of which we read, things in the image of the seen, then
they quite distort our appreciation of the world.

Consider so simple a thing as a river. A child learns its map and
knows, or thinks it knows, that such and such rivers characterize such
and such nations and their territories. Paris stands upon the River
Seine, Rome upon the River Tiber, New Orleans on the Mississippi,
Toledo upon the River Tagus, and so forth. That child will know one
river, the river near his home. And he will think of all those other
rivers in its image. He will think of the Tagus and the Tiber and the
Seine and the Mississippi—and they will all be the river near his home.
Then let him travel, and what will he come across? The Seine, if he is
from these islands, may not disappoint him or astonish him with a sense
of novelty and of ignorance. It will indeed look grander and more
majestic, seen from the enormous forest heights above its lower course,
than what, perhaps, he had thought possible in a river, but still it
will be a river of water out of which a man can drink, with clear-cut
banks and with bridges over it, and with boats that ply up and down.
But let him see the Tagus at Toledo, and what he finds is brown rolling
mud, pouring solid after the rains, or sluggish and hardly a river
after long drought. Let him go down the Tiber, down the Valley of the
Tiber, on foot, and he will retain until the last miles an impression
of nothing but a turbid mountain torrent, mixed with the friable soil
in its bed. Let him approach the Mississippi in the most part of its
long course and the novelty will be more striking still. It will not
seem to him a river at all (if he be from Northern Europe); it will
seem a chance flood. He will come to it through marshes and through
swamps, crossing a deserted backwater, finding firm land beyond, then
coming to further shallow patches of wet, out of which the tree-stumps
stand, and beyond which again mud-heaps and banks and groups of reeds
leave undetermined, for one hundred yards after another, the limits of
the vast stream. At last, if he has a boat with him, he may make some
place where he has a clear view right across to low trees, tiny from
their distance, similarly half swamped upon a further shore, and behind
them a low escarpment of bare earth. That is the Mississippi nine times
out of ten, and to an Englishman who had expected to find from his
early reading or his maps a larger Thames it seems for all the world
like a stretch of East Anglian flood, save that it is so much more
desolate.

The maps are coloured to express the claims of Governments. What do
they tell you of the social truth? Go on foot or bicycling through the
more populated upland belt of Algiers and discover the curious mixture
of security and war which no map can tell you of and which none of the
geographies make you understand. The excellent roads, trodden by men
that cannot make a road; the walls as ready loopholed for fighting; the
Christian church and the mosque in one town; the necessity for and the
hatred of the European; the indescribable difference of the sun, which
here, even in winter, has something malignant about it, and strikes as
well as warms; the mountains odd, unlike our mountains; the forests,
which stand as it were by hardihood, and seem at war against the
influence of dryness and the desert winds, with their trees far apart,
and between them no grass, but bare earth alone.

So it is with the reality of arms and with the reality of the sea. Too
much reading of battles has ever unfitted men for war; too much talk of
the sea is a poison in these great town populations of ours which know
nothing of the sea. Who that knows anything of the sea will claim
certitude in connexion with it? And yet there is a school which has by
this time turned its mechanical system almost into a commonplace upon
our lips, and talks of that most perilous thing, the fortunes of a
fleet, as though it were a merely numerical and calculable thing! The
greatest of Armadas may set out and not return.

There is one experience of travel and of the physical realities of the
world which has been so widely repeated, and which men have so
constantly verified, that I could mention it as a last example of my
thesis without fear of misunderstanding. I mean the quality of a great
mountain.

To one that has never seen a mountain it may seem a full and a fine
piece of knowledge to be acquainted with its height in feet exactly,
its situation; nay, many would think themselves learned if they know no
more than its conventional name. But the thing itself! The curious
sense of its isolation from the common world, of its being the
habitation of awe, perhaps the brooding-place of a god!

I had seen many mountains, I had travelled in many places, and I had
read many particular details in the books—and so well noted them upon
the maps that I could have re-drawn the maps—concerning the Cerdagne.
None the less the sight of that wall of the Cerdagne, when first it
struck me, coming down the pass from Tourcarol, was as novel as though
all my life had been spent upon empty plains. By the map it was 9000
feet. It might have been 90,000! The wonderment as to what lay beyond,
the sense that it was a limit to known things, its savage
intangibility, its sheer silence! Nothing but the eye seeing could give
one all those things.

The old complain that the young will not take advice. But the wisest
will tell them that, save blindly and upon authority, the young cannot
take it. For most of human and social experience is words to the young,
and the reality can come only with years. The wise complain of the
jingo in every country; and properly, for he upsets the plans of
statesmen, miscalculates the value of national forces, and may, if he
is powerful enough, destroy the true spirit of armies. But the wise
would be wiser still if, while they blamed the extravagance of this
sort of man, they would recognize that it came from that half-knowledge
of mere names and lists which excludes reality. It is maps and
newspapers that turn an honest fool into a jingo.

It is so again with distance, and it is so with time. Men will not
grasp distance unless they have traversed it, or unless it be
represented to them vividly by the comparison of great landscapes. Men
will not grasp historical time unless the historian shall be at the
pains to give them what historians so rarely give, the measure of a
period in terms of a human life. It is from secondary impressions
divorced from reality that a contempt for the past arises, and that the
fatal illusion of some gradual process of betterment of “progress”
vulgarizes the minds of men and wastes their effort. It is from
secondary impressions divorced from reality that a society imagines
itself diseased when it is healthy, or healthy when it is diseased. And
it is from secondary impressions divorced from reality that springs the
amazing power of the little second-rate public man in those modern
machines that think themselves democracies. This last is a power which,
luckily, cannot be greatly abused, for the men upon whom it is thrust
are not capable even of abuse upon a great scale. It is none the less
marvellous in its falsehood.

Now you will say at the end of this, Since you blame so much the power
for distortion and for ill residing in our great towns, in our system
of primary education and in our papers and in our books, what remedy
can you propose? Why, none, either immediate or mechanical. The best
and the greatest remedy is a true philosophy, which shall lead men
always to ask themselves what they really know and in what order of
certitude they know it; where authority actually resides and where it
is usurped. But, apart from the advent, or rather the recapture, of a
true philosophy by a European society, two forces are at work which
will always bring reality back, though less swiftly and less whole. The
first is the poet, and the second is Time.

Sooner or later Time brings the empty phrase and the false conclusion
up against what is; the empty imaginary looks reality in the face and
the truth at once conquers. In war a nation learns whether it is strong
or no, and how it is strong and how weak; it learns it as well in
defeat as in victory. In the long processes of human lives, in the
succession of generations, the real necessities and nature of a human
society destroy any false formula upon which it was attempted to
conduct it. Time must always ultimately teach.

The poet, in some way it is difficult to understand (unless we admit
that he is a seer), is also very powerful as the ally of such an
influence. He brings out the inner part of things and presents them to
men in such a way that they cannot refuse but must accept it. But how
the mere choice and rhythm of words should produce so magical an effect
no one has yet been able to comprehend, and least of all the poets
themselves.




On the Decline of the Book: [And Especially of the Historical Book]


It is an interesting speculation by what means the Book lost its old
position in this country. This is not only an interesting speculation,
but one which nearly concerns a vital matter. For if men fall into the
habit of neglecting true books in an old and traditional civilization,
the inaccuracy of their judgments and the illusions to which they will
be subject, must increase.

To take but one example: history. The less the true historical book is
read and the more men depend upon ephemeral statement, the more will
legend crystallize, the harder will it be to destroy in the general
mind some comforting lie, and the great object-lesson of politics
(which is an accurate knowledge of how men have acted in the past) will
become at last unknown.

There are many, especially among younger men, who would contest the
premiss upon which all this is founded. They may point out, for
instance, that the actual number of bound books bought in a given time
at present is much larger than ever it was before. They may point out
again, and with justice, that the proportion of the population which
reads books of any sort, though perhaps not larger than it was three
hundred years ago, is very much larger than it was one hundred years
ago. And it may further be affirmed with truth that the range of
subjects now covered by books produced and sold is much wider than ever
it was before.

All this is true; and yet it is also true that the Book as a factor in
our civilization has not only declined but has almost disappeared. Were
many more dogs to be possessed in England than are now possessed, but
were they to be all mongrels, among which none could be found capable
of retrieving, or of following a fox or a hare with any discipline, one
would have a right to say that the dog as a factor of our civilization
had declined. Were many more men in England able to ride horses more or
less, but were the number of those who rode constantly and for pleasure
enormously to diminish, and were the new millions who could just manage
to keep on horseback to prefer animals without spirit on which they
would feel safe, one would have a right to say that the horse was
declining as a factor in our civilization; and this is exactly what has
happened with the Book.

The excellence of a book and its value as a book depend upon two
factors, which are usually, though not always, united in varied
proportions: first, that it should put something of value to the
reader, whether of value as a discovery and an enlargement of wisdom or
of value as a new emphasis laid upon old and sound morals; secondly,
that this thing added or renewed in human life should be presented in
such a manner as to give permanent aesthetic pleasure.

That is not a first-rate book which, while it is admirably written,
teaches something false or something evil; nor is that a first-rate
book which, though it discover a completely new thing, or emphasize the
most valuable department of morals, is so constructed as to be
unreadable. Now it will not be denied that as far as these two factors
are concerned—and I repeat they are almost always found in
combination—the position of the Book has dwindled almost to
nothingness. One could give examples of almost every kind: one could
show how poetry, no matter how appreciated or praised, no longer sells.
One could show—and this is one of the worst signs of all—how men will
buy by the hundred thousand anything at all which has the hall mark of
an established reputation, quite careless as to their love of it or
their appetite for it. One could further show how more than one book of
permanent value in English life has been discovered in our generation
outside England, and has been as it were thrust upon the English public
by foreign opinion.

But for my purpose it will be sufficient to take one very important
branch which I can claim to have watched with some care, and that is
the branch of History.

It may be said with truth that in our generation no single first-rate
piece of history has enjoyed an appreciable sale. That is not true of
France, it is not true of the United States, it is not even true of
Germany in her intellectual decline, but it is true of England.

History is an excellent test. No man will read history, at least
history of an instructive sort, unless he is a man who can read a book,
and desires to possess one. To read History involves not only some
permanent interest in things not immediately sensible, but also some
permanent brain-work in the reader; for as one reads history one
cannot, if one is an intelligent being, forbear perpetually to contrast
the lessons it teaches with the received opinions of our time. Again,
History is valuable as an example in the general thesis I am
maintaining, because no good history can be written without a great
measure of hard work. To make a history at once accurate, readable,
useful, and new, is probably the hardest of all literary efforts; a man
writing such history is driving more horses abreast in his team than a
man writing any other kind of literary matter. He must keep his
imagination active; his style must be not only lucid, but also must
arrest the reader; he must exercise perpetually a power of selection
which plays over innumerable details; he must, in the midst of such
occupations, preserve unity of design, as much as must the novelist or
the playwright; and yet with all this there is not a verb, an adjective
or a substantive which, if it does not repose upon established
evidence, will not mar the particular type of work on which he is
engaged.

As an example of what I mean, consider two sentences: The first is
taken from the 432nd page of that exceedingly unequal publication, the
_Cambridge History of the French Revolution_; the second I have made up
on the spur of the moment; both deal with the Battle of Wattignies. The
“Cambridge History” version runs as follows:—

On October 15 the relieving force, 50,000 strong, attacked the Austrian
covering force at Wattignies; the battle raged all that day and was
most furious on the right, in front of the village of Wattignies, which
was taken and lost three times; on the 17th the French expected another
general engagement but the enemy had drawn off.

There are here five great positive errors in six lines. The French were
not 50,000 strong, the attack on the 15th was not on Wattignies, but on
Dourlers; Wattignies was not taken and lost three times; the fight of
the 15th was _least_ pressed on the right (harder on the left and
hardest in the centre) and no one—not the least recruit—expected Coburg
to come _back_ on the 17th. Why, he had crossed the Sambre at every
point the day before! As for negative errors, or errors of omission,
they are capital, and the chief is that the victory was won on the
second day, the 16th, of which no mention is made.

Now contrast such a sentence with the following:—

On October 15th the relieving force, 42,000 strong, attacked the
Austrian centre at Dourlers, and made demonstrations upon its wings;
the attack upon Dourlers (which village had been taken and lost three
times) having failed, upon the following day, October 16th, the extreme
left of the enemy’s position at Wattignies was attacked and carried;
the enemy thus outflanked was compelled to retreat, and Maubeuge was
relieved the same evening.

In the first sentence (which bears the hall mark of the University)
every error that could possibly be made in so few lines has been made.
The numbers are wrong; the nature of the fighting is misstated; the
village in the centre is confused with that on the extreme right; the
critical second day is altogether omitted, and every portion of the
sentence, verb, adjective, and substantive, is either directly
inaccurate or indirectly conveys an inaccurate impression. The second
sentence, bald in style and uninteresting in presentation as the first,
has the merit of telling the truth. But—and here is the point—it would
be impossible to criticize the first sentence unless someone had read
up the battle, and to read up that battle one has to depend on five or
six documents, some unpublished (like much of Jourdan’s Memoirs), some
of them involving a visit to Maubeuge itself, some, like Pierrat’s
book, very difficult to obtain (for it is neither in the British Museum
nor in the Bodleian) some few the writings of contemporary
eyewitnesses, and yet themselves demonstrably inaccurate. All these
must be read and collated, and if possible the actual ground of the
battle visited, before the first simple inaccurate sentence can be
properly criticized or the second bald but accurate sentence framed.
None of these authorities can have been so much as heard of by the
official historian I have quoted.

It would be redundant to press the point. Most readers know well enough
what labour the just writing of history involves, and how excellent a
type it is of that “making of a book” which art is, as I have said,
imperilled by apathy at the present day.

Consider for a moment who were those that purchased historical works in
this country in the past. There were, first of all, the landed gentry.
In almost every great country-house you will find a good old library,
and that good old library you will discover to be, as a rule, most
valuable and most complete in what concerns the end of the eighteenth
and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. A very large proportion
of history, and history of the best sort, is to be found upon those
shelves. The standard dwindles, though it is fairly well maintained
during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. Then—as a
rule—it abruptly comes to an end. One may take as a sort of bourne, the
two great books Macaulay’s _History_ and Kinglake’s, for an earlier and
a later limit. Most of these libraries contain Macaulay; some few
Kinglake; hardly one possesses later works of value.

It may be urged in defence of the buyer that no later works of value
exist. Put so broadly, the statement is erroneous; but the truth which
it contains is in itself dependent upon the lack of public support for
good historical work. When there is a fortune for the man who writes in
accordance with whatever form of self-appreciation happens for the
moment to be popular, while a steady view and an accurate presentation
of the past can find no sale, then that steady view and that accurate
presentation cannot be pursued save by men who are wealthy, or by men
who are endowed, but even wealthy men will hesitate to write what they
know will not be read, and for history no one is endowed.

Our Universities were framed for many purposes, of which the
cultivation of learning was but one; in that one field, however, a
particular form of learning was taken very seriously, and was pursued
with admirable industry; I mean an acquaintance with and an imitation
of the Latin and Greek Classics.

It was a particular character of this form of learning that proficiency
in it would lead to undisputed honours. The scholar recognized the
superior scholar; the field of inquiry was by convention highly
limited; it had been thoroughly explored; discussion upon such results
as were doubtful did not involve a difference in general philosophy.

With history it is otherwise. Whether such things have or have not
happened, and, above all, if they have happened, the _way_ in which
they have happened, is to our general judgment of contemporary men what
evidence is to a criminal trial. Facts won’t give way. If, therefore,
there are vested interests, moral or material, to be maintained,
history is, of all the sciences or arts, that one most likely to suffer
at the hands of those connected with such interests. Even where the
truth will be of advantage to those interests, they are afraid of it,
because the thorough discussion of it will involve the presentation of
views disadvantageous to privilege.

Where, as is much more commonly the case (for vested interests, moral
or material, are unreasoning and selfish things), the truth would
certainly offend them, they are the more determined to prevent its
appearance.

But of all vested interests none deal with such assured incomes, none
are so immune by influence and tradition as the Universities.

Now, if the rich man has no temptation by way of popular fame, and the
poor man no opportunity for endowment, in any branch of letters, there
remains but a third form of support, and that is the support of the
buying public. And the public will not buy.

I will suppose the case of a popular novelist, who in a few months
shall write, not an historical novel, but a piece of so-called history.
He shall call it, for instance, “England’s Heroes.” Before you tell me
his name, or what he has written, I can tell you here and now what he
will write on any number of points. He will call Hastings Senlac. In
the Battle of Hastings he will make out Harold to be the head of a
highly patriotic nation called the “Anglo-Saxons”; they shall be
desperately defending themselves against certain French-speaking
Scandinavians called Normans. He will deplore the defeat, but will say
it was all for the best. Magna Charta he will have signed at
Runnymede—probably he will have it drawn up there as well. He will
translate the most famous clause by the modern words “Judgment of his
peers” and “law of the land.” He will represent the Barons as having
behind them the voice of the whole nation—and so forth. When he comes
to Crécy he will make Edward III speak English. When he comes to
Agincourt he will leave his readers as ignorant as himself upon the
boundaries, numbers and power of the Burgundian faction. In the Civil
War Oliver Cromwell will be an honest and not very rich gentleman of
the middle-classes. The Parliamentary force will be that of the mass of
the people against a few gallant but wicked aristocrats who follow the
perfidious Charles. He will make no mention of the pay of the
Ironsides. James II will be driven out by a popular uprising, in which
the great Churchill will play an honourable and chivalric part. The
loss of the American Colonies will be deplored, and will be ascribed to
the folly of attempting to tax men of “Anglo-Saxon” blood, unless you
grant them representation. The Continental troops will be treated as
the descendants of Englishmen! The guns at Saratoga will be Colonial
guns; the incapacity of the Fleet will not be touched upon. Here again,
as in the case of the Battle of Hastings, all will be for the best, and
there will be a few touching words upon the passionate affection now
felt for Great Britain by the inhabitants of the United States. The
defensive genius of Wellington will be represented as that of a general
particularly great in the offensive. Talavera will be a victory. The
Spanish Auxiliaries in the Peninsula will be contemptible. No guns will
be abandoned before Coruña, but what are left at Coruña will be
mentioned and re-embarked. The character of Nelson will receive a
curious sort of glutinous praise; Emma Hamilton, not Naples, will be
the stain upon his name; the Battle of Trafalgar will prevent the
invasion of England.

This is a lengthy but not unjust description of what this gentleman
would write; it is rubbish from beginning to end. It would sell,
because every word of it would foster in the reader the illusion that
the community of which he is a member is invincible under all
circumstances, that effort and self-denial and suffering are spared him
alone out of all mankind, and that a little pleasurable excitement,
preferably that to be obtained from his favourite game, is the chief
factor in military success.

I have omitted Alfred. Alfred in such a book will be the “teller of
truth”—but he will not go to Mass.

Given that the name is sufficiently well known, there is hardly any
limit to the sale of a book modelled upon these lines. Contrast with
its fate the fate of a book, written no matter how powerfully, that
should insist upon truths, no matter how valuable to the English people
at the present moment. These truths need by no means be unpleasant,
though at the present moment an unpleasant truth is undoubtedly more
valuable than a pleasant one. They could make as much or more for the
glory of the country; they could be at any rate of infinitely greater
service, but they would not be received, simply because they would
compel close attention and brain-work in the reader as well as in the
writer of them. An established groove would have to be abandoned; to
use a strong metaphor, the reader would have to get out of bed, and
that is what the modern reader will not do. Tell him that the men who
fought on either side at Hastings’ plain cared nothing for national but
everything for feudal allegiance; that _lex terrae_ means the local
custom of ordeal and not the “law of the land”; tell him that _judicium
parium_ means the right of a noble to be judged by nobles, and has
nothing to do with the jury system; tell him that Magna Charta was
certainly drawn up before the meeting at Runnymede; that not until the
Lancastrians did English kings speak English; that Oliver Cromwell owed
his position to the enormous wealth of the Williamses, of whom had he
not been a cadet, he would never have been known; tell him that the
whole force of the Parliament resided in the squires and that the Civil
Wars turned England into an oligarchy; tell him the exact truth about
the infamy of Churchill; tell him what proportion of Englishmen during
the American War were taxed without being represented; tell him what
proportion of Washington’s troops were of English blood; tell him any
one illuminating and true thing about the history of his country, and
the novelty will so offend him that a direct insult would have pleased
him better.

What is true of history is true of nearly all the rest, and the upshot
of the whole matter is that there is not, either in private patronage
or in popular demand, a chance for history in modern England.

You can have excellent literature in journalism, and it will be widely
read. I would say more—I would say that the better literature a
newspaper admits, the more widely will that paper be read, or at any
rate the greater will its influence be on modern Englishmen. But when
it comes to the kneaded and wrought matter of the true Book, neither
the public nor the centres of learning will have any of it, and the
last medium which might make it possible, patronage, has equally
disappeared, because the modern patron does not work in the daylight in
the full view of the nation and with its full approbation, and he is no
longer a public man (though he is richer than ever he was before). His
patronage, therefore, though it is still considerable, is expended in
satisfying his private demand. Private architects build him doubtful
castles, private collectors get him manuscripts and jewels, but
Letters, which are a public thing, he can no longer command.

It might be asked, by way of conclusion, whether there is any remedy
for this state of things. There is none. Its prime cause resides in a
certain attitude of the national mind, and this kind of broadly held
philosophy is not changed save by slow preaching or external shock. As
long as modern England remains what we know it, and follows the lines
of change which we see it following, the Book will necessarily decline
more and more, and we must make up our minds to it.

Of other evil tendencies of our time, one can say of some that they are
obviously mending, of others that such and such an applicable remedy
would mend them. Our public architecture is certainly getting better;
so is our painting. Our gross and increasing contempt of
self-government (to take quite another sphere) is curable by one or two
simple reforms in procedure, registration, the expenses of election,
and voting at the polls, which would restore the House of Commons to
life, and give it power to express English will. But a regard for, a
cultivation of, above all a sinking of wealth upon, English Letters is
past praying for. We must wait until the tide changes; we can do
nothing, and the waiting will be long.




José Maria de Heredia


The French have a phrase “la beauté du verbe” by which they would
express a something in the sound and in the arrangement of words which
supplements whatever mere thought those words were intended to express.
It is evident that no definition of this beauty can be given, but it is
also evident that without it letters would not exist. How it arises we
cannot explain, yet the process is familiar to us in everything we do
when we are attempting to fulfil an impulse towards whatever is good.
An integration not of many small things but of an infinite series of
infinitely small things build up the perfect gesture, the perfect line,
the perfect intonation, and the perfect phrase. So indeed are all
things significant built up: every tone of the voice, every arrangement
of landscape or of notes in music which awake us and reveal the things
beyond. But when one says that this is especially true of perfect
expression one means that sometimes, rarely, the integration achieves a
steadfast and sufficient formula. The mind is satisfied rather than
replete. It asks no more; and if it desires to enjoy further the
pleasure such completion has given it, it does not attempt to prolong
or to develop the pleasure under which it has leapt; it is content to
wait a while and to return, knowing well that it has here a treasure
laid up for ever.

All this may be expressed in two words: the Classical Spirit. That is
Classic of which it is true that the enjoyment is sufficient when it is
terminated and that in the enjoyment of it an entity is revealed.

When men propose to bequeath to their fellows work of so supreme a kind
it is to be noticed that they choose by instinct a certain material.

It has been said that the material in which he works affects the
achievement of the artist: it is truer to say that it helps him. A man
designing a sculpture in marble knows very well what he is about to do.
A man attempting the exact and restrained rendering of tragedy upon the
stage does not choose the stage as one among many methods, he is drawn
to it: he needs it; the audience, the light, the evening, the very
slope of the boards, all minister to his efforts. And so a man
determined to produce the greatest things in verse takes up by nature
exact and thoughtful words and finds that their rhythm, their
combination, and their sound turn under his hand to something greater
than he himself at first intended; he becomes a creator, and his name
is linked with the name of a masterpiece. The material in which he has
worked is hard; the price he has paid is an exceeding effect; the
reward he has earned is permanence.

José de Heredia was an artist of this kind. The mass of the verse he
produced, or rather published, was small. It might have been very
large. It is not (as a foolish modern affectation will sometimes
pretend) necessary to the endurance or even the excellence of work that
it should be the product of exceptional moments; nor is it even true
(as the wise Ancients believed) that great length of time must always
mature it. But the small volume of Heredia’s legacy to European letters
does argue this at least in the poet, that he passionately loved
perfection and that, finding himself able to achieve it (for perfection
can be achieved) but now and then, he chose only to be remembered by
the contentment which, now and then, his own genius had given him.

He worked upon verse as men work upon the harder metals; all that he
did was chiselled very finely, then sawn to an exact configuration and
at last inlaid, for when he published his completed volume it is true
to say that every piece fitted in with the sound of one before and of
one after. He was careful in the heroic degree.

His blood and descent are worthy of notice. He was a Spaniard,
inheriting from the first Conquerors of the New World, nor was it
remarkable to those who have received a proper enthusiasm for the
classical spirit that the energy and even the violence natural to such
a lineage should express themselves in the coldest and the most exalted
form when, for the second time, a member of the family attempted verse.
It is in the essence of that spirit that it alone can dare to be
disciplined. It never doubts the motive power that will impel it; it is
afraid, if anything, of an excess of power, and consciously imposes
upon itself the limits which give it form.

Heredia in his person expressed the activity which impelled him, for he
was strong, brown, erect, a rapid walker, and a man whose voice was
perpetually modulated in resonant and powerful tones. In his last years
during his administration of the Library at the Arsenal this vitality
of his took on an aspect of good nature very charming and very
fruitful. His organization of the place was thorough, his knowledge of
the readers intimate. He refused the manuscripts of none, he advised,
laughed, and consoled. His criticism was sure. Several, notably Marcel
Prevost, were launched by his authority. The same deep security of
literary judgment which had permitted him to chastise and to perfect
his impeccable sonnets into their final form permitted him also to hold
up before his eyes, grasp, and judge the work of every other man.

His frailty, as must always be the frailty of such men, was
fastidiousness. The same sensitive consciousness which is said to have
all but lost us the Aeneid, and which certainly all but lost us the
Apologia, dominated his otherwise vigorous soul. It is more than forty
years since his first verse, written just upon achieving his majority,
appeared in the old _Revue de Paris_ and in the _Revue des Deux
Mondes_. It was not till 1893 that he collected in one volume the
scattered sonnets of his youth and middle age: the collection won him
somewhat tardily his chair in the Academy. There is irony in the
reminiscence that the man he defeated in that election was Zola.

All the great men who saluted his advent are dead. Théophile Gautier,
who first established his fame; Hugo, who addressed to him, perhaps,
that vigorous appeal in which strict labour is deified, and the medal
and the marble bust are shown to outlive the greatest glories, are
sometimes quoted as the last among the great French writers.

The immediate future will show that the stream of French excellence in
this department, as in any other of human activity, is full, deep, and
steady. The work of Heredia will help to prove it. He was a Spaniard,
and a Colonial Spaniard. No other nation, perhaps, except the modern
French, so inherit the romantic appetite of the later Roman Empire as
to be able to mould and absorb every exterior element of excellence. It
is remarkable that at the same moment Paris contemplated the funeral of
the Italian de Brazza and the death of the Cuban Heredia. It is
probable that those of us who are still young will live to see either
name at the head of a new tradition. Heredia proved it possible not so
much to imitate as to recapture the secure tradition of an older time.
Perhaps the truest generalization that can be made with regard to the
French people is to say that they especially in Western Europe (whose
quality it is ever to transform itself but never to die) discover new
springs of vitality after every period of defeat and aridity which they
are compelled to cross. Heredia will prove in the near future a capital
example of this power. He will increase silently in reputation until
we, in old age, shall be surprised to find our sons and grandsons
taking him for granted and speaking of him as one speaks of the
Majores, of the permanent lights of poetry.




Normandy and the Normans


There is no understanding a country unless one gets to know the nature
of its sub-units. In some way not easy to comprehend, impossible to
define, and yet very manifest, each of the great national organisms of
which Christendom is built up is itself a body of many regions whose
differences and interaction endow it with a corporate life. No one
could understand the past of England who did not grasp the local genius
of the counties—Lancashire, cut off eastward by the Pennines, southward
by the belt of marsh, with no natural entry save by the gate of
Stockport; Sussex, which was and is a bishopric and a kingdom; Kent,
Devon, the East Anglian meres. No one could (or does) understand modern
England who does not see its sub-units to have become by now the great
industrial towns, or who fails to seize the spirit of each group of
such towns—with London lying isolated in the south, a negative to the
rest.

France is built of such sub-units: it is the peculiarity of French
development that these are not small territories mainly of an average
extent with government answerable in a long day’s ride to one centre,
such as most English counties are; nor city States such as form the
piles upon which the structure of Italy has been raised; nor kingdoms
such as coalesced to reform the Spanish people; but _provinces_,
differing greatly in area, from little plains enclosed, like the
Rousillon, to great stretches of landscape succeeding landscape like
the Bourbonnais or the Périgord.

The real continuity with an immemorial past which inspires all Gallic
things is discoverable in this arrangement of Gaul. At the first glance
one might imagine a French province to be a chance growth of the feudal
ties and of the Middle Ages. A further effort of scholarship will prove
it essentially Roman. An intimate acquaintance with its customs and
with the site of its strongholds, coupled with a comparison of the most
recent and most fruitful hypotheses of historians, will convince you
that it is earlier than the Roman conquest; it is tribal, or the home
of a group of cognate tribes, and its roots are lost in prehistory. So
it is with Normandy.

This vast territory—larger (I think) than all North England from the
Humber to Cheviot and from Chester to the Solway—has never formed a
nation. It is typical of the national idea in France that Normandy
should have “held” of the political centre of the country, probably
since the first Gallic confederations were formed, certainly since the
organization of the Empire. It is equally typical of the local life of
a French province that, thus dependent, Normandy should have strictly
preserved its manner and its spirit, and should have readily made war
upon the Crown and resisted, as it still resists and will perhaps for
ever, the centralizing forces of the national temper.

If you will travel day after day, and afoot, westward across the length
of Normandy, you will have, if you are a good walker, a fortnight’s
task ahead of you; even if you are walking for a wager, a week’s. It is
the best way in which to possess a knowledge of that great land, and my
advice would be to come in from the Picards over the bridge of Aumale
across the little River Bresle (which is the boundary of Normandy to
the east), and to go out by way of Pontorson, there crossing into
Brittany over the little River Couesnon, which is the boundary of
Normandy upon the west and beyond which lie the Bretons. In this way
will you be best acquainted with the sharp differentiation of the
French provinces passing into Normandy from Picardy, brick-built,
horse-breeding, and slow, passing out of Normandy into the desolation
and dreams of Brittany, and having known between the one and the other
the chalk streams, the day-long beechen forests, the valley pastures,
and the flamboyant churches of the Normans. You will do well to go by
Neufchâtel, where the cheese is made, and by Rouen, then by Lisieux to
Falaise, where the Conqueror was born, and thence by Vive to Avranches
and so to the Breton border, taking care to choose the forests between
one town and another for your road, since these many and deep
woods—much wider than any we know in England—are in great part the soul
of the country.

By this itinerary you will not have taken all you should into view; you
will not have touched the coast nor seen how Normandy is based upon the
sea, and you will not have known the Cotentin, which is a little State
of its own and is the quadrilateral which Normandy thrusts forth into
the Channel. If you have the leisure, therefore, return by the north.
Pass through Coutances and Valognes to Cherbourg, thence through Caen
and Bayeux to the crossing of Seine at Honfleur, and then on by the
chalk uplands and edges of the cliffs till you reach Eu upon the Bresle
again. In such a double journey the character of the whole will be
revealed, and if you have studied the past of the place before starting
you will find your journey full. Avranches, Coutances, Lisieux, Bayeux,
Rouen are not chance sites. Their great churches mark the bishoprics;
the bishoprics in turn were the administrative centres of Rome, and
Rome chose them because they were the strongholds or the sacred cities
each of a Gallic tribe. The wealth of the valleys permitted everywhere
that astonishing richness of detail which marks the stonework in
village after village; the connexion with England, especially the last
connexion under Henry V, explains the innumerable churches, splendid
even in hamlets as are our own. The Bresle and the Couesnon, those
little streams, are boundaries not of these last few centuries, but of
a time beyond view; the Romans found them so. Diocletian made them the
limits of the “Second Lyonesse,” “Lugdunensis Secunda,” which was the
last Roman name of the province.

Here and there, near the west especially, you will discover names which
recall the chief adventure of Normandy, the accident which baptized it
with its Christian name, the landing of the Scandinavian pirates, the
thousandth anniversary of which is now being celebrated. They came—we
cannot tell in what numbers, some thousands—and harried the land. The
old policy of the Empire, the policy already seven hundred years old,
was had recourse to; the barbarians were granted settlement,
inheritance, marriage, and partnership with the Lords of the Villae;
their chief was permitted to hold local government, to tax and to levy
men as the administrator of the whole province; but there followed
something which wherever else the experiment had been tried had not
followed: something of a new race arose. In Burgundy, in the northeast,
in Visigothic Aquitaine the slight admixture of foreign blood had not
changed the people, it was absorbed; the slight admixture of
Scandinavian blood, coming so much later, in a time so degraded in
government and therefore so open to natural influence, did change the
Gallo-Romans of the Second Lyonesse. Few as the newcomers may have been
in number, the new element transformed the mass, and when a century had
permitted the union to work and settle, the great soldiers who founded
us appeared. The Norman lords ordered, surveyed, codified, and ruled.
They let Europe into England, they organized Sicily, they confirmed the
New Papacy, they were the framework of the Crusades.

The phenomenon was brief. It lasted little more than a hundred years,
but it transformed Europe and launched the Middle Ages. When it had
passed, Normandy stood confirmed for centuries (and is still confirmed)
in a character of its own. No longer adventurous but mercantile, apt,
of a resisting courage, sober in thought, leaning upon tradition, not
imperially but domestically strong: the country of Corneille and of
Malesherbes, a reflection of that spirit in letters; the conservative
body of to-day—for in our generation that is the mark of Normandy—and,
in arms, the recruitment to which Napoleon addressed his short and
famous order that “the Normans that day should do their duty.”




The Old Things


Those who travel about England for their pleasure, or, for that matter,
about any part of Western Europe, rightly associate with such travel
the pleasure of history; for history adds to a man, giving him, as it
were, a great memory of things—like a human memory, but stretched over
a far longer space than that of one human life. It makes him, I do not
say wise and great, but certainly in communion with wisdom and
greatness.

It adds also to the soil he treads, for to this it adds meaning. How
good it is when you come out of Tewkesbury by the Cheltenham road to
look upon those fields to the left and know that they are not only
pleasant meadows, but also the place in which a great battle of the
mediaeval monarchy was decided, or as you stand by that ferry, which is
not known enough to Englishmen (for it is one of the most beautiful
things in England), and look back and see Tewkesbury tower, framed
between tall trees over the level of the Severn, to see also the Abbey
buildings in your eye of the mind—a great mass of similar stone with
solid Norman walls, stretching on hugely to the right of the Minster.

All this historical sense and the desire to marry History with Travel
is very fruitful and nourishing, but there is another interest, allied
to it, which is very nearly neglected, and which is yet in a way more
fascinating and more full of meaning. This interest is the interest in
such things as lie behind recorded history, and have survived into our
own times. For underneath the general life of Europe, with its splendid
epic of great Rome turned Christian, crusading, discovering, furnishing
the springs of the Renaissance, and flowering at last materially into
this stupendous knowledge of today, the knowledge of all the Arts, the
power to construct and to do—underneath all that is the foundation on
which Europe is built, the stem from which Europe springs; and that
stem is far, far older than any recorded history, and far, far more
vital than any of the phenomena which recorded history presents.

Recorded history for this island and for Northern France and for the
Rhine Valley is a matter of two thousand years; for the Western
Mediterranean of three; but the things of which I speak are to be
reckoned in tens of thousands of years. Their interest does not lie
only nor even chiefly in things that have disappeared. It is indeed a
great pleasure to rummage in the earth and find polished stones wrought
by men who came so many centuries before us, and of whose blood we
certainly are; and it is a great pleasure to find, or to guess that we
find, under Canterbury the piles of a lake or marsh dwelling, proving
that Canterbury has been there from all time; and that the apparently
defenceless Valley City was once chosen as an impregnable site, when
the water-meadows of the Stour were impassable as marsh, or with
difficulty passable as a shallow lagoon. And it is delightful to stand
on the earthwork a few miles west and to say to oneself (as one can say
with a fair certitude), “Here was the British camp defending the
south-east; here the tenth legion charged.” All these are pleasant, but
more pleasant, I think, to follow the thing where it actually survives.

Consider the track-ways, for instance. How rich is England in these! No
other part of Europe will afford the traveller so permanent and so
fascinating a problem. Elsewhere Rome hardened and straightened every
barbaric trail until the original line and level disappeared; but in
this distant province of Britain she could only afford just so much
energy as made them a foothold for her soldiery; and all over England
you can go, if you choose, foot by foot, along the ancient roads that
were made by the men of your blood before they had heard of brick or of
stone or of iron or of written laws.

I wonder that more men do not set out to follow, let us say, the
Fosse-Way. There it runs right across Western England from the
south-west to the north-east in a line direct yet sinuous, characters
which are the very essence of a savage trail. It is a modern road for
many miles, and you are tramping, let us say, along the Cotswold on a
hard metalled modern English highway, with milestones and notices from
the County Council telling you that the culverts will not bear a
steam-engine, if so be you were to travel on one. Then suddenly this
road comes up against a cross-road and apparently ceases, making what
map draughtsmen call a “T”; but right in the same line you see a gate,
and beyond it a farm lane, and so you follow. You come to a spinney
where a ride has been cut through by the woodreeve, and it is all in
the same line. The Fosse-Way turns into a little path, but you are
still on it; it curves over a marshy brook-valley, picking out the firm
land, and as you go you see old stones put there heaven knows how many
(or how few) generations ago—or perhaps yesterday, for the tradition
remains, and the country-folk strengthen their wet lands as they have
strengthened them all these thousands of years; you climb up out of
that depression, you get you over a stile, and there you are again upon
a lane. You follow that lane, and once more it stops dead. This time
there is a field before you. No right of way, no trace of a path,
nothing but grass rounded into those parallel ridges which mark the
modern decay of the corn lands and pasture—alas!—taking the place of
ploughing. Now your pleasure comes in casting about for the trail; you
look back along the line of the Way; you look forward in the same line
till you find some indication, a boundary between two parishes, perhaps
upon your map, or two or three quarries set together, or some other
sign, and very soon you have picked up the line again.

So you go on mile after mile, and as you tread that line you have in
the horizons that you see, in the very nature and feel of the soil
beneath your feet, in the skies of England above you, the ancient
purpose and soul of this Kingdom. Up this same line went the Clans
marching when they were called Northward to the host; and up this went
slow, creaking wagons with the lead of the Mendips or the tin of
Cornwall or the gold of Wales.

And it is still there; it is still used from place to place as a high
road, it still lives in modern England. There are some of its peers, as
for instance the Ermine Street, far more continuous, and affording
problems more rarely; others like the ridgeway of the Berkshire Downs,
which Rome hardly touched, and of which the last two thousand years
has, therefore, made hardly anything; you may spend a delightful day
piecing out exactly where it crossed the Thames, making your guess at
it, and wondering as you sit there by Streatley Vicarage whether those
islands did not form a natural weir below which lay the ford.

The roads are the most obvious things. There are many more; for
instance, thatch. The same laying of the straw in the same manner, with
the same art, has continued, we may be certain, from a time long before
the beginning of history. See how in the Fen Land they thatch with
reeds, and how upon the Chalk Downs with straw from the Lowlands. I
remember once being told of a record in a manor, which held of the
Church and which lay upon the southern slope of the Downs, that so much
was entered for “straw from the Lowlands”: then, years afterwards, when
I had to thatch a Bethlehem in an orchard underneath tall elms—a
pleasant place to write in, with the noise of bees in the air—the man
who came to thatch said to me: “We must have straw from the Lowlands;
this upland straw is no good for thatching.” Immediately when I heard
him say this there was added to me ten thousand years. And I know
another place in England, far distant from this, where a man said to me
that if I wished to cross in a winter mist, as I had determined to do,
Cross-Fell, that great summit of the Pennines, I must watch the drift
of the snow, for there was no other guide to one’s direction in such
weather. And I remember another man in a little boat in the North Sea,
as we came towards the Foreland, talking to me of the two tides, and
telling me how if one caught the tide all the way up to Long Nose and
then went round it on the end of the flood, one caught a new tide up
London river, and so made two tides in one day. He spoke with the same
pleasure that silly men show when they talk about an accumulation of
money. He felt wealthy and proud from the knowledge, for by this
knowledge he had two tides in one day. Now knowledge of this sort is
older than ten thousand years; and so is the knowledge of how birds
fly, and of how they call, and of how the weather changes with the
moon.

Very many things a man might add to the list that I am making. Dew-pans
are older than the language or the religion; and the finding of water
with a stick; and the catching of that smooth animal, the mole; and the
building of flints into mortar, which if one does it in the old way (as
you may see at Pevensey) the work lasts for ever, but if you do it in
any new way it does not last ten years; then there is the knowledge of
planting during the crescent part of the month, but not before the new
moon shows; and there is the influence of the moon on cider, and to a
less extent upon the brewing of ale; and talking of ale, the knowledge
of how ale should be drawn from the brewing just when a man can see his
face without mist upon the surface of the hot brew. And there is the
knowledge of how to bank rivers, which is called “throwing the rives”
in the South, but in the Fen Land by some other name; and how to bank
them so that they do not silt, but scour themselves. There are these
things and a thousand others. All are immemorial.




The Battle of Hastings. Related in the Manner of Oxford and Dedicated
to that University


So careless were the French commanders (or more properly the French
commander, for the rest were cowed by the bullying swagger of William)
that the night, which should have been devoted to some sort of
reconnaissance, if not of a preparation of the ground, was devoted to
nothing more practical than the religious exercises peculiar to
foreigners.

Their army, as we have seen, was not drawn from any one land, but it
was in the majority composed of Normans and Bretons; we can therefore
understand the extravagant superstition which must bear the blame for
what followed.

Meanwhile, upon the heights above, the English host calmly prepared for
battle. Fires were lit each in its appointed place, and at these meat
was cooked under the stern but kindly eyes of the sergeant-majors.
These also distributed at an appointed price liquor, of which the
British soldier is never willing to be deprived, and as the hours
advanced towards morning, the songs in which our adventurous race has
ever delighted rose from the heights above the Brede.

The morning was misty, as is often the case over damp and marshy lands
in the month of October, but the inclemency of the weather, or, to
speak more accurately, the superfluous moisture precipitated from an
already saturated atmosphere, was of no effect upon those silent and
tenacious troops of Harold. It was far other with the so-called
“Norman” host, who were full of forebodings—only too amply to be
justified—of the fate that lay before them upon the morrow.

It is curious to contrast the quiet skill and sagacity which marked the
disposition of Harold with the almost childish simplicity of William’s
plan—if plan it may be called.

The Saxon hosts were drawn along the ridge in a position chosen with
masterly skill. It afforded (as may still be seen) no dead ground for
an attacking force and little cover.[1] Their left was arranged _en
potence_, their right was drawn up in echelon. The centre followed the
plan usual at that time, reposing upon the wings to its right and left
and extended. The reserves were, of course, posted behind. Cavalry, as
at Omdurman, played but a slight role in this typically national action
and such mounted troops as were present seem to have been intermixed
with the line in the fashion later known, in the jargon of the service,
as “The Beggar’s Quadrille.” The Brigade of Guards is not mentioned in
any record that I can discover, but was probably set by reversed
companies in a square perpendicular to the main ravine and a little in
front of the salient angle which appears upon the map at the point
marked A.

The terrain can be clearly determined at the present day in spite of
the changes that have taken place in the intervening years. It is a
fairly steep slope of hemispherical contour interspersed with low
bushes; the summit (upon which now stands our lovely English village of
Battle and the residence of one of those cultured and leisured men who
form the framework of our commonwealth) was then but a wild heath.

Harold himself could be distinguished in the centre of the line by his
handsome features, restrained deportment, and unfailing gentlemanly
good sense as he spoke to staff officer, orderly, and even groom with
indefatigable skill.

In spite of the determination observable from a great distance upon the
faces of the tall Saxon line, William with characteristic lack of
balance opened the action by ordering a charge uphill with cavalry
alone; it was a piece of tactics absurdly incongruous and one even he
would never have attempted had he understood the foe that was before
him, or the fate to which that foe had doomed him.

The lesson dealt him was as immediate as it was severe. The foreigners
were thrust headlong down the hill, and a private letter tells us how
the Men of Kent in particular buffeted the Normans about “as though
they were boys.” But even in the heat of this initial success Harold
had the self-command to order the retirement upon the main position:
and with troops such as his the order was equivalent to its execution.

This rude blow would have sufficed for any commander less vain than
William, but he seems to have lost all judgment in a fit of personal
vanity and to have ordered a second charge which could not but prove as
futile as the first, delivered as it was up a perfect glacis
strengthened by epaulements, reverses and countersunk galvon work and
one whose natural strength was heightened by the stockade which the
indomitable energy of Harold’s troops had perfected in the early hours
of the morning. Many of the stakes in this, the reader may note with
pardonable pride, were of English oak—sharpened at the tip.

William’s plan (if plan it may be called) was, as we have seen,
necessarily futile and was foredoomed to failure. But Harold had no
intention to let the action bear no more fruit than a tactical victory
upon this particular field. The brain that had designed the exact
synchrony of Stamford Bridge and the famous march southward from the
Humber was of that sort which is only found once in many centuries of
the history of war and which is (it may be said without boasting)
peculiar to this island.

Another general would have awaited the second charge with its useless
butchery and still more useless contest for the barren name of victory.
Not so Harold. Those commanding, cold grey eyes of his swept the line
in a comprehensive glance, and though no written record of the detail
remains, he must know little of the character of the man who does not
understand that from Harold certainly proceeded the order for what
followed.

The forces at the centre, which he commanded in person, deftly withdrew
before the futile gallop of William’s cavalry, leaving, with that
coolness which has ever distinguished our troops, the laggards to their
fate. At the same moment, and with marvellous precision, the left and
right were withdrawn from the plateau rapidly and as by magic, and the
old-fashioned tactics of mere impact (which William of Normandy seems
seriously to have relied on!) were spent and wasted upon the now
evacuated summit of the hill.

What followed is famous in history.

The cohesion of the Saxon force and the exactitude and coolness with
which its great operation was performed is of good augury for the
future of our country. Though it was now thick night, by no set road
and with no cumbersome machinery of train and rear-guard, the whole of
the vast assembly masked itself behind the woodlands of the Weald.

The Norman horsemen, bewildered and fatigued, gazed on the many that
had fallen in defence of the masking position and wondered whether such
novel happenings were victory or no, but the army whose concentration
upon the Thames it was William’s whole object to prevent, was already
miles northward, each unit proceeding by exactly co-ordinated routes
towards London.

There is perhaps no more difficult task set before soldiers than the
quiet execution of such a manoeuvre after the heat of a heavy action,
and none have performed it more magnificently than the veteran troop of
Harold.

When (luckily) all the orders had been finally distributed a great
tragedy marred the completeness of the day.

Just before the execution of this masterpiece of strategy, and as the
autumn sun was sinking, the inevitable price which war demands of all
its darlings was paid.

Harold himself, the artist of the great victory, fell. But we have no
reason to believe that his loss retarded the retrograding movement in
any degree. Men who create as Harold created have not their creations
spoilt by death.


The shameful history of the close of the campaign is familiar to every
schoolboy, and the military historian must be pardoned if he deals with
a purely civilian blunder in a few brief words.

Parliament interfered—as it always does—with what should have been a
matter for soldiers alone. Intrigues, bribery, or worse (with which the
military historian has no concern) ruined what had been, in the field,
one of the principal achievements of the Saxon arms. And William, who
could not count to hold his own against regular forces and who was
astonished to find himself free to retreat precipitately on Dover, was
still more astonished to find himself accepted a few weeks later after
an aimless march to the west and north by the politicians—or worse—at
Berkhampstead. He and England were equally astounded to find that a
broken and defeated invader could actually be accepted by the
intriguers at Westminster and crowned King of England as the price of a
secret bargain.

Such was the fruit of as great and successful an effort as ever Saxon
soldier made: the Battle of Senlac: for such—as I am now free to
reveal—was the true name of the field of action.

The ineptitude or avarice of politicians had undone the work of
soldiers, and it is no wonder that the last of Harold’s veterans, who
retired in disgust to impregnable fortresses in Ely, Arthur’s Seat, and
Pudsey, are recorded to have gnashed their teeth and shed tears of
indignation at the dispatches from the metropolis. At Crécy they were
to be avenged.




The Roman Roads in Picardy


If a man were asked where he would find upon the map the sharpest
impress of Rome and of the memories of Rome, and where he would most
easily discover in a few days on foot the foundations upon which our
civilization still rests, he might, in proportion to his knowledge of
history and of Europe, be puzzled to reply. He might say that a week
along the wall from Tyne to Solway would be the answer; or a week in
the great Roman cities of Provence with their triumphal arches and
their vast arenas and their Roman stone cropping out everywhere: in old
quays, in ruined bridges, in the very pavement of the streets they use
to-day, and in the columns of their living churches.

Now I was surprised to find myself after many years of dabbling in such
things, furnishing myself the answer in quite a different place. It was
in Picardy during the late manoeuvres of the French Army that, in the
intervals of watching those great buzzing flies, the aeroplanes, and in
the intervals of long tramps after the regiments or of watching the
massed guns, the necessity for perpetually consulting the map brought
home to me for the first time this truth—that Picardy is the
province—or to be more accurate, Picardy with its marches in the Île de
France, the edge of Normandy and the edge of Flanders—which retains
to-day the most vivid impress of Rome. For though the great buildings
are lacking, and the Roman work, which must here have been mainly of
brick, has crumbled, and though I can remember nothing upstanding and
patently of the Empire between the gate of Rheims and the frontier of
Artois, yet one feature—the Roman road—is here so evident, so multiple,
and so enduring that it makes up for all the rest.

One discovers the old roads upon the map, one after the other, with a
sort of surprise. The scheme develops before one as one looks, and
always when one thinks one has completed the web another and yet
another straight arrow of a line reveals itself across the page.

The map is a sort of palimpsest. A mass of fine modern roads, a whole
red blur of lanes and local ways, the big, rare black lines of the
railway—these are the recent writing, as it were; but underneath the
whole, more and more apparent and in greater and greater numbers as one
learns to discover them, are the strict, taut lines which Rome
stretched over all those plains.

There is something most fascinating in noting them, and discovering
them one after the other.

For they need discovering. No one of them is still in complete use. The
greater part must be pieced together from lengths of lanes which turn
into broad roads, and then suddenly sink again into footpaths, rights
of way, or green forest rides.

Often, as with our rarer Roman roads in England, all trace of the thing
disappears under the plough or in the soft crossings of the river
valleys; one marks them by the straightness of their alignment, by the
place names which lie upon them (the repeated name Estrée, for
instance, which is like the place name “street” upon the Roman roads of
England); by the recovery of them after a gap; by the discoveries which
local archaeology has made.

Different men have different pastimes, and I dare say that most of
those who read this will wonder that such a search should be a pastime
for any man, but I confess it is a pastime for me. To discover these
things, to recreate them, to dig out on foot the base upon which two
thousand years of history repose, is the most fascinating kind of
travel.

And then, the number of them! You may take an oblong of country with
Maubeuge at one corner, Pontoise at another, Yvetot and some frontier
town such as Fumes for the other two corners, and in that stretch of
country a hundred and fifty miles by perhaps two hundred, you can build
up a scheme of Roman ways almost as complete as the scheme of the great
roads to-day.

That one which most immediately strikes the eye is the great line which
darts upon Rouen from Paris.

Twice broken at the crossing of the river valleys, and lost altogether
in the last twelve miles before the capital of Normandy, it still
stands on the modern map a great modern road with every aspect of
purpose and of intention in its going.

From Amiens again they radiate out, these roads, some, like the way to
Cambray, in use every mile; some, like the old marching road to the
sea, to the Portus Itius, to Boulogne, a mere lane often wholly lost
and never used as a great modern road. This was the way along which the
French feudal cavalry trailed to the disaster of Crécy, and just beyond
Crécy it goes and loses itself in that exasperating but fascinating
manner which is the whole charm of Roman roads wherever the hunter
finds them. You may lay a ruler along this old forgotten track, all the
way past Domqueur, Novelle (which is called Novelle-en-Chaussée, that
is Novelle on the paved road), on past Estrée (where from the height
you overlook the battlefield of Crécy), and that ruler so lying on your
map points right at Boulogne Harbour, thirty odd miles away—and in all
those thirty odd remaining miles I could not find another yard of it.
But what an interest! What a hobby to develop! There is nothing like it
in all the kinds of hunting that have ever been invented for filling up
the whole of the mind. True, you will get no sauce of danger, but, on
the other hand, you will hunt for weeks and weeks, and you will come
back year after year and go on with your hunting, and sometimes you
actually find—which is more than can be said for hunting some animals
in the Weald.

How was it lost, this great main road of Europe, this marching road of
the legions, linking up Gaul and Britain, the way that Hadrian went,
and the way down which the usurper Constantine III must have come
during that short adventure of his which lends such a romance to the
end of the Empire? One cannot conceive why it should have disappeared.
It is a sunken way down the hillside across the light railway which
serves Crécy, it gets vaguer and vaguer, for all the world like those
ridges upon the chalk that mark the Roman roads in England, and then it
is gone. It leaves you pointing, I say, at that distant harbour, thirty
odd miles off, but over all those miles it has vanished. The ghost of
the legends cannot march along it any more. In one place you find a few
yards of it about three miles south and east of Montreuil. It may be
that the little lane leading into Estrée shows where it crossed the
valley of the Cauche, but it is all guesswork, and therefore very
proper to the huntsman.

Then there is that unbroken line by which St. Martin came, I think,
when he rode into Amiens, and at the gate of the town cut his cloak in
two to cover the beggar. It drives across country for Roye and on to
Noyon, the old centre of the Kings. It is a great modern road all the
way, and it stretches before you mile after mile after mile, until
suddenly, without explanation and for no reason, it ends sharply, like
the life of a man. It ends on the slopes of the hill called Choisy, at
the edge of the wood which is there. And seek as you will, you will
never find it again.

From that road also, near Amiens, branches out another, whose object
was St. Quentin, first as a great high road, lost in the valley of the
Somme, a lesser road again, still in one strict alignment, it reaches
on to within a mile of Vermand, and there it stops dead. I do not think
that between Vermand and St. Quentin you will find it. Go out
north-westward from Vermand and walk perhaps five miles, or seven:
there is no trace of a road, only the rare country lanes winding in and
out, and the open plough of the rolling land. But continue by your
compass so and you will come (suddenly again and with no apparent
reason for its abrupt origin) upon the dead straight line that ran from
the capital of the Nervii, three days’ march and more, and pointing all
the time straight at Vermand.

And so it is throughout the province and its neighbourhood. Here and
there, as at Bavai, a great capital has decayed. Here and there (but
more rarely), a town wholly new has sprung up since the Romans, but the
plan of the country is the same as that which they laid down, and the
roads as you discover them, mark it out and establish it. The armies
that you see marching to-day in their manoeuvres follow for half a
morning the line which was taken by the Legions.




The Reward of Letters


It has often been remarked that while all countries in the world
possess some sort of literature, as Iceland her Sagas, England her
daily papers, France her prose writers and dramatists, and even Prussia
her railway guides, one nation and one alone, the Empire of Monomotopa,
is utterly innocent of this embellishment or frill.

No traveller records the existence of any Monomotopan quill-driver; no
modern visitor to that delightful island has come across a
_littérateur_ whether in the worse or in the best hotels; and such
reading as the inhabitants enjoy is entirely confined to works imported
by large steamers from the neighbouring Antarctic Continent.

The causes of this singular and happy state of affairs were unknown
(since the common histories did not mention them) until the recent
discovery by Mr. Paley, the chief authority upon Monomotopan hieratic
script, of a very ancient inscription which clearly sets forth the
whole business.

It seems that an Emperor of Monomotopa, whose date can be accurately
fixed by internal evidence to lie after the universal deluge and before
the building of the Pyramid of Cheops, was, upon his accession to the
throne, particularly concerned with the just repartition of taxes among
his beloved subjects.

It would seem (if we are to trust the inscription) that in a past still
more remote the taxes were so light that even the richest men would
meet them promptly and without complaining, but this was at a period
when the enemies of Monomotopa were at once distant and actively
engaged in quarrelling among themselves. With sickening treachery these
distant rival nations had determined to produce wealth and to live in
amity, so that it was incumbent upon the Monomotopans not only to build
ships, but actually to provide an army, and at last (what broke the
camel’s back) to establish fortifications of a very useless but
expensive sort upon a dozen points of their Imperial coast.

Under the increasing strain the old fiscal system broke down. The poor
were clearly embarrassed, as might be seen in their emaciated visages
and from the terrible condition of their boots. The rich had reached
the point after which it was inconvenient to them to pay any more. The
middle classes were spending the greater part of their time in devising
methods by which the exorbitant and intempestive demands of the
collectors could be either evaded or, more rarely, complied with. In a
word, a new and juster system of taxation was an imperative need, and
the Emperor, who had just ascended the throne at the age of eighteen,
and whom a sort of greenness had preserved from the iniquities of this
world, was determined to effect the great reform.

With the advice of his Ministers (all of whom had had considerable
experience in the handling of money), the Emperor at last determined
that each man and woman should pay to the State one-tenth and no more
of the wealth which he or she produced; those who produced nothing it
was but common justice and reason to exempt, and the effect of this
tardy act of justice upon the very rich was observed in the sudden
increase of the death-rate from all those diseases that are the
peculiar product of luxury and evil living. Paupers also, the
unemployed, cripples, imbeciles, deaf mutes, and the clergy escaped
under this beneficent and equable statute, and we may sum up the whole
policy by saying that never was a law acclaimed with so much happy
bewilderment nor subject to less expressed criticism than this.

It was, moreover, easy to estimate in this new fashion the total
revenue of the State, since its produce had been accurately set down by
statisticians of the utmost eminence, and one of these diverse
documents had been taken for the basis of the new fiscal regime.

In practice also the collection was easy. Overseers would attend the
harvest with large carts, prong the tenth turnip, hoick up the tenth
sheaf of wheat, bucket out the tenth gallon of ale, and so forth. In
the markets every tenth animal was removed by Imperial officers, every
tenth newspaper was impounded as it left the press, and every tenth
drink about to be consumed in the hostelries of the Empire was, after a
simulacrum of proffering it, suddenly removed by the waiter and poured
into a receptacle, the keys of which were very jealously guarded.

It was the same with the liberal professions: of the fee received by a
barrister in the Criminal Courts a tenth was regularly demanded at the
door when the verdict had been given and the prisoner whom he had
defended passed out to execution. The tenth knock-out in the prize ring
received by the professional pugilist was followed by the immediate
sequestration of his fee for that particular encounter, and the tenth
aria vibrating from the lips of a prima donna was either compounded for
at a certain rate or taken in kind by the official who attended at
every performance of grand opera.

One form of wealth alone puzzled the beneficent monarch and his
Napoleonic advisers, and this was the production (for it then existed)
of literary matter.

At first this seemed as simple to tax as any one of the other numerous
activities upon which the Emperor’s loyal and loving subjects were
engaged. A brief examination of the customs of the trade, conducted by
an army of officials who penetrated into the very dens and attics in
which Letters are evolved, reported that the method of payment was by
the measurement of a number of words.

“It is, your Majesty,” wrote the permanent official of the department
in his minute, “the practice of those who charitably employ this sort
of person to pay them in classes by the thousand words; thus one man
gets one sequin a thousand, another two byzants, a third as much as a
ducat, while some who have singularly attracted the notice of the
public can command ten, twenty, nay forty scutcheons, and in some very
exceptional cases a thousand words command one of those beautiful
pieces of stiff paper which your Majesty in his bountiful provision
tenders to his dutiful subjects for acceptance as metal under diverse
penalties. The just taxation of these fellows can therefore be easily
achieved if your Majesty, in the exercise of his almost superhuman
wisdom, will but add a schedule to the Finance Act in which there shall
be set down fifteen or twenty classes of writers, with their price per
thousand words, and a compulsory registration of each class, enforced
by the rude hand of the police.”

The Emperor of Monomotopa immediately nominated a Royal Commission
(unpaid), among whose sons, nephews, and private friends the salaried
posts connected with the work were distributed. This Commission
reported by a majority of one ere two years had elapsed. The schedule
was designed, and such _littérateurs_ as had not in the interval fled
the country were registered, while a further enactment strictly
forbidding their employers to make payment upon any other system
completed the scheme.

But, alas! so full of low cunning and dirty dodges is this kind of man
(I mean what we call authors) that very soon after the promulgation of
the new law a marked deterioration in the quality of Monomotopan
letters was apparent upon every side!

The citizen opening his morning paper would be astonished to find the
leading article consist of nothing more original than a portion of the
sacred Scriptures. A novel bought to ease the tedium of a journey would
consist of long catalogues for the most part, and when it came to
descriptions of scenery would fall into the most minute and detailed
category of every conceivable feature of the landscape. Some even took
advantage of the new regulation so far as to repeat one single word an
interminable number of times, while it was remarked with shame by the
Ministers of Religion that the morals of their literary friends
permitted them only to use words of one syllable, and those of the
shortest kind. And this they said was the only true and original
Monomotopan dialect.

Such was the public inconvenience that next year a sharper and much
more drastic law was passed, by which it was laid down that every
literary composition should make sense within the meaning of the Act,
and should be original so far as the reading of the judge appointed for
the trial of the case extended. But though after the first few
executions this law was generally observed, the nasty fellows affected
by it managed to evade it in spirit, for by the use of obscure terms,
of words drawn from dead languages, and of bold metaphor transferred
from one art to another, they would deliberately invite prosecution,
and then in the witness-box make fools of those plain men, the judge
and jury, by showing that this apparently meaningless claptrap could,
with sufficient ingenuity, be made to yield some sort of sense, and
during this period no art critic was put to death.

Driven to desperation, the Emperor changed the whole basis of the
Remuneration of Literary Labour, and ordered that it should be by the
length of the prose or poetry measured in inches.

This reform, however, did but add to the confusion, for while the men
of the pen wrote their works entirely in short dialogue, asterisks, and
blanks, the publishers, who were now thoroughly organized, printed the
same in smaller and smaller type, in order to avoid the consequences of
the law.

At this last piece of insolence the Emperor’s mind was quickly decided.
Arresting one night not only all those who had ever written, but all
those who had even boasted of letters, or who were so much as suspected
by their relatives of secretly indulging in them, he turned the whole
two million into a large but enclosed area, and (desiring to kill two
birds with one stone) offered the ensuing spectacle as an amusement to
the more sober and respectable sections of the community.

It is well known that the profession of letters breeds in its followers
an undying hatred of each against his fellows. The public were
therefore entertained for a whole day with the pleasing sight of a
violent but quite disordered battle, in which each of the wretched
prisoners seemed animated by no desire but the destruction of as many
as possible of his hated rivals, until at last every soul of these
detestable creatures had left its puny body and the State was rid of
all.

A law which carried to the universities the rule of the primary
schools—to wit, that men should be taught to read but not to
write—completed the good work. And there was peace.




The Eye-Openers


Without any doubt whatsoever, the one characteristic of the towns is
the lack of reality in the impressions of the many: now we live in
towns: and posterity will be astounded at us! It isn’t only that we get
our impressions for the most part as imaginary pictures called up by
printer’s ink—that would be bad enough; but by some curious perversion
of the modern mind, printer’s ink ends by actually preventing one from
seeing things that are there; and sometimes, when one says to another
who has not travelled, “Travel!” one wonders whether, after all, if he
does travel, he will see the things before his eyes? If he does, he
will find a new world; and there is more to be discovered in this
fashion to-day than ever there was.

I have sometimes wished that every Anglo-Saxon who from these shores
has sailed and seen for the first time the other Anglo-Saxons in New
York or Melbourne, would write in quite a short letter what he really
felt. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred men only write what they have
read before they started, just as Rousseau in an eighteenth-century
village believed that every English yokel could vote and that his vote
conveyed a high initiative, making and unmaking the policy of the
State; or just as people, hearing that the birth-rate of France is low,
travel in that country and say they can see no children—though they
would hardly say it about Sussex or Cumberland where the birth-rate is
lower still.

What travel does in the way of pleasure (the providing of new and fresh
sensations, and the expansion of experience), that it ought to do in
the way of knowledge. It ought to and it does, with the wise, provide a
complete course of unlearning the wretched tags with which the sham
culture of our great towns has filled us. For instance, of Barbary—the
lions do not live in deserts; they live in woods. The peasants of
Barbary are not Semitic in appearance or in character; Barbary is full
to the eye, not of Arab and Oriental buildings—they are not
striking—but of great Roman monuments: they are altogether the most
important things in the place. Barbary is not hot, as a whole: most of
Barbary is extremely cold between November and March. The inhabitants
of Barbary do not like a wild life, they are extremely fond of what
civilization can give them, such as _crème de menthe_, rifles, good
waterworks, maps, and railways: only they would like to have these
things without the bother of strict laws and of the police, and so
forth. Travel in Barbary with seeing eyes and you find out all this new
truth.

Now it took the French forty years and more before each of these plain
facts (and I have only cited half a dozen out of as many hundred) got
into their letters and their print: they have not yet got into the
letters and the print of other nations. But an honest man travelling in
Barbary on his own account would pick up every one of these truths in
two or three days, except the one about the lions; to pick up that
truth you must go to the very edge of the country, for the lion is a
shy beast and withdraws from men.

The wise man who really wants to see things as they are and to
understand them, does not say: “Here I am on the burning soil of
Africa.” He says: “Here I am stuck in a snowdrift and the train twelve
hours late”—as it was (with me in it) near Sétif in January, 1905. He
does not say as he looks on the peasant at his plough outside Batna:
“Observe yon Semite!” He says: “That man’s face is exactly like the
face of a dark Sussex peasant, only a little leaner.” He does not say:
“See those wild sons of the desert! How they must hate the new
artificial world around them!” Contrariwise, he says: “See those four
Mohammedans playing cards with a French pack of cards and drinking
liqueurs in the café! See, they have ordered more liqueurs!” He does
not say: “How strange and terrible a thing the railway must be to
them!” He says: “I wish I was rich enough to travel first, for the
natives pouring in and out of this third-class carriage, jabbering like
monkeys, and treading on my feet, disturb my tranquillity. Some
hundreds must have got in and out during the last fifty miles!”

In other words, the wise man has permitted eye-openers to rain upon him
their full, beneficent, and sacramental influence. And if a man in
travelling will always maintain his mind ready for what he really sees
and hears, he will become a whole nest of Columbuses discovering a
perfectly interminable series of new worlds.

A man can only talk of what he himself knows. Let me give further
examples. I had always heard until I visited the Pyrenees how French
civilization (especially in the matter of roads, motors, and things
like that) went up to the “Spanish” frontier and then stopped dead. It
doesn’t. The change is at the Aragonese frontier. On the Basque third
of the frontier the people are just as active and fond of wealth, and
of scraping of stone and of cleanliness, and of drawing straight lines,
to the north as to the south of it. They are all one people, as
industrious, as thrifty, and as prosperous as the Scots. So are the
Catalans one people, and you get much the same sort of advantages and
disadvantages (apart from the effect of government) with the Catalans
to the north as with the Catalans to the south of the border.

So with religion. I had thought to find the Spanish churches crowded. I
found just the contrary. It was the French churches that were crowded,
not the Spanish; and the difference between the truth—what one really
sees and hears—and the printed legend happens to be very subtly
illustrated in this case of religion. The French have inherited (and
are by this time used to, and have, perhaps grown fond of) a big
religious debate. Those who side with the national religion and
tradition emphasize their opinion in every possible way—so do their
opponents. You pick up two newspapers from Toulouse, for instance, and
it is quite on the cards that the leading article of each will be a
disquisition upon the philosophy of religion, the one, the “Depêche” of
Toulouse, militantly, and often solently atheist; the other as
militantly Catholic.

You don’t get that in Pamplona, and you don’t get it in Saragossa. What
you get there is a profound dislike of being interfered with, ancient
and lazy customs, wealth retained by the chapters, the monasteries, and
the colleges, and with all this a curious, all-pervading indifference.

One might end this little train of thought by considering a converse
test of what the eye-opener is in travel; and that test is to talk to
foreigners when they first come to England and see how they tend to
discover in England what they have read of at home instead of what they
really see. There have been very few fogs in London of late, but your
foreigner nearly always finds London foggy. Kent does not show along
its main railway line the evidence of agricultural depression: it is
like a garden. Yet, in a very careful and thorough French book just
published by a French traveller, his bird’s-eye view of the country as
he went through Kent just after landing would make you think the place
a desert; he seems to have thought the hedges a sign of agricultural
decay. The same foreigner will discover a plebeian character in the
Commons and an aristocratic one in the House of Lords, though he shall
have heard but four speeches in each, and though every one of the eight
speeches shall have been delivered by members of one family group
closely intermarried, wealthy, titled, and perhaps (who knows?) of some
lineage as well.

The moral is that one should tell the truth to oneself, and look out
for it outside one. It is quite as novel and as entertaining as the
discovery of the North Pole—or, in case that has come off (as some
believe), the discovery of the South Pole.




The Public


I notice a very curious thing in the actions particularly of business
men to-day, and of other men also, which is the projection outward from
their own inward minds of something which is called “The Public”—and
which is not there.

I do not mean that a business man is wrong when he says that “the
public will demand” such and such an article, and on producing the
article finds it sells widely; he is obviously and demonstrably right
in his use of the word “public” in such a connexion. Nor is a man wrong
or subject to illusion when he says, “The public have taken to
cinematograph shows,” or “The public were greatly moved when the Hull
fishermen were shot at by the Russian fleet in the North Sea.” What I
mean is “The Public” as an excuse or scapegoat; the Public as a menace;
the Public as a butt. That Public simply does not exist.

For instance, the publisher will say, as though he were talking of some
monster, “The Public will not buy Jinks’s work. It is first-class work,
so it is too good for the Public.” He is quite right in his statement
of fact. Of the very small proportion of our people who read only a
fraction buy books, and of the fraction that buy books very few indeed
buy Jinks’s. Jinks has a very pleasant up-and-down style. He loves to
use funny words dragged from the tomb, and he has delicate little
emotions. Yet hardly anybody will buy him—so the publisher is quite
right in one sense when he says, “The Public” won’t buy Jinks. But
where he is quite wrong and suffering from a gross illusion is in the
motive and the manner of his saying it. He talks of “The Public” as
something gravely to blame and yet irredeemably stupid. He talks of it
as something quite external to himself, almost as something which he
has never personally come across. He talks of it as though it were a
Mammoth or an Eskimo. Now, if that publisher would wander for a moment
into the world of realities he would perceive his illusion. Modern men
do not like realities, and do not usually know the way to come in
contact with them. I will tell the publisher how to do so in this case.

Let him consider what books he buys himself, what books his wife buys;
what books his eldest son, his grandmother, his Aunt Jane, his old
father, his butler (if he runs to one), his most intimate friend, and
his curate buy. He will find that not one of these people buys Jinks.
Most of them will talk Jinks, and if Jinks writes a play, however dull,
they will probably go and see it once; but they draw the line at buying
Jinks’s books—and I don’t blame them.

The moral is very simple. You yourselves are “The Public,” and if you
will watch your own habits you will find that the economic explanation
of a hundred things becomes quite clear.

I have seen the same thing in the offices of a newspaper. Some simple
truth of commanding interest to this country, involving no attack upon
any rich man, and therefore not dangerous under our laws, comes up for
printing. It is discussed in the editor’s room. The editor says, “Yes,
of course, we know it is true, and of course it is important, but the
Public would not stand it.”

I remember one newspaper office of my youth in which the Public was
visualized as a long file of people streaming into a Wesleyan chapel,
and another in which the Public was supposed to be made up without
exception of retired officers and maiden ladies, every one of whom was
a communicant of the English Established Church, every one of good
birth, and yet every one devoid of culture.

Without the least doubt each of these absurd symbols haunted the brain
of each of the editors in question. The editor of the first paper would
print at wearisome length accounts of obscure Catholic clerical
scandals on the Continent, and would sweat with alarm if his
sub-editors had admitted a telegram concerning the trial of some
fraudulent Protestant missionary or other in China.

Meanwhile his rather dull paper was being bought by you and me, and
bank clerks and foreign tourists, and doctors, and publicans, and
brokers, Catholics, Protestants, atheists, “peculiar people,” and every
kind of man for many reasons—because it had the best social statistics,
because it had a very good dramatic critic, because they had got into
the habit and couldn’t stop, because it came nearest to hand on the
bookstall. Of a hundred readers, ninety-nine skipped the clerical
scandal and either chuckled over the fraudulent missionary or were
bored by him and went on to the gambling news from the Stock Exchange.
But the type for whom all that paper was produced, the menacing god or
demon who was supposed to forbid publication of certain news in it, did
not exist.

So it was with the second paper, but with this difference, that the
editor was right about the social position of those who read his sheet,
but quite wrong about the opinions and emotions of people in that
social position.

It was all the more astonishing from the fact that the editor was born
in that very class himself and perpetually mixed with it. No one
perhaps read “The Stodge” (for under this device would I veil the true
name of the organ) more carefully than those retired officers of either
service who are to be found in what are called our “residential” towns.
The editor was himself the son of a colonel of guns who had settled
down in a Midland watering-place. He ought to have known that world,
and he did know that world, but he kept his illusion of his Public
quite apart from his experience of realities.

Your retired officer (to take his particular section of this particular
paper’s audience) is nearly always a man with a hobby, and usually a
good scientific or literary hobby at that. He writes many of our best
books demanding research. He takes an active part in public work which
requires statistical study. He is always a travelled man, and nearly
always a well-read man. The broadest and the most complete questioning
and turning and returning of the most fundamental subjects—religion,
foreign policy, and domestic economics—are quite familiar to him. But
the editor was not selecting news for that real man; he was selecting
news for an imaginary retired officer of inconceivable stupidity and
ignorance, redeemed by a childlike simplicity. If a book came in, for
instance, on biology, and there was a chance of having it reviewed by
one of the first biologists of the day, he would say: “Oh, our Public
won’t stand evolution,” and he would trot out his imaginary retired
officer as though he were a mule.

Artists, by which I mean painters, and more especially art critics, sin
in this respect. They say: “The public wants a picture to tell a
story,” and they say it with a sneer. Well, the public does want a
picture to tell a story, because you and I want a picture to tell a
story. Sorry. But so it is. The art critic himself wants it to tell a
story, and so does the artist. Each would rather die than admit it, but
if you set either walking, with no one to watch him, down a row of
pictures you would see him looking at one picture after another with
that expression of interest which only comes on a human face when it is
following a human relation. A mere splash of colour would bore him;
still more a mere medley of black and white. The story may have a very
simple plot; it may be no more than an old woman sitting on a chair, or
a landscape, but a picture, if a man can look at it all, tells a story
right enough. It must interest men, and the less of a story it tells
the less it will interest men. A good landscape tells so vivid a story
that children (who are unspoilt) actually transfer themselves into such
a landscape, walk about in it, and have adventures in it.

They make another complaint against the public, that it desires
painting to be lifelike. Of course it does! The statement is accurate,
but the complaint is based on an illusion. It is you and I and all the
world that want painting to imitate its object. There is a wonderful
picture in the Glasgow Art Gallery, painted by someone a long time ago,
in which a man is represented in a steel cuirass with a fur tippet over
it, and the whole point of that picture is that the fur looks like fur
and the steel looks like steel. I never met a critic yet who was so
bold as to say that picture was a bad picture. It is one of the best
pictures in the world; but its whole point is the liveliness of the
steel and of the fur.

Finally, there is one proper test to prove that all this jargon about
“The Public” is nonsense, which is that it is altogether modern. Who
quarrelled with the Public in the old days when men lived a healthy
corporate life, and painted, wrote, or sang for the applause of their
fellows?

If you still suffer from the illusion after reading these magisterial
lines of mine, why, there is a drastic way to cure yourself, which is
to go for a soldier; take the shilling and live in a barracks for a
year; then buy yourself out. You will never despise the public again.
And perhaps a better way still is to go round the Horn before the mast.
But take care that your friends shall send you enough money to
Valparaiso for your return journey to be made in some comfort; I would
not wish my worst enemy to go back the way he came.




On Entries


I am always planning in my mind new kinds of guide books. Or, rather,
new features in guide books.

One such new feature which I am sure would be very useful would be an
indication to the traveller of how he should approach a place.

I would first presuppose him quite free and able to come by rail or by
water or by road or on foot across the fields, and then I would
describe how the many places I have seen stand quite differently in the
mind according to the way in which one approaches them.

The value of travel, to the eye at least, lies in its presentation of
clear and permanent impressions, and these I think (though some would
quarrel with me for saying it) are usually instantaneous. It is the
first sharp vision of an unknown town, the first immediate vision of a
range of hills, that remains for ever and is fruitful of joy within the
mind, or, at least, that is one and perhaps the chief of the fruits of
travel.

I remember once, for instance, waking from a dead sleep in a train (for
I was very tired) and finding it to be evening. What woke me was the
sudden stopping of the train. It was in Italy. A man in the carriage
said to me that there was some sort of accident and that we should be
waiting a while. The people got out and walked about by the side of the
track. I also got out of the carriage and took the air, and when I so
stepped out into the cool of that summer evening I was amazed at the
loneliness and tragedy of the place.

There were no houses about me that I could see save one little place
built for the railway men. There was no cultivation either.

Close before me began a sort of swamp with reeds which hardly moved to
the air, and this gradually merged into a sheet of water above and
beyond which were hills, barren and not very high, which took the last
of the daylight, for they looked both southward and to the west. The
more I watched the extraordinary and absolute scene the less I heard of
the low voices about me, and indeed a sort of positive silence seemed
to clothe the darkening landscape. It was full of something quite gone
down, and one had the impression that it would never be disturbed.

As the light lessened, the hills darkened, the sky took on one broad
and tender colour, the sheet of water gleamed quite white, and the
reeds stood up like solid shadows against it. I wish I could express in
words the impression of recollection and of savage mourning which all
that landscape imposed, but from that impression I was recalled and
startled by the guard, who came along telling us that things were
righted and that the train would start again; soon we were in our
places and the rapid movement isolated for me the memory of a
singularly vivid scene. I thought the place must have a name, and I
asked a neighbour in the carriage what it was called; he told me it was
called Lake Trasimene.

Now I do not say that this tragic site is to be visited thus. It was
but an accident, though an accident for which I am most grateful to my
fate. But what I have said here illustrates my meaning that the manner
of one’s approach to any place in travel makes all the difference.

Thus one may note how very different is Europe seen from the water than
seen from any other opportunity for travel. So many of the great
cathedrals were built to dominate men who should watch them from the
wharves of the mediaeval towns, but I think it is almost a rule if you
have leisure and can take your choice to choose this kind of entry to
them. Amiens is quite a different thing seen from the river below it to
the north and east from what it is seen by a gradual approach along the
street of a modern town. The roofs climb up at it, and it stands
enthroned. So Chartres seen from the little Eure; but the Eure is so
small a river that he would be a bold man who would travel up it all
this way. Nevertheless it is a good piece of travel, and anyone who
will undertake it will see Louviers and will pass Anet, where the
greatest work of the Renaissance once stood, and will go through lonely
but rich pastures until at last he gets to Chartres by the right gate.
Thence he will see something astonishing for so flat a region as the
Beauce. The great church seems mountainous upon a mountain. Its apse
completes the unclimbable steepness of the hill and its buttresses
follow the lines of the fall of it. But if you do not come in by the
river, at least come in by the Orleans road. I suppose that nine people
out of ten, even to-day when the roads are in proper use again, come
into Chartres by that northern railway entry, which is for all the
world like coming into a great house by a big, neglected backyard.

Then if ever you have business that takes you to Bayonne, come in by
river and from the sea, and how well you will understand the little
town and its lovely northern Gothic!

Some of the great churches all the world knows must be seen from the
water, and most of the world so sees them. Ely is one, Cologne is
another, but how many people have looked right up at Durham as at a
cliff from that gorge below, or how many have seen the height of Albi
from the Tarn?

As for famous cities with their walls, there is no doubt that a man
should approach them by the chief high road, which once linked them
with their capital, or with their nearest port, or with Rome—and that
although this kind of entry is nowadays often marred by ugly suburbs.
You will get much your finest sight of Segovia as you come in by the
road from the Guadarama and from Madrid. It is from that point that you
were meant to see the town, and you will get much your best grip on
Carcassonne, old Carcassonne, if you come in by the road from Toulouse
at morning as you were meant to come, and so Coucy should be approached
by that royal road from Soissons and from the south, while as for Laon
(the most famous of the hill towns), come to it from the east, for it
looks eastward, and its lords were Eastern lords.

Ranges of hills, I think, are never best first seen from railways.
Indeed, I can remember no great sight of hills so seen, not even the
Alps. A railway must of necessity follow the floor of the valley and
tunnel and creep round the shoulders of the bulwarks. There is perhaps
one exception to this rule, which is the sight of the Pyrenees from the
train as one comes into Tarbes. It is a wise thing if you are visiting
those hills to come into Tarbes by night and sleep there, and then next
morning the train upon its way to Pau unfolds you all the wall of the
mountains. But this is an accident. It is because the railway runs upon
a sort of high platform that you see the mountains so. With all other
hills that I remember it is best to have them burst suddenly upon you
from the top of some pass lifted high above the level and coming, let
us say, to a height half their own. Certainly the Bernese Oberland is
more wonderful caught in one moment from the Jura than introduced in
any other way, and the snows on Atlas over the desert seem like part of
the sky when they come upon one after climbing the red rocks of the
high plateaux and you see them shining over the salt marshes. The
Vosges you cannot thus see from a half-height; there is no platform,
and that is perhaps why the Vosges have not impressed travellers as
they should. But you can so watch the grand chain of old volcanoes
which are the rampart of Auvergne. You can stand upon the high wooden
ridge of Foreze and see them take the morning across the mists and the
flat of the Limagne, where the Gauls fought Caesar. Further south from
the high table of the Velay you can see the steep backward escarpment
of the Cevennes, inky blue, desperately blue, blue like nothing else on
earth except the mountains in those painters of North Italy, of the
parts north and east of Venice, the name of whose school escapes me—or,
rather, I never knew it.

Now, as for towns that live in a hollow, it is great fun to come upon
them from above. They are not used to being thus taken at a
disadvantage and they are both surprised and surprising. There are many
towns in holes and trenches of Europe which you can thus play “peep-bo”
with if you will come at them walking. By train they will mean nothing
to you. You will probably come upon them out of a long, shrieking
tunnel, and by the high road they mean little more, for the high road
will follow the vale. But if you come upon them from over their
guardian cliffs and scars you catch them unawares, and this is a good
way of approaching them, for you master them, as it were, and spy them
out before you enter in. You can act thus with Grenoble and with many a
town on the Meuse, and particularly with Aubusson, which lies in the
depths of so dreadful a trench that I could wonder how man ever dreamt
of living and building there.

The most difficult of all places on which to advise, I think, would be
the very great cities, the capitals. They seem to have to-day no noble
entries and no proper approach. Perhaps we shall only deal with them
justly when we can circle down to them through the air and see their
vast activity splashed over the plain. Anyhow, there is no proper way
of entering them now that I know of. Berlin is not worth entering at
all. Rome (a man told me once) could be entered by some particular road
over the Janiculum, I think—which also, if I remember right, was the
way that Shelley came—but I despair of Paris, and certainly of London.
I cannot even recall an entry for Brussels, though Brussels is a
monumental city with great rewards for those who love the combination
of building and hills.

Perhaps, after all, the happiest entries of all and the most easy are
those of our many market towns, small and not swollen in Britain and in
Northern Gaul and in the Netherlands and in the Valley of the Rhine.
These hardly ever fail us, and we come upon them in our travels as they
desire that we should come, and we know them properly as things should
properly be known—that is, from the beginning.




Companions of Travel


I write of travelling companions in general, and not in particular,
making of them a composite photograph, as it were, and finding what
they have in common and what is their type; and in the first place I
find them to be chance men. For there are some people who cannot travel
without a set companion who goes with them from Charing Cross all over
the world and back to Charing Cross again. And there is a pathos in
this: as Balzac said of marriage, “What a commentary on human life,
that human beings must associate to endure it.” So it is with many who
cannot endure to travel alone: and some will positively advertise for
another to go with them.

In a glade of the Sierra Nevada, which, for awful and, as it were,
permanent beauty seemed not to be of this world, I came upon a man
slowly driving along the trail a ramshackle cart, in which were a few
chairs and tables and bedding. He had a long grey beard and wild eyes;
he was old, and very small like a gnome, but he had not the gnome’s
good-humour. I asked him where he was going, and I slowed down, so as
to keep pace with his ridiculous horse. For some time he would not
answer me, and then he said, “Out of this.” He added, “I am tired of
it.” And when I asked him, “Of what?” his only answer was an
old-fashioned oath. But from further complaints which he made I
gathered that what he was tired of was clearing forests, digging
ground, paying debts, and in general living upon this unhappy earth. He
did not like me very much, and though I would willingly have learned
more, he would tell me nothing further, so when we got to a place where
there was a little stream I went on and left him.

I have never forgotten the sadness of this man. Where he was going, and
what he expected to do, or what opportunities he had, I have never
understood. Though some years after, in quite another place—namely,
Steyning, in Sussex—I came upon just such another, whose quarrel was
with the English climate, the rich and the poor, and the whole
constitution of God’s earth. These are the advantages of travel, that
one meets so many men whom one would otherwise never meet, and that one
feeds as it were upon the complexity of mankind.

Thus in a village called Encamps, in the depths of Andorra, where no
man has ever killed another, I found a man with a blue face, who was a
fossil, the kind of man you would never find in the swelling life of
Western Europe. He was emancipated, he had studied in Perpignan, over
and beyond the great hills. He could not see why he should pay taxes to
support a priest. “The priests” he assured me, “say the most ridiculous
things. They narrate the most impossible fables. They affirm what
cannot possibly be true. All that they say is in opposition to science.
If I am ill, can a priest cure me? No. Can a priest tell me how to
build, or how to light my house? He is unable to do so. He is a useless
and a lying mouth, why should I feed him?”

I questioned this man very closely, and discovered that in his view the
world slowly changed from worse to better, and to accelerate this
process enlightenment alone was needed. “But what do these brutes,” he
said, alluding to his fellow-countrymen, “know of enlightenment? They
do not even make roads, because the priests forbid them.”

I could write at length upon this man. He was not a Sceptic as you may
imagine, nor had he adopted the Lucretian form of Epicureanism. Not a
bit of it. He was a hearty Atheist, with Positivist leanings. I further
found that he had married a woman older, wealthier, and if possible
uglier than himself. She kept the inn, and was very kind to him. His
life would have been quite happy had he not been tortured by the
monstrous superstitions of others.

Then, again, in the town of Marseilles, only two years ago, I met a man
who looked well fed, and had a stalwart, square French face, and whose
politico-economic ideal, though it was not mine, greatly moved me. It
was just past midnight, and I was throwing little stones into the old
Greek harbour, the stench and the glory of which are nearly three
thousand years old; I was to be off at dawn upon a tramp steamer, and I
had so determined to pass the few hours of darkness.

I was throwing pebbles into the water, I say, and thinking about
Ulysses, when this man came slouching up, with his hands in the pockets
of his enormous corduroy trousers, and, looking at me with some
contempt from above (for he was standing, I was sitting), he began to
converse with me. We talked first of ships, then of heat and cold, and
so on to wealth and poverty; and thus it was I came upon his views,
which were that there should be a sort of break up, and houses ought to
be burned, and things smashed, and people killed; and over and above
this, it should be made plain that no one had a right to govern: not
the people, because they were always being bamboozled; obviously not
the rich; least of all, the politicians, to whom he justly applied the
most derogatory epithets. He waved his arm out in the darkness at the
Phoceans, at the half-million of Marseilles, and said, “All that should
disappear.” The constructive side of his politico-economic scheme was
negative. He was a practical man. None of your fine theories for him.
One step at a time. Let there be a Chambardement—that is, a noisy
collapse, and he would think about what to do afterwards.

His was not the narrow, deductive mind. He was objective and concrete.
Believe me or not, he was paid an excellent wage by the municipality to
prevent people like me, who sit up at night, from doing mischief in the
harbour. When I had come to an end of his politico-economic scheme—the
main lines of which were so clear and simple that a child could
understand them—we fell to talking of the tides, and I told him that in
my country the sea went up and down. He was no rustic, and would have
no such commonplace truths. He was well acquainted with the Phenomenon
of the Tides; it was due to the combined attraction of the sun and of
the moon. But when I told him I knew places where the tides fell thirty
or forty feet, we would have had a violent quarrel had I not prudently
admitted that that was romantic exaggeration, and that five or six was
the most that one ever saw it move. I avoided the quarrel, but the
little incident broke up our friendship, and he shuffled away. He did
not like having his leg pulled.

There are many others I remember. Those I have written about elsewhere
I am ashamed to recall, as the man at Jedburgh, who first expounded to
me how one knew all about the fate of the individual soul, and then
objected to personal questions about his own; the German officer man at
Aix-la-Chapelle, who had hair the colour of tow, and gave me minute
details of the method by which England was to be destroyed; a man I met
upon the Appian Way, who told the most abominable lies; and another man
who met me outside Oxford station during the Vac. and offered to show
me the sights of the town for a consideration, which he did, but I
would not pay him because he was inaccurate, as I easily proved by a
few searching questions upon the exact site of Bocardo (of which he had
never heard), and the negative evidence against a Roman origin for the
site of the city. Moreover, he said that Trinity was St. John’s, which
was rubbish.

Then there was another man who travelled with me from Birmingham,
pressed certain tracts upon me, and wanted to charge me sixpence each
at Paddington. But if I were to speak of even these few I should
exceed.




On the Sources of Rivers


There are certain customs in man the permanence of which gives infinite
pleasure. When the mood of the schools is against them these customs
lie in wait beneath the floors of society, but they never die, and when
a decay in pedantry or in despotism or in any other evil and inhuman
influence permits them to reappear they reappear.

One of these customs is the religious attachment of man to isolated
high places, peaks, and single striking hills. On these he must build
shrines, and though he is a little furtive about it nowadays, yet the
instinct is there, strong as ever. I have not often come to the top of
a high hill with another man but I have seen him put a few stones
together when he got there, or, if he had not the moral courage so to
satisfy his soul, he would never fail on such an occasion to say
something ritual and quasi-religious, even if it were only about the
view; and another instinct of the same sort is the worship of the
sources of rivers.

The Iconoclast and the people whose pride it is that their senses are
dead will see in a river nothing more than so much moisture gathered in
a narrow place and falling as the mystery of gravitation inclines it.
Their mood is the mood of that gentleman who despaired and wrote:

A cloud’s a lot of vapour,
    The sky’s a lot of air,
And the sea’s a lot of water
    That happens to be there.


You cannot get further down than that. When you have got as far down as
that all is over. Luckily God still keeps his mysteries going for you,
and you can’t get rid, even in that mood, of the certitude that you
yourself exist and that things outside of you are outside of you. But
when you get into that modern mood you do lose the personality of
everything else, and you forget the sanctity of river heads.

You have lost a great deal when you have forgotten that, and it behoves
you to recover what you have lost as quickly as possible, which is to
be done in this way: Visit the source of some famous stream and think
about it. There was a Scotchman once who discovered the sources of the
Nile, to the lasting advantage of mankind and the permanent glory of
his native land. He thought the source of the Nile looked rather like
the sources of the Till or the Tweed or some such river of Thule. He
has been ridiculed for saying this, but he was mystically very right.
The source of the greatest of rivers, since it was sacred to him,
reminded him of the sacred things of his home.

When I consider the sources of rivers which I have seen, there is not
one, I think, which I do not remember to have had about it an influence
of awe. Not only because one could in imaginings see the kingdoms of
the cities which it was to visit and the way in which it would bind
them all together in one province and one story, but also simply
because it was an origin.

The sources of the Rhone are famous: the Rhone comes out of a glacier
through a sort of ice cave, and if it were not for an enormous hotel
quite four-square it would be as lonely a place as there is in Europe,
and as remarkable a beginning for a great river as could anywhere be
found. Nor, when you come to think of it, does any European river have
such varied fortunes as the Rhone. It feeds such different religions
and looks on such diverse landscapes. It makes Geneva and it makes
Avignon; it changes in colour and in the nature of its going as it
goes. It sees new products appearing continually on its journey until
it comes to olives, and it flows past the beginning of human cities,
when it reflects the huddle of old Arles.

The sources of the Garonne are well known. The Garonne rises by itself
in a valley from which there is no issue, like the fabled valleys shut
in by hills on every side. And if it were anything but the Garonne it
would not be able to escape: it would lie imprisoned there for ever.
Being the Garonne it tunnels a way for itself right under the High
Pyrenees and comes out again on the French side. There are some that
doubt this, but then there are people who would doubt anything.

The sources of the River Arun are not so famous as these two last, and
it is a good thing, for they are to be found in one of the loneliest
places within an hour of London that any man can imagine, and if you
were put down there upon a windy day you would think yourself upon the
moors. There is nothing whatsoever near you at the beginnings of the
little sacred stream.

Thames had a source once which was very famous. The water came out
plainly at a fountain under a bleak wood just west of the Fosse Way,
under which it ran by a culvert, a culvert at least as old as the
Romans. But when about a hundred years ago people began to improve the
world in those parts, they put up a pumping station and they pumped
Thames dry—since which time its gods have deserted the river.

The sources of the Ribble are in a lonely place up in a corner of the
hills where everything has strange shapes and where the rocks make one
think of trolls. The great frozen Whernside stands up above it, and
Ingleborough Hill, which is like no other hill in England, but like the
flat-topped Mesas which you have in America, or (as those who have
visited it tell me) like the flat hills of South Africa; and a little
way off on the other side is Pen-y-ghent, or words to that effect. The
little River Ribble rises under such enormous guardianship. It rises
quite clean and single in the shape of a little spring upon the
hillside, and too few people know it. The other river that flows east
while the Ribble flows west is the River Ayr. It rises in a curious
way, for it imitates the Garonne, and finding itself blocked by
limestone burrows underneath at a place called Malham Tarn, after which
it has no more trouble.

The River Severn, the River Wye, and a third unimportant river, or at
least important only for its beauty (and who would insist on that?)
rise all close together on the skirts of Plinlimmon, and the smallest
of them has the most wonderful rising, for it falls through the gorge
of Llygnant, which looks like, and perhaps is, the deepest cleft in
this island, or, at any rate, the most unexpected. And a fourth source
on the mountain, a tarn below its summit, is the source of Rheidol,
which has a short but adventurous life like Achilles.

There is one source in Europe that is properly dealt with, and where
the religion due to the sources of rivers has free play, and this is
the source of the Seine. It comes out upon the northern side of the
hills which the French call the Hills of Gold, in a country of
pasturage and forest, very high up above the world and thinly peopled.
The River Seine appears there in a sort of miraculous manner, pouring
out of a grotto, and over this grotto the Parisians have built a votive
statue; and there is yet another of the hundred thousand things that
nobody knows.




On Error


There is an elusive idea that has floated through the minds of most of
us as we grew older and learnt more and more things. It is an idea
extremely difficult to get into set terms. It is an idea very difficult
to put so that we shall not seem nonsensical; and yet it is a very
useful idea, and if it could be realized its realization would be of
very practical value. It is the idea of a Dictionary of Ignorance and
Error.

On the face of it a definition of the work is impossible. Strictly
speaking it would be infinite, for human knowledge, however far
extended, must always be infinitely small compared with all possible
knowledge, just as any given finite space is infinitely small compared
with all space.

But that is not the idea which we entertain when we consider this
possible Dictionary of Ignorance and Error. What we really mean is a
Dictionary of the sort of Ignorance and the sort of Error which we know
ourselves to have been guilty of, which we have escaped by special
experience or learning as time went on, and against which we would warn
our fellows.

Flaubert, I think, first put it down in words, and said that such an
encyclopaedia was very urgently needed.

It will never exist, but we all know that it ought to exist. Bits of it
appear from time to time piecemeal and here and there, as for instance
in the annotations which modern scholarship attaches to the great text,
in the printed criticisms to which sundry accepted doctrines are
subjected by the younger men to-day, in the detailed restatement of
historical events which we get from modern research as our fathers
could never have them—but the work itself, the complete Encyclopaedia
or Dictionary of Ignorance and Error, will never be printed. It is a
great pity.

Incidentally one may remark that the process by which a particular
error is propagated is as interesting to watch as the way in which a
plant grows.

The first step seems to be the establishing of an authority and the
giving of that authority a name which comes to connote doctrinal
infallibility. A very good example of this is the title “Science.” Mere
physical research, its achievements, its certitudes, even its
conflicting and self-contradictory hypotheses, having got lumped
together in many minds under this one title Science, the title is now
sacred. It is used as a priestly title, as an immediate estopper to
doubt or criticism.

The next step is a very interesting one for the student of psychical
pathology to note. It seems to be a disease as native and universal to
the human mind as is the decay of the teeth to the human body. It seems
as though we all must suffer somewhat from it, and most of us suffer a
great deal from it, though in a cool aspect we easily perceive it to be
a lesion of thought. And this second step is as follows:

The whole lump having been given its sacred title and erected into an
infallible authority, which you are to accept as directly superior to
yourself and all personal sources of information, there is attributed
to this idol a number of attributes. We give it a soul, and a habit and
manners which do not attach to its stuff at all. The projection of this
imagined living character in our authority is comparable to what we
also do with mountains, statues, towns, and so forth. Our living
individuality lends individuality to them. I might here digress to
discuss whether this habit of the mind were not a distorted reflection
of some truth, and whether, indeed, there be not such beings as demons
or the souls of things. But, to leave that, we take our authority—this
thing “Science,” for instance—we clothe it with a creed and appetites
and a will, and all the other human attributes.

This done, we set out in the third step in our progress towards fixed
error. We make the idol speak. Of course, being only an idol, it talks
nonsense. But by the previous steps just referred to we must believe
that nonsense, and believe it we do. Thus it is, I think, that fixed
error is most generally established.

I have already given one example in the hierarchic title “Science.”

It was but the other day that I picked up a weekly paper in which a
gentleman was discussing ghosts—that is, the supposed apparition of the
living and the dead: of the dead though dead, and of the living though
absent.

Nothing has been more keenly discussed since the beginning of human
discussions. Are these phenomena (which undoubtedly happen) what modern
people call subjective, or are they what modern people call objective?
In old-fashioned English, Are the ghosts really there or are they not?
The most elementary use of the human reason persuades us that the
matter is not susceptible of positive proof. The criterion of certitude
in any matter of perception is an inner sense in the perceiver that the
thing he perceives is external to himself. He is the only witness; no
one can corroborate or dispute him. The seer may be right or he may be
wrong, but we have no proof—and only according to our temperament, our
fancy, our experience, our mood, do we decide with one or the other of
the two great schools.

Well, the gentleman of whom I am speaking wrote and had printed in
plain English this phrase (read it carefully):—“Science teaches us that
these phenomena are purely subjective.”

Now I am quite sure that of the thousands who read that phrase all but
a handful read it in the spirit in which one hears the oracle of a god.
Some read it with regret, some with pleasure, but all with
acquiescence.

That physical science was not competent in the matter one way or the
other each of those readers would probably have discovered, if even so
simple a corrective as the use of the term “physical research” instead
of the sacred term “science” had been applied; the hierarchic title
“Science” did the trick.

I might take another example out of many hundreds to show what I mean.
You have an authority which is called, where documents are concerned,
“The Best Modern Criticism.” “The Best Modern Criticism” decides that
“Tam o’ Shanter” was written by a committee of permanent officials of
the Board of Trade, or that Napoleon Bonaparte never existed. As a
matter of fact, the tomfoolery does not usually venture upon ground so
near home, but it talks rubbish just as monstrous about a poem a few
hundred or a few thousand years old, or a great personality a few
hundred or a few thousand years old.

Now if you will look at that phrase “The Best Modern Criticism” you
will see at once that it simply teems with assumption and tautology.
But it does more and worse: it presupposes that an infallible authority
must of its own nature be perpetually wrong.

Even supposing that I have the most “modern” (that is, merely the
latest) criticism to hand, and even supposing that by some omniscience
of mine I can tell which is “the best” (that is, which part of it has
really proved most ample, most painstaking, most general, and most
sincere), even then the phrase fatally condemns me. It is to say that
Wednesday is always infallible as compared with Tuesday, and Thursday
as compared with Wednesday, which is absurd.

The B.M.C. tells me in 1875 that the Song of Roland could have no
origins anterior to the year 1030. But the B.M.C. of 1885 (being a
B.M.C. and nothing more valuable) has a changed opinion. It must change
its opinion, that is the law of its being, since an integral factor in
its value is its modernity. In 1885 B.M.C. tells me that the Song of
Roland can be traced to origins far earlier, let us say to 912.

In 1895 B.M.C. has come to other conclusions—the Song of Roland is
certainly as late as 1115 ... and so forth.

Now you would say that an idol of that absurdity could have no effect
upon sane men. Change the terms and give it another name, and you would
laugh at the idea of its having an effect upon any men. But we know as
a matter of fact that it commands the thoughts of nearly all men to-day
and makes cowards of the most learned.

Perhaps you will ask me at the end of so long a criticism in what way
error may be corrected, since there is this sort of tendency in us to
accept it, to which I answer that things correct it, or as the
philosophers call things, “Reality.” Error does not wash.

To go back to that example of ghosts. If ever you see a ghost (my poor
reader), I shall ask you afterwards whether he seemed subjective or no.
I think you will find the word “subjective” an astonishingly thin
one—if, at least, I catch you early after the experience.




The Great Sight


All night we had slept on straw in a high barn. The wood of its beams
was very old, and the tiles upon the roof were green with age; but
there hung from beam to beam, fantastically, a wire caught by nails,
and here and there from this wire hung an electric-light bulb. It was a
symbol of the time, and the place, and the people. There was no local
by-law to forbid such a thing, or if there was, no one dreamt of
obeying it.

Just in the first dawn of that September day we went out, my companion
and I, at guesswork to hunt in the most amusing kind of hunting, which
is the hunting of an army. The lane led through one of those lovely
ravines of Picardy which travellers never know (for they only see the
plains), and in a little while we thought it wise to strike up the
steep bank from the valley on to the bare plateau above, but it was all
at random and all guesswork, only we wisely thought that we were
nearing the beginning of things, and that on the bare fields of the
high flat we should have a greater horizon and a better chance of
catching any indications of men or arms.

When we had reached the height the sun had long risen, but it as yet
gave no shining and there were no shadows, for a delicate mist hung all
about the landscape, though immediately above us the sky was faintly
blue.

It was the weirdest of sensations to go for mile after mile over that
vast plain, to know that it was cut in regular series by parallel
ravines which in all that extended view we could not guess at; to see
up to the limits of the plateau the spires of villages and the groups
of trees about them, and to know that somewhere in all this there lay
concealed a _corps d’armée_—and not to see or hear a soul. The only
human being that we saw was a man driving a heavy farm cart very slowly
up a side-way just as we came into the great road which has shot dead
across this country in one line ever since the Romans built it. As we
went along that road, leaving the fields, we passed by many men indeed,
and many houses, all in movement with the early morning; and the
chalked numbers on the doors, and here and there an empty tin of
polishing-paste or an order scrawled on paper and tacked to a wall
betrayed the passage of soldiers. But of the army there was nothing at
all. Scouting on foot (for that was what it was) is a desperate
business, and that especially if you have nothing to tell you whether
you will get in touch in five, or ten, or twenty miles.

It was nine o’clock before a clatter of horse-hoofs came up the road
behind us. At first my companion and I wondered whether it were the
first riders of the Dragoons or Cuirassiers. In that case the advance
was from behind us. But very soon, as the sound grew clearer, we heard
how few they were, and then there came into view, trotting rapidly, a
small escort and two officers with the umpires’ badges, so there was
nothing doing; but when, half a mile ahead of us on the road, they
turned off to the left over plough, we knew that that was the way we
must follow too. Before we came to the turning-place, before we left
the road to take the fields on the left, there came from far off and on
our right the sound of a gun.

It was my companion who heard it first. We strained to hear it again;
twice we thought we had caught it, and then again twice we doubted. It
is not so easily recognizable a sound as you might think in those great
plains cut by islands of high trees and steading walls. The little “75”
gun lying low makes a different sound altogether at a distance from the
old piece of “90.” At any rate there was here no doubt that there were
guns to the right and in front of us, and the umpire had gone to the
left. We were getting towards the thick, and we had only to go straight
on to find out where the front was.

Just as we had so decided and were still pursuing the high road, there
came, not half a mile away and again to our right, in a valley below
us, that curious sound which is like nothing at all unless it be
dumping of flints out of a cart: rifle fire. It cracked and tore in
stretches. Then there were little gaps of silence like the gaps in
signalling, and then it cracked and tore in stretches again; and then,
fitfully, one individual shot and then another would be heard; and,
much further off, with little sounds like snaps, the replies began from
the hillside beyond the stream. So far so good. Here was contact in the
valley below us, and the guns, some way behind and far off northwards,
had opened. So we got the hang of it instantly—the front was a sort of
a crescent lying roughly north and south, and roughly parallel to the
great road, and the real or feigned mass of the advance was on the
extreme left of that front. We were in it now, and that anxious and
wearing business in all hunting, finding, was over; but we had been on
foot six mortal hours before coming across our luck, and more than half
the soldiers’ day was over. These men had been afoot since three, and
certain units on the left had already marched over twenty miles.

After that coming in touch with our business, not only did everything
become plain, but the numbers we met, and what I have called “the thick
of things,” fed us with interest. We passed half the 38th, going down
the road singing, to extend the line, and in a large village we came to
the other half, slouching about in the traditional fashion of the
Service; they had been waiting for an hour. With them, and lined up all
along the village street, was one battery, with the drivers dismounted,
and all that body were at ease. There were men sitting on the doorsteps
of the houses and men trotting to the canteen-wagon or to the village
shops to buy food; and there were men reading papers which a pedlar had
brought round. Mud and dust had splashed them all; upon some there was
a look of great fatigue; they were of all shapes and sizes, and
altogether it was the sort of sight you would not see in any other
service in the world. It was the sort of sight which so disgusted the
Emperor Joseph when he made his little tour to spy out the land before
the Revolutionary Wars. It was the sort of sight which made Massenbach
before Grandpré marvel whether the French forces were soldiers at all,
and the sort of sight which made Valmy inexplicable to the King of
Prussia and his staff. It was the sort of sight which eighteen months
later still convinced Mack in Tournai that the Duke of York’s plan was
a plan “of annihilation.” It is a trap for judgment is the French
service.

So they lounged about and bought bread, and shifted their packs, and so
the drivers stood by their horses, and so they all waited and slouched;
until there came, not a man with a bugle nor anything with the
slightest savour of drama but a little fellow running along thumping in
his loose leather leggings, who went up to a Major of Artillery and
saluted, and immediately afterwards the Major put his hand up, and then
down a village street, from a point which we could not see came a
whistle, and the whole of that mass of men began to swarm. The
grey-blue coats of the line swung round the corner of the village
street; they had yet a few miles before them. Anything more rapid or
less in step it would be difficult to conceive. The guns were off at a
right angle down the main road, making a prodigious clatter, and at the
same time appeared two parties, one of which it was easy to understand,
the other not. They were both parties of sappers. The one party had a
great roll of wire on a drum, and as quick as you could think they were
unreeling it, and as they unreeled it fastening it to eaves,
overhanging branches, and to corners of walls, stretching it out
forward. It was the field-telephone. The other party came along
carrying great beams upon their shoulders, but what they were to do
with these beams we did not know.

We followed the tail of the line down into the valley, and all that
morning long and past the food time at midday, and so till the sun
declined in the afternoon, we went with the 38th in its gradual success
from crest to crest. And still the 38th slouched by companies, and mile
after mile with checks and halts, and it never seemed to get either
less or more tired. The men had had twelve hours of it when they came
at last, and we after them, on to the critical position. They had
carried (together with all the line to left and to the right of them) a
string of villages which crowned the crest of a further plateau, and
over this further plateau they were advancing against the main body of
the resistance—the other army corps which was set up against ours, to
simulate an enemy.

A railway line ran here across the rolling hedgeless fields, and just
at the point where my companion and I struck it there was a dip in the
land and a high embankment which hid the plain beyond; but from that
plain beyond one heard the separate fire of the advancing line in its
scattered order. We climbed the embankment, and from its ridge we saw
over two miles or more of stubble, the little creeping bunches of the
attack. What was resisting, or where it lay, one could only guess. Some
hundreds of yards before us to the east, with the sloping sun full on
it, a line of thicket, one scattered wood and then another, an
imperceptible lifting of the earth here and there marked the opposing
firing line. Two pompoms could be spotted exactly, for the flashes were
clear through the underwood. And still the tide of the advance
continued to flow, and the little groups came up and fed it, one after
another and another, in the centre where we were, and far away to the
north and right away to the south the countryside was alive with it.
The action was beginning to take on something of that final movement
and decision which makes the climax of manoeuvres look so great a game.
But in a little while that general creeping forward was checked: there
were orders coming from the umpires, and a sort of lull fell over each
position held. My companion said to me:

“Let us go forward now over the intervening zone and in among
Picquart’s men, and get well behind their line, and see whether there
is a rally or whether before the end of this day they begin to fall
back again.”

So we did, walking a mile or so until we had long passed their outposts
and were behind their forward lines. And standing there, upon a little
eminence near a wood, we turned and looked over what we had come,
westward towards the sun which was now not far from its setting. Then
it was that we saw the last of the Great Sight.

The level light, mellow and already reddening, illumined all that plain
strangely, and with the absolute stillness of the air contrasted the
opening of the guns which had been brought up to support the renewal of
the attack. We saw the isolated woods standing up like islands with low
steep cliffs, dotted in a sea of stubble for miles and miles, and first
from the cover of one and then from another the advance perpetually,
piercing and deploying. As we so watched there buzzed high above us,
like a great hornet, a biplane, circling well within our lines, beyond
attack from the advance, but overlooking all they concealed behind it.
In a few minutes a great Bleriot monoplane like a hawk followed, yet
further inwards. The two great birds shot round in an arc, parallel to
the firing line, and well behind it, and in a few minutes, that seemed
seconds, they were dots to the south and then lost in the air. And
perpetually, as the sun declined, Picquart’s men were falling back
north and south of us and before us, and the advance continued. Group
by group we saw it piercing this hedge, that woodland, now occupying a
nearer and a nearer roll of land. It was the greatest thing imaginable:
this enormous sweep of men, the dead silence of the air, and the
comparatively slight contrast of the ceaseless pattering rifle fire and
the slight intermittent accompaniment of the advancing batteries; until
the sun set and all this human business slackened. Then for the first
time one heard bugles, which were a command to cease the game.

I would not have missed that day nor lose the memories of it for
anything in the world.




The Decline of a State


The decline of a State is not equivalent to a mortal sickness therein.
States are organisms subject to diseases and to decay as are the
organisms of men’s bodies; but they are not subject to a rhythmic rise
and fall as is the body of a man. A State in its decline is never a
State doomed or a State dying. States perish slowly or by violence, but
never without remedy and rarely without violence.

The decline of a State differs with the texture of it. A democratic
State will decline from a lowering of its potential, that is of its
ever-ready energy to act in a crisis, to correct and to control its
servants in common times, to watch them narrowly and suspect them at
all times. A despotic State will decline when the despot is not in
point of fact the true depository of despotic power, but some other
acting in his name, of whom the people know little and cannot judge; or
when the despot, though fully in view and recognized, lacks will; or
when (which is rare) he is so inhuman as to miss the general sense of
his subjects. An oligarchic State, or aristocracy as it is called, will
decline principally through two agencies which are, first, illusion,
and secondly, lack of civic aptitude. For an oligarchic State tends
very readily to illusion, being conducted by men who live at leisure,
satisfy their passions, are immune from the laws, and prefer to shield
themselves from reality. Their capacity or appetite for illusion will
rapidly pervade those below them, for in an aristocracy the rulers are
subjected to a sort of worship from the rest of the community, and thus
it comes about that aristocracies in their decline accept fantastic
histories of their own past, conceive victory possible without armies,
wealth to be an indication of ability, and national security to be a
natural gift rather than a product of the will. Such communities
further fail from the lack of civic aptitude, as was said above, which
means that they deliberately elect to leave the mass of citizens
incompetent and irresponsible for generations, so that, when any more
strain is upon them, they look at once for some men other than
themselves to relieve them, and are incapable of corporate action upon
their own account.

The decline of a State differs also according to whether it be a great
State or a small one, for in the first indifference, in the latter
faction, are a peril, and in the first ignorance, in the latter private
spite.

Then again, the decline of a State will differ according to whether its
strength is rooted originally in commerce, in arms, or in production;
and if in production, then whether in the production of the artisan or
in that of the peasant. If arms be the basis of the State, then that
the army should become professional and apart is a symptom of decline
and a cause of it; if commerce, the substitution of hazards and
imaginaries for the transport of real goods and the search after real
demand; if production, the discontent or apathy of the producer; as
with peasants an ill system in the taxation of the land or in the
things necessary for its tillage, such as a misgovernment of its
irrigation in a dry country; the permission of private exactions and
tolls in a fertile one; the toleration of thieves and forestallers, and
so forth. Artisans, upon the other hand, may well flourish, though the
State be corrupt in such matters, but they must be secured in a high
wage and be given a vast liberty of protest, for if they sink to be
slaves in fact, they will from the nature of their toil grow both weak
and foolish. Yet is not the State endangered by the artisan’s throwing
off a refuse of ill-paid and starving men who are either too many for
the work or unskilful at it? Such an excretion would poison a
peasantry, remaining in their body as it were, but artisans are purged
thereby. This refuse it is for the State to decide upon. It may in an
artisan State be used for soldiery (since such States commonly maintain
but small armies and are commonly indifferent to military glory), or it
may be set to useful labour, or again, destroyed; but this last use is
repugnant to humanity, and so in the long run hurtful to the State.

In the decline of a State, of whatever nature that State be, two vices
will immediately appear and grow: these are Avarice and Fear; and men
will more readily accept the imputation of Avarice than of Fear, for
Avarice is the less despicable of the two—yet in fact Fear will be by
far the strongest passion of the time.

Avarice will show itself not indeed in a mere greed of gain (for this
is common to all societies whether flourishing or failing), but rather
in a sort of taking for granted and permeation of the mere love of
money, so that history will be explained by it, wars judged by their
booty or begun in order to enrich a few, love between men and women
wholly subordinated to it, especially among the rich: wealth made a
test for responsibility and great salaries invented and paid to those
who serve the State. This vice will also be apparent in the easy
acquaintance of all who are possessed of wealth and their segregation
from the less fortunate, for avarice cleaves society flatways, keeping
the scum of it quite clear of the middle, the middle of it quite clear
of the dregs, and so forth. It is a further mark of avarice in its last
stages that the rich are surrounded with lies in which they themselves
believe. Thus, in the last phase, there are no parasites but only
friends, no gifts but only loans, which are more esteemed favours than
gifts once were. No one vicious but only tedious, and no one a poltroon
but only slack.

Of Fear in the decline of a State it may be said that it is so much the
master passion of such decline as to eat up all others. Coming by
travel from a healthy State to one diseased, Fear is the first point
you take. Men dare not print or say what they feel of the judges, the
public governors, the action of the police, the controllers of fortunes
and of news. This Fear will have about it something comic, providing
infinite joy to the foreigner, and modifying with laughter the lament
of the patriot. A miserable hack that never had a will of his own, but
ran to do what he was told for twenty years at the bidding of his
masters, being raised to the Bench will be praised for an impartial
virtue more than human. A drunken fellow, the son of a drunkard, having
stolen control over some half-dozen sheets, must be named under the
breath or not at all. A powerful minister may be accused with sturdy
courage of something which he did not do and no one would mind his
doing, but under the influence of Fear, to tell the least little truth
about him will put a whole assembly into a sort of blankness.

This vice has for its most laughable effect the raising of a whole host
of phantoms, and when a State is so far gone that civic Fear is quite
normal to the citizens, then you will find them blenching with terror
at a piece of print, a whispered accusation. Bankruptcy, though they be
possessed of nothing, and even the ill-will of women. Moneylenders
under this influence have the greatest power, next after them,
blackmailers of all kinds, and next after these eccentrics who may
blurt or break out. Those who have least power in the decline of a
State, are priests, soldiers, the mothers of many children, the lovers
of one woman, and saints.




On Past Greatness


There lies in the North-East of France, close against the Belgian
frontier and within cannon shot of the famous battlefield of
Malplaquet, a little town called Bavai—I have written of it elsewhere.

Coming into this little town you seem to be entering no more than a
decent, unimportant market borough, a larger village meant for country
folk, perhaps without a history and certainly without fame.

As you come to look about you one thing after another enlivens your
curiosity and suggests something at once enormous and remote in the
destinies of the place.

In the first place, seven great roads go out like the seven rays of a
star, plumb straight, darting along the line, across the vast, bare
fields of Flanders, past and along the many isolated woods of the
provinces, and making to great capitals far off—to Cologne, to Paris,
to Treves, and to the ports of the sea.

These roads are deserted in great part. Some of them are metalled in
certain sections, and again in other sections are no more than lanes,
and again no more than footpaths, as you proceed along their miles of
way; but their exact design awfully impresses the mind. You know, as
you follow such strict alignment, that you are fulfilling the majestic
purpose of Imperial Rome. It was the Romans that made these things.

Then, intrigued and excited by such remains of greatness, you read what
you can of the place.... And you find nothing but a dust of legend. You
find a story that once here a king, filled with ambition and
worshipping strange gods, thrust out these great roads to the ends of
the earth; desired his capital to be a hub and navel for the world. He
put them under the protection of the seven planets and of the deities
of those stars. Three he paved with black marble and four with white
marble, and where they met upon the market place he put up a golden
terminal. There the legend ends.

It is only legend—a true product of the Dark Ages, when all that Rome
had done rose like a huge dream in the mind of Europe and took on
gorgeous and fantastic colouring. You learn (for the rest) very
little—that ornaments and money have been found dating from two
thousand years, that once great walls surrounded the place. It must
have had noble buildings and solemn courts. In strict history all you
will discover is that it was the capital of that tribe, the Nervii,
against whom Caesar fought, and whose territory was early conquered for
the Empire. You will find nothing more. There is no living tradition,
there is no voice; the little town is dumb.

The place is a figure, and a striking one, of greatness long dead, and
a man visiting its small domestic interests to-day, and noting its
comfort, its humility, and its sleep, is reminded of many things
attaching to human fame. It would seem as though the ambitions of men,
and that exalted appetite for glory which has produced the chief things
of this world, suffer the effect of time somewhat as the body of an
animal slain will suffer that.

One part of the organism and then another decays and mixes back with
nature. The effect of will has vanished. The thing is a prey to all
that environment which, once alive, it combated, conquered, and
transformed to its own use. One portion after another is lost, until at
last only the most resisting stands—the skeleton and hard framework,
the least expressive, the least personal part of the whole. This also
decays and perishes. Then there remains no more but a score of hardened
fragments that linger in their place, and what has passed away is
fortunate if even the slightest or most fantastic legend of itself
survives.

The great dead are first forgotten in their physical habit; we lose the
nature of their voices, we forget their sympathies and their
affections. Bit by bit all that they intended to be eternal slips back
into the common thing around. A blurred image, growing fainter and
fainter, lingers. At last the person vanishes, and in its place some
public raising material things—a monument, a tomb, an ornament, or
weapon of enduring metal—is all that remains.

If it were possible for the spring of appetite and quest to be dried up
in man, such a spectacle would dry up that spring.

It is not possible, for it is providentially in the nature of man to
cherish these illusions of an immortal memory and of a life bestowed
upon the shade or the mere name of his living greatness. Those various
forms of fame which are young men’s goals, and to which the eager
creative power of early manhood so properly directs itself, seem each
in turn or each for its varying temperament to promise the desired
reward; and one imagines that his love, another that his discoveries,
another that his victories in the field or his conspicuous acts of
courage will remain permanently with his fellows long after he has left
their feast.

As though to give some substance to the flattering cheat, there is one
kind of fame which men have been permitted to attain, and which does
give them a sort of fixed tenure—if not for ever, yet for generations
upon generations—in the human city. This sort of fame is the fame of
the great poets. There is nothing more enduring. It has for some who
were most blessed outlasted, you may say, all material things which
they handled or they knew—all fabrics, all instruments, all
habitations. It is comparable in its endurance to the years, and a man
reads the “Song of Roland” and can still look on that same unchanged
Cleft of Roncesvalles, or a man reads the Iliad and can look to-day
westward from the shores to Tenedos. But wait a moment. Are they indeed
blessed in this, the great poets? Ronsard debated it. He decided that
they were, and put into the mouth of the muses the great lines:——

Mais un tel accident n’arrive point a l’âme,
Qui sans matière vist immortelle là haut.

Vela saigement dit, Ceux dont la fantaisie
    Sera religieuse et devote envers Dieu
Tousjours acheveront quelque grand poésie,
    Et dessus leur renom la Parque n’aura lieu.


But the matter is still undecided.




Mr. The Duke: The Man of Malplaquet


On the field of Malplaquet, that battlefield, I met a man.

He was pointed out to me as a man who drove travellers to Bavai. His
name was Mr. The Duke, and he was very poor.

If he comes across these lines (which is exceedingly unlikely) I offer
him my apologies. Anyhow, I can write about him freely, for he is not
rich, and, what is more, the laws of his country permit the telling of
the truth about our fellow-men, even when they are rich.

Mr. The Duke was of some years, and his colour was that of cedar wood.
I met him in his farmyard, and I said to him:

“Is it you, sir, that drive travellers to Bavai?”

“No,” said he.

Accustomed by many years of travel to this type of response, I
continued:

“How much do you charge?”

“Two francs fifty,” said he.

“I will give you three francs,” I said, and when I had said this he
shook his head and replied:

“You fall at an evil moment; I was about to milk the cows.” Having said
this he went to harness the horse.

When the horse was harnessed to his little cart (it was an extremely
small horse, full of little bones and white in colour, with one eye
stronger than the other) he gave it to his little daughter to hold, and
himself sat down to table, proposing a meal.

“It is but humble fare,” he said, “for we are poor.”

This sounded familiar to me; I had both read and heard it before. The
meal was of bread and butter, pasty and beer, for Malplaquet is a
country of beer and not of wine.

As he sat at table the old man pointed out to me that contraband across
the Belgian frontier, which is close by, was no longer profitable.

“The Fraud,” he said, “is no longer a living for anyone.”

Upon that frontier contraband is called “The Fraud”; it holds an
honourable place as a career.

“The Fraud,” he continued, “has gone long ago; it has burst. It is no
longer to be pursued. There is not even any duty upon apples.... But
there is a duty upon pears. Had I a son I would not put him into The
Fraud.... Sometimes there is just a chance here and there.... One can
pick up an occasion. But take it all in all (and here he wagged his
head solemnly) there is nothing in it any more.”

I said that I had no experience of contraband professionally, but that
I knew a very honest man who lived by it in the country of Andorra, and
that according to my morals a man had a perfect right to run the risk
and take his chance, for there was no contract between him and the
power he was trying to get round. This announcement pleased the old
gentleman, but it did not grip his mind. He was of your practical sort.
He was almost a Pragmatist. Abstractions wearied him. He put no faith
in the reality of ideas. I think he was a Nominalist like Abelard: and
whatever excuse you may make for him, Abelard was a Nominalist right
enough, for it was the intellectual thing to be at the time, though St.
Bernard utterly confuted him in arguments of enormous length and
incalculable boredom.

The old man, then, I say, would have nothing to do with first
principles, and he reasserted his position that, in the concrete, in
the existent world, The Fraud no longer paid.

This said for the sixth or seventh time, he drank some brandy to put
heart into him and climbed up into his little cart, I by his side. He
hit the white horse with a stick, making at the same time an
extraordinary shrill noise with his mouth, like a siren, and the horse
began to slop and sludge very dolefully towards Bavai.

“This horse,” said Mr. The Duke, “is a wonderfully good horse. He goes
like the wind. He is of Arab extraction, and comes from Africa.”

With these words he gave the horse another huge blow with his stick,
and once more emitted his piercing cry. The horse went neither faster
nor slower than before, and seemed very indifferent to the whole
performance.

“He is from Africa,” said Mr. The Duke again, meditatively. “Do you
know Africa?”

Africa with the French populace means Algiers. I answered that I knew
it, and that in particular I knew the road southward from Constantine.
At this he looked very pleased, and said:

“I was a soldier in Africa. I deserted seven times.”

To this I made no answer. I did not know how he wanted me to take it,
so I waited until he should speak again, which he soon did, and said:

“The last time I deserted I was free for a year and a half. I used to
conduct beasts; that was my trade. When they caught me I was to have
been shot. I was saved by the tears of a woman!”

Having said this the old man pulled out a very small pipe and filled it
with exceedingly black tobacco. He lit it, then he began talking again
rather more excitedly.

“It is a terrible thing and an unhappy thing none the less,” he went
on, “that a man should be taken out to be shot and should be saved by
the tears of a woman.” Then he added, “Of what use are wars? How
foolish it is that men should kill each other! If there were a war I
would not fight. Would you?”

I said I thought I would; but whether I should like to or not would
depend upon the war.

He was eager to contradict and to tell me that war was wrong and
stupid. Having behind him the logical training of fifteen Christian
centuries he was in no way muddle-headed upon the matter. He saw very
well that his doctrine meant that it was wrong to have a country, and
wrong to love it, and that patriotism was all bosh, and that no ideal
was worth physical pain or trouble. To such conclusions had he come at
the end of his life.

The white horse meanwhile slouched; Bavai grew somewhat nearer as we
sat in silence after his last sentence. He was turning many things over
in his mind. He veered off on to political economy.

“When the rich man at the Manufactory here, the place where they sell
phosphates for the land, when he stands beer to all the workmen and to
the countryside, I always say, ‘Fools! All this will be put on to the
cost of the phosphates; they will cost you more!’”

Mr. The Duke did not accept John Stuart Mill’s proposition upon the
cost of production nor the general theories of Ricardo upon which
Mill’s propositions were based. In his opinion rent was a factor in the
cost of production, for he told me that butter had gone up because the
price of land was rising near the towns. In what he next said I found
out that he was not a Collectivist, for he said a man should own enough
to live upon, but he said that this was impossible if rich people were
allowed to live. I asked him what the politics of the countryside were
and how people voted. He said:

“The politicians trick the people. They are a heap of worthlessness.”

I asked him if he voted, and he said “yes.” He said there was only one
way to vote, but I did not understand what this meant.

Had time served I should have asked him further questions—upon the
nature of the soul, its ultimate fate, the origin of man and his
destiny, whether mortal or immortal; the proper constitution of the
State, the choice of the legislator, the prince, and the magistrate;
the function of art, whether it is subsidiary or primary in human life;
the family; marriage. Upon the State he had already informed me, and
also upon the institution of property, and upon his view of armies.
Upon all those other things he would equally have given me a clear
reply, for he was a man that knew his own mind, and that is more than
most people can say.

But we were now in Bavai, and I had no time to discover more. We drank
together before we parted, and I was very pleased to see the honest
look in his face. With more leisure and born to greater opportunities
he would have been talked about, this Man of Malplaquet. He had come to
his odd conclusions as the funny people do in Scandinavia and in
Russia, and among the rich intellectuals and usurers in London and
Berlin; but he was a jollier man than they are, for he could drive a
horse and lie about it, and he could also milk a cow. As we parted he
used a phrase that wounded me, and which I had only heard once before
in my life. He said:

“We shall never see each other again!”

Another man had once said this thing to me before. This man was a
farmer in the Northumbrian hills, who walked with me a little way in
the days when I was going over Carter Fell to find the Scots people,
many, many years ago. He also said: “We shall never meet again!”




The Game of Cards


A youth of no more than twenty-three years entered a first-class
carriage at the famous station of Swindon in the county of Wiltshire,
proposing to travel to the uttermost parts of the West and to enjoy a
comfortable loneliness while he ruminated upon all things human and
divine; when he was sufficiently annoyed to discover that in the
further corner of the carriage was sitting an old gentleman of
benevolent appearance, or at any rate a gentleman of benevolent
appearance who appeared in his youthful eyes to be old.

For though the old gentleman was, as a fact, but sixty, yet his virile
beard had long gone white and the fringes of hair attaching to his
ostrich egg of a head confirmed his venerable appearance.

When the train had started the young man proceeded in no very good
temper and with great solemnity to fill a pipe. He turned to his
senior, who was watching him in a very paternal and happy manner, and
said formally:

“I hope you do not mind my smoking, sir?”

“Not at all,” said the old boy; “it is a habit I have long grown
accustomed to in others.”

The young man bowed in a somewhat absurd fashion and felt for his
matches. He discovered to his no small mortification that he had none.
He was so used to his pipe after a meal that he really could not forgo
it. He came off his perch by at least three steps and asked the old man
very gently whether he had any matches.

The older man produced a box and at the same time brought out with it a
little notebook and a playing card which happened to be in his pocket.
The young man took the matches and lit his pipe, surveying the old man
the while with a more complacent eye.

“It is very kind of you, sir,” he said a little less stiffly. He handed
back the matches, wrapped his rug round his legs, sat down in his
place, and knowing that one should prolong the conversation for a
moment or two after a favour, said: “I see that you play cards.”

“I do,” said the old man simply; “would you like a game?”

“I don’t mind,” said the young man, who had always heard that it was
unmanly and ridiculous to refuse a game of cards in a railway carriage.

The elder man laughed merrily in his strong beard as he saw his junior
begin to spread somewhat awkwardly a copy of a newspaper upon his
knees. “I’ll show you a trick worth two of that,” he said, and taking
one of the first-class cushions, which alone of railway cushions are
movable from its place, he came over to the corner opposite the young
man and made a table of the cushion between them. “Now,” said he
genially, “what’s it to be?”

“Well,” said the young man like one who expounds new mysteries, “do you
know piquet?”

“Oh, yes,” said his companion with another happy little laugh of
contentment with the world. “I’ll take you on. What shall it be?”

“Pennies if you like,” said the young man nonchalantly.

“Very well, and double for the Rubicon.”

“How do you mean?” said the young man, puzzled.

“You will see,” said the old man, and they began to play.

The game was singularly absorbing. At first the young man won a few
pounds; then he lost rather heavily, then he won again, but not quite
enough to recoup. Then in the fourth game he won, so that he was a
little ahead, and meanwhile the old man chatted merrily during the
discarding or the shuffling: during the shuffling especially. He looked
out towards the downs with something of a sigh at one moment, and said:

“It’s a happy world.”

“Yes,” answered the younger man with the proper lugubriousness of
youth, “but it all comes to an end.”

“It isn’t its coming to an end,” said the elder man, declaring a point
of six, “that’s not the tragedy; it’s the little bits coming to an end
meanwhile, before the whole comes to an end: that’s the tragedy....”
But he added with another of his jolly laughs: “We must play. Piquet
takes up all one’s grey matter.”

They played and the young man lost again, but by a very narrow margin:
it was quite an absorbing game. As they shuffled again the young man
said:

“What did you mean by the little bits stopping, or whatever it was?”

“Oh,” said the old man as though he couldn’t remember, and then he
added: “Oh, yes, I mean you’ll find, as you grow older, people die and
affections change, and, though it seems silly to mention it in company
with higher things, there’s what Shelley called the ‘contagion of the
world’s slow stain.’”

Then their conversation was interrupted by the ardour of the game; but
as they played the young man was ruminating, and he had come to the
conclusion that his senior was imperfectly educated and was probably of
the middle classes, whereas he himself was destined to be a naval
architect, and with that object had recently left the university for an
office in the city. The young man thought that a man properly educated
would never quote a tag: he was wrong there. As he had allowed his
thoughts to wander somewhat the young man lost that game rather
heavily, and at the end of it he was altogether about ten shillings to
the bad. It was his turn to shuffle. The older man was at leisure to
speak, and did so rather dreamily as he gazed at the landscape again.

“Things change, you know,” he said, “and there is the contagion of the
world’s slow stain. One gets preoccupied: especially about money. When
men marry they get very much preoccupied upon that point. It’s bad for
them, but it can’t be helped.”

“You cut,” said the young man.

His elder cut and they played again. This time as they played their
game the old man broke his rule of silence and continued his
observations interruptedly:

“Four kings,” he said.... “It isn’t that a man gets to think money
all-important, it is that he has to think of it all the time.... No,
three queens are no good. I said four kings.... four knaves.... The
little losses of money don’t affect one, but perpetual trouble about it
does, and” (closing up the majority of tricks which he had just gained)
“many a man goes on making more year after year and yet feels himself
in peril.... _And_ the last trick.” He took up the cards to shuffle
them. “Towards the very end of life,” he continued, “it gets less, I
suppose, but you’ll feel the burden of it.” He put the pack over for
the younger man to cut. When that was done he dealt them out slowly. As
he dealt he said: “One feels the loss of little material things:
objects to which one was attached, a walking-stick, or a ring, or a
watch which one has carried for years. Your declare.”

The young man declared, and that game was played in silence. I regret
to say that the young man was Rubiconed, and was thirty shillings in
the elder’s debt.

“We’ll stop if you like” said the elder man kindly.

“Oh, no,” said the youth with nonchalance, “I’ll pay you now if you
like.”

“Not at all, I didn’t mean that,” said the older man with a sudden
prick of honour.

“Oh, but I will, and we’ll start fair again,” said the young man.
Whereupon he handed over his combined losses in gold, the older man
gave him change, they shuffled again, and they went on with their play.

“After all,” said the older man, musing as he confessed to a point of
no more than five, “it’s all in the day’s work.... It’s just a day’s
work,” he repeated with a saddened look in his eyes, “it’s a game that
one plays like this game, and then when it’s over it’s over. It’s the
little losses that count.”

That game again was unfortunate for the young man, and he had to shell
out fifteen and six. But the brakes were applied, Bristol was reached,
the train came to a standstill, and the young man, looking up a little
confused and hurried, said: “Hello, Bristol! I get out here.”

“So do I,” said the older man. They both stood up together, and the
jolt of the train as it stopped dead threw them into each other’s arms.

“I am really very sorry,” said the youth.

“It’s my fault,” said the old chap like a good fellow, “I ought to have
caught hold. You get out and I’ll hand you your bag.”

“It’s very kind of you,” said the young man. He was really flattered by
so much attention, but he knew himself what a good companion he was and
he could understand it; besides which they had made friends during that
little journey. He always liked a man to whom he had lost some money in
an honest game.

There was a heavy crowd upon the platform, and two men barging up out
of it saluted the old man boisterously by the name of Jack. He twinkled
at them with his eyes as he began moving the luggage about, and stood
for a moment in the doorway with his own bag in his right hand and the
young man’s bag in his left. The young man so saw it for an instant, a
fine upstanding figure—he saw his bag handed by some mistake to the
second of the old man’s friends, a porter came by at the moment pushing
through the crowd with a trolley, an old lady made a scene, the porter
apologized, the crowd took sides, some for the porter, some for the old
lady; the young man, with the deference of his age, politely asked
several people to make way, but when he had emerged from the struggle
his companion, his companion’s friends, and his own bag could not be
found; or at any rate he could not make out where they were in the
great mass that pushed and surged upon the platform.

He made himself a little conspicuous by asking too many questions and
by losing his temper twice with people who had done him no harm, when,
just as his excitement was growing more than querulous, a very heavy,
stupid-looking man in regulation boots tapped him on the shoulder and
said: “Follow me.” He was prepared with an oath by way of reply, but
another gentleman of equal weight, wearing boots of the same pattern,
linked his arm in his and between them they marched him away, to a
little private closet opening out of the stationmaster’s room.

“Now, sir,” said he who had first tapped him on the shoulder, “be good
enough to explain your movements.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said the young man.

“You were in the company,” said the older man severely, “of an old man,
bald, with a white beard and a blue sailor suit. He had come from
London; you joined him at Swindon. We have evidence that he was to be
met at this station and it will be to your advantage if you make a
clean breast of it.”

The young man was violent and he was borne away.

But he had friends at Bristol. He gave his references and he was
released. To this day he believes that he suffered not from folly, but
from injustice. He did not see his bag again, but after all it
contained no more than his evening clothes, for which he had paid or
rather owed six guineas, four shirts, as many collars and dress ties, a
silver-mounted set of brushes and combs, and useless cut-glass bottles,
a patented razor, a stick of shaving soap, and two very, very
confidential letters which he treasured. His watch, of course, was
gone, but not, I am glad to say, his chain, which hung dangling, though
in his flurry he had not noticed it. It made him look a trifle
ridiculous. As he wore no tie-pin he had not lost that, and beyond his
temper he had indeed lost nothing further save, possibly, a textbook
upon Thermodynamics. This book he _thought_ he remembered having put
into the bag, and if he had it belonged to his library, but he could
not quite remember this point, and when the Library claimed it he
stoutly disputed their claim.

In this dispute he was successful, but it was the only profit he made
out of that journey, unless we are to count his experience, and
experience, as all the world knows, is a thing that men must buy.




“King Lear”


The great unity which was built up two thousand years ago and was
called Christendom in its final development split and broke in pieces.
The various civilizations of its various provinces drifted apart, and
it will be for the future historian to say at what moment the isolation
of each from all was farthest pushed. It is certain that that point is
passed.

In the task of reuniting what was broken—it is the noblest work a
modern man can do—the very first mechanical act must be to explain one
national soul to another. That act is not final. The nations of Europe,
now so divided, still have more in common than those things by which
they differ, and it is certain that when they have at last revealed to
them their common origin they will return to it. They will return to
it, perhaps, under the pressure of war waged by some not Christian
civilization, but they will return. In the meanwhile, of those acts not
final, yet of immediate necessity in the task of establishing unity, is
the act of introducing one national soul to another.

Now this is best accomplished in a certain way which I will describe.
You will take that part in the letters of a nation which you maturely
judge most or best to reflect the full national soul, with its
qualities, careless of whether these be great or little; you will take
such a work as reproduces for you as you read it, not only in its
sentiment, but in its very rhythm, the stuff and colour of the nation;
this you will present to the foreigner, who cannot understand. His
efforts must be laborious, very often unfruitful, but where it is
fruitful it will be of a decisive effect.

Thus let anyone take some one of the immortal things that Racine wrote
and show them to an Englishman. He will hardly ever be able to make
anything of it at first. Here and there some violently emotional
passage may faintly touch him, but the mass of the verse will seem to
him dead. Now, if by constant reading, by association with those who
know what Racine is, he at last sees him—and these changes in the mind
come very suddenly—he will see into the soul of Gaul. For the converse
task, to-day not equally difficult but once almost impossible, of
presenting England to the French intelligence—or, indeed, to any other
alien intelligence—you may choose the play “King Lear.”

That play has every quality which does reflect the soul of the
community in which and for which it was written. Note a few in their
order.

First, it is not designed to its end; at least it is not designed
accurately to its end; it is written as a play and it is meant to be
acted as a play, and it is the uniform opinion of those versed in plays
and in acting that in its full form it could hardly be presented, while
in any form it is the hardest even of Shakespeare’s plays to perform.
Here you have a parallel with a thousand mighty English things to which
you can turn. Is there not institution after institution to decide on,
so lacking a complete fitness to its end, larger in a way than the end
it is to serve, and having, as it were, a life of its own which
proceeds apart from its effect? This quality which makes so many
English things growths rather than instruments is most evident in the
great play.

Again, it has that quality which Voltaire noted, which he thought
abnormal in Shakespeare, but which is the most national characteristic
in him, that a sort of formlessness, if it mars the framework of the
thing and spoils it, yet also permits the exercise of an immeasurable
vitality. When a man has read “King Lear” and lays down the book he is
like one who has been out in one of those empty English uplands in a
storm by night. It is written as though the pen bred thoughts. It is
possible to conjecture as one reads, and especially in the diatribes,
that the pen itself was rapid and the brain too rapid for the pen. One
feels the rush of the air. Now, this quality is to be discovered in the
literature of many nations, but never with the fullness which it has in
the literature of England. And note that in those phases of the
national life when foreign models have constrained this instinct of
expansion in English verse, they never have restrained it for long, and
that even through the bonds established by those models the instinct of
expansion breaks. You see it in the exuberance of Dryden and in the
occasional running rhetoric of Pope, until it utterly loosens itself
with the end of the eighteenth century.

The play is national, again, in that permanent curiosity upon knowable
things—nay, that mysterious half-knowledge of unknowable things—which,
in its last forms, produced the mystic, and which is throughout history
so plainly characteristic of these Northern Atlantic islands. Every
play of Shakespeare builds with that material, and no writer, even of
the English turn, has sent out points further into the region of what
is not known than Shakespeare has in sudden flashes of phrase. But
“King Lear,” though it contains a lesser number of lines of this
mystical and half-religious effect than, say, “Hamlet,” yet as a
general impression is the more mystical of the two plays. The element
of madness, which in “Hamlet” hangs in the background like a
storm-cloud ready to break, in “King Lear” rages; and it is the use of
this which lends its amazing psychical power to the play. It has been
said (with no great profundity of criticism) that English fiction is
chiefly remarkable for its power of particularization of character, and
that where French work, for instance, will present ideas, English will
present persons. The judgment is grossly insufficient, and therefore
false, but it is based upon a proof which is very salient in English
letters, which is that, say, in quite short and modern work the sense
of complete unity deadens the English mind. The same nerve which
revolts at a straight road and at a code of law revolts against one
tone of thought, and the sharp contrast of emotional character, not the
dual contrast which is common to all literatures, but the multiple
contrast, runs through “King Lear” and gives the work such a tone that
one seems as one reads it to be moving in a cloud.

The conclusion is perhaps Shakespearean rather than English, and in a
fashion escapes from any national labelling. But the note of silence
which Shakespeare suddenly brings in upon the turmoil, and with which
he is so fond of completing what he has done, would not be possible
were not that spirit of expansion and of a kind of literary
adventurousness present in all that went before.

It is indeed this that makes the play so memorable. And it may not be
fantastic to repeat and expand what has been said above in other words,
namely, that King Lear has something about him which seems to be a
product of English landscape and of English weather, and if its general
movement is a storm its element is one of those sudden silences that
come sometimes with such magical rapidity after the booming of the
wind.




The Excursion


It is so old a theme that I really hesitate to touch it; and yet it is
so true and so useful that I will. It is true all the time, and it is
particularly useful at this season of the year to men in cities: to all
repetitive men: to the men that read these words. What is more, true as
it is and useful as it is, no amount of hammering at people seems to
get this theme into their practice; though it has long ago entered into
their convictions they will not act upon it in their summers. And this
true and useful theme is the theme of little freedoms and discoveries,
the value of getting loose and away by a small trick when you want to
get your glimpse of Fairyland.

Now how does one get loose and away?

When a man says to himself that he must have a holiday he means that he
must see quite new things that are also old: he desires to open that
door which stood wide like a window in childhood and is now shut fast.
But where are the new things that are also the old? Paradoxical fellows
who deserve drowning tell one that they are at our very doors. Well,
that is true of the eager mind, but the mind is no longer eager when it
is in need of a holiday. And you can get at the new things that are
also the old by way of drugs, but drugs are a poor sort of holiday
fabric. If you have stored up your memory well with much experience you
can get these things from your memory—but only in a pale sort of way.

I think the best avenue to recreation by the magical impressions of the
world upon the mind is this: To go to some place to which the common
road leads you and then to get just off the common road. You will be
astonished to find how strange the world becomes in the first mile—and
how strange it remains till the common road is reached again.

It always sounds like a mockery for a man who has travelled to a great
many places, as I have, to advise his fellows to travel abroad; they
are most of them hard tied. Yet it is really a much easier thing than
men bound to the desk and the workshop understand. Britain is but one
great port, and its inward seas are narrow—and the fares are
ridiculously low. If you are a young man you can go almost anywhere for
almost anything, sitting up by night on deck, and not expecting too
much courtesy. But, of course, if you shirk the sea you are a prisoner.

Well, then, supposing you abroad, or even in some other part of this
highly varied kingdom in which you live, and supposing you to have
reached some chosen place by some common road—what I desire to dilate
upon here is the truth which every little excursion of business or of
leisure (and precious few of leisure) makes me more certain of every
day: That just a little way off the road is fairyland.

It was exactly three days ago that I had occasion to go down the
railway line that is the most frequented in Europe: I was on business,
not leisure, but in the business I had two days’ leisure, and I did
what I would advise all other men to do in such a circumstance.

I took a train to nowhere, fixing my starting-point thus:—

I first looked at the map and saw where nearest to me was a
quadrilateral bare of railways. This formula, to look for a
quadrilateral bare of railways, is a very useful formula for the man
who is seeking another world. Then I fixed at random upon one little
roadside station upon the main line; I determined to get out there and
to walk aimlessly and westward until I should strike the other side of
the quadrilateral. I made no plan, not even of the hours of the day.

I came into my roadside station at half-past eight of the long summer
night, broad daylight that is, but with night advancing. I got out and
began my westward march. At once there crowded upon me any number of
unexpected and entertaining things!

The first thing I found was a street which was used by horses as well
as by men, and yet was made up of broad steps. It was a sort of
stair-case going up a hill. At the top of it I found a woman leading a
child by the hand. I asked her the name of the steps. She told me they
were called “The Steps of St. John.”

A quarter of a mile further down the narrow lane I saw to my
astonishment an enormous castle, ruined and open to the sky. There are
many such ruins famous in Europe, but of this one I had never even
heard. I went lonely under the evening and looked at its main gate and
saw on it a moulded escutcheon, carved, and the motto in French,
“Henceforward,” which word made me think a great deal, but resolved no
problem in my mind.

I went on again westward as the darkness fell and saw what I had not
seen before, though my reading had told me of its existence, a long
line of trees marking a ridge on the horizon, which line was the border
of that ancient road the Roman soldiers built leading from the west
into Amiens. “Along that road,” thought I, “St. Martin rode before he
became a monk, and while he was yet a soldier and was serving under
Julian the Apostate. Along that road he came to the west gate of Amiens
and there cut his cloak in two and gave the half of it to a beggar.”

The memory of St. Martin’s deed entertained me for some miles of my
way, and I remembered how, when I was a child, it had seemed to me
ridiculous to cut your coat in two whether for a beggar or for anybody
else. Not that I thought charity ridiculous—God forbid!—but that a coat
seemed to me a thing you could not cut in two with any profit to the
user of either half. You might cut it in latitude and turn it into an
Eton jacket and a kilt, neither of much use to a Gallo-Roman beggar. Or
you might cut it in meridian and leave but one sleeve: mere folly.

Considering these things, I went on over the rolling plateau. I saw a
great owl flying before me against the sky, different from the owls of
home. I saw Jupiter shining above a cloud and Venus shining below one.
The long light lingered in the north above the English sea. At last I
came quite unexpectedly upon that delight and plaything of the French:
a light railway, or steam tram such as that people build in great
profusion to link up their villages and their streams. The road where I
came upon it made a level crossing, and there was a hut there, and a
woman living in it who kept the level crossing and warned the
passers-by. She told me no more trains, or rather little trams, would
pass that night, but that three miles further on I should come to a
place called “The Mills of the Vidame.”
Now the name “Vidame” reminded me that a “Vidame” was the lay protector
of a Cathedral Chapter in feudal times, so the name gave me a renewed
pleasure.

But it was now near midnight, and when I came to this village I
remembered how in similar night walks I had sometimes been refused
lodging. When I got among the few houses all was dark. I found,
however, in the darkness two young men, each bearing an enormous curled
trumpet of the kind which the French call _cors de chasse_, that is,
hunting horns, so I asked them where the inn was. They took me to it
and woke up the hostess, who received us with oaths. This she did lest
the young men with hunting horns should demand a commission. Her heart,
however, was better than her mouth, and she put me up, but she charged
me tenpence for my room, counting coffee in the morning, which was, I
am sure, more than her usual rate.

Next day I took the little steam tram away from the place and went on
vaguely whither it should please God to take me, until the plateau
changed and the light railway fell into a charming valley, and, seeing
a town rooted therein, I got out and paid my fare and visited the town.
In this town I went to church, as it was early morning (you must excuse
the foible), and, coming out of church, I had an argument with a
working man upon the matter of religion, in which argument, as I
believe, I was the victor. I then went on north out of this town and
came into a wood of enormous size. It was miles and miles across, and
the trees were higher than anything I have seen outside of California.
It was an enchanted wood. The sun shone down through a hundred feet of
silence by little rounds between the leaves, and there was silence
everywhere. In this wood I sojourned all day long, making slowly
westward, till, in the very midst of it, I found a troubled man. He was
a man of middle age, short, intelligent, fat, and weary. He said to me:

“Have you noticed any special mark upon the trees? A white mark of the
number 90?”

“No,” said I. “Are there any wild boars in this forest?”

“Yes,” he answered, “a few, but not of use. I am looking for trees
marked in white with the number 90. I have paid a price for them, and I
cannot find them.”

I saluted him and went on my way. At last I came to an open clearing,
where there was a town, and in the town I found a very delightful inn,
where they would cook anything one felt inclined for, within reason,
and charged one very moderately indeed. I have retained its name.

By this time I was completely lost, and in the heart of Fairyland, when
suddenly I remembered that everyone that strikes root in Fairyland
loses something, at the least his love and at the worst his soul, and
that it is a perilous business to linger there, so I asked them in that
hotel how they worked it when they wanted to go west into the great
towns. They put me into an omnibus, which charged me fourpence for a
journey of some two miles. It took me, as Heaven ordained, to a common
great railway, and that common great railway took me through the night
to the town of Dieppe, which I have known since I could speak and
before, and which was about as much of Fairyland to me as Piccadilly or
Monday morning.

Thus ended those two days, in which I had touched again the unknown
places—and all that heaven was but two days, and cost me not fifty
shillings.

Excuse the folly of this.




The Tide


I wish I had been one of those men who first sailed beyond the Pillars
of Hercules and first saw, as they edged northward along a barbarian
shore, the slow swinging of the sea. How much, I wonder, did they think
themselves enlarged? How much did they know that all the civilization
behind them, the very ancient world of the Mediterranean, was something
protected and enclosed from which they had escaped into an outer world?
And how much did they feel that here they were now physically caught by
the moving tides that bore them in the whole movement of things?

For the tide is of that kind; and the movement of the sea four times
daily back and forth is a consequence, a reflection, and a part of the
ceaseless pulse and rhythm which animates all things made and which
links what seems not living to what certainly lives and feels and has
power over all movement of its own. The circuits of the planets stretch
and then recede. Their ellipses elongate and flatten again to the
semblance of circles. The Poles slowly nod once every many thousand
years, there is a libration to the moon; and in all this vast
harmonious process of come and go the units of it twirl and spin, and,
as they spin, run more gravely in ordered procession round their
central star: that star moves also to a beat, and all the stars of
heaven move each in times of its own as well, and their movement is one
thing altogether. Whoever should receive the mighty business moving in
one ear would get the music of it in a perfect series of chords,
superimposed the one upon the other, but not a tremble of them out of
tune.

The great scheme is not infinite, for were it infinite such rhythms
could not be. It was made, and it moves in order to the scheme of its
making without caprice, not wayward anywhere, but in and out and back
and forth as to a figure set for it. It must be so, or these exact
arrangements could not be.

Now with this regulated breathing and expiration, playing itself out in
a million ways and co-extensive with the universe of things, the tides
keep time, and they alone of earthly things bring its actual force to
our physical perception, to our daily life. We see the sea in movement
and power before us heaving up whatever it may bear, and we feel in an
immediate way its strong backward sagging when the rocks appear above
it as it falls. We have our hand on the throb of the current turning in
a salting river inland between green hills; we are borne upon it bodily
as we sail, its movement kicks the tiller in our grasp, and the
strength beneath us and around us, the rush and the compulsion of the
stream, its silence and as it were its purpose, all represent to us,
immediately and here, that immeasurable to and fro which rules the
skies.

When the Roman soldiers came marching northward with Caesar and first
saw the shores of ocean: when, after that occupation of Gaul which has
changed the world, they first mounted guard upon the quays of the Itian
port under Gris-Nez, or the rocky inlets of the Veneti by St. Malo and
the Breton reefs, they were appalled to see what for centuries chance
traders and the few curious travellers, the men of Marseilles and of
the islands, had seen before them. They saw in numbers and in a
corporate way what hitherto individuals alone had seen; they saw the
sea like a living thing, advancing and retreating in an ordered dance,
alive with deep sighs and intakes, and ceaselessly proceeding about a
work and a doing which seemed to be the very visible action of an
unchanging will still pleased with calculated change. It was the
presence of the Roman army upon the shores of the Channel which brought
the Tide into the general conscience of Europe, and that experience, I
think, was among the greatest, perhaps the greatest, of those new
things which rushed upon the mind of the Empire when it launched itself
by the occupation of Gaul.

The tide, when it is mentioned in brief historical records of times
long since, suddenly strikes one with vividness and with familiarity,
so that the past is introduced at once, presented to us physically, and
obtruded against our modern senses alive. I know of no other physical
thing mentioned in this fashion, in chronicle or biography, which has
so powerful an effect to restore the reality of a dead century.

The Venerable Bede is speaking in one place of Southampton Water, in
his ecclesiastical history, or, rather, of the Isle of Wight, whence
those two Princes were baptized and died under Cadwalla. As the
historian speaks of the place he says:

“In this sea” (which is the Solent) “comes a double tide out of the
seas which spring from the infinite ocean of the Arctic surrounding all
Britain.”

And he tells us how these double tides rush together and fight
together, sweeping as they do round either side of the island by the
Needles and by Spithead into the land-locked sheet within.

Now that passage in Bede’s fourth book is more real to me than anything
in all his chronicle, for in Southampton Water to-day the living thing
which we still note as we sail is the double tide. You take a falling
tide at the head of the water, near Southampton Town, and if you are
not quick with your business it is checked in two hours and you meet a
strange flood, the second flood, before you have rounded Calshott
Castle.

Then there is a Charter of Newcastle. Or, rather, the inviolable
Customs of that town, very old, drawn up nearly eight hundred years
ago, but beginning from far earlier; and in these customs you find
written:

“If a plea shall arise between a burgess and a merchant it must be
determined before the third flowing of the sea”—that is, within three
tides; a wise provision! For thus the merchant would not miss the last
tide of the day after the quarrel. How living it is, a phrase of that
sort coming in the midst of those other phrases!

All the rest, worse luck, has gone. Burgage-tenure, and the economic
independence of the humble, and the busy, healthy life of men working
to enrich themselves, not others, and that corporate association which
was the blood of the Middle Ages, and the power of popular opinion,
and, in general, freedom. But out of all these things that have
perished, the tide remains, and in the eighteen clauses of the Customs,
the tidal clause alone stands fresh and still has meaning. The capital,
great clinching clause by which men owned their own land within the
town has gone utterly and altogether. The modern workman on the Tyne
would not understand you perhaps, to whom in that very place you should
say, “Many centuries ago the men that came before you here, your
fathers, were not working precariously at a wage, or paying rent to
others, but living under their own roofs and working for themselves.”
There is only one passage in the document that all could understand in
Newcastle to-day—the very few rich who are hardly secure, the myriads
of poor who are not secure at all—and that passage is the passage which
talks of the third tide; for even to-day there is some good we have
left undestroyed and the sea still ebbs and flows.

This little note of the Newcastle men, and of the flowing and the
ebbing of their sea, is to be found, you say, in the archives of
England? Not at all! It is to be found in the Acts of the Parliament of
Scotland—at least, so my book assures me, but why I do not know.
Perhaps of the times when between Tyne and Tees, men looked northward
and of the times when they looked southward (for they alternately did
one and the other during many hundreds of years) those times when they
looked northward seemed the more natural to them. Anyhow, the reference
is to the Acts of the Parliament of Scotland, and that is the end of
it.




On a Great Wind


It is an old dispute among men, or rather a dispute as old as mankind,
whether Will be a cause of things or no; nor is there anything novel in
those moderns who affirm that Will is nothing to the matter, save their
ignorant belief that their affirmation is new.

The intelligent process whereby I know that Will not seems but is, and
can alone be truly and ultimately a cause, is fed with stuff and
strengthens sacramentally as it were, whenever I meet, and am made the
companion of, a great wind.

It is not that this lively creature of God is indeed perfected with a
soul; this it would be superstition to believe. It has no more a person
than any other of its material fellows, but in its vagary of way, in
the largeness of its apparent freedom, in its rush of purpose, it seems
to mirror the action of mighty spirit. When a great wind comes roaring
over the eastern flats towards the North Sea, driving over the Fens and
the Wringland, it is like something of this island that must go out and
wrestle with the water, or play with it in a game or a battle; and
when, upon the western shores, the clouds come bowling up from the
horizon, messengers, outriders, or comrades of a gale, it is something
of the sea determined to possess the land. The rising and falling of
such power, its hesitations, its renewed violence, its fatigue and
final repose—all these are symbols of a mind; but more than all the
rest, its exultation! It is the shouting and the hurrahing of the wind
that suits a man.

Note you, we have not many friends. The older we grow and the better we
can sift mankind, the fewer friends we count, although man lives by
friendship. But a great wind is every man’s friend, and its strength is
the strength of good-fellowship; and even doing battle with it is
something worthy and well chosen. If there is cruelty in the sea, and
terror in high places, and malice lurking in profound darkness, there
is no one of these qualities in the wind, but only power. Here is
strength too full for such negations as cruelty, as malice, or as fear;
and that strength in a solemn manner proves and tests health in our own
souls. For with terror (of the sort I mean—terror of the abyss or panic
at remembered pain, and in general, a losing grip of the succours of
the mind), and with malice, and with cruelty, and with all the forms of
that Evil which lies in wait for men, there is the savour of disease.
It is an error to think of such things as power set up in equality
against justice and right living. We were not made for them, but rather
for influences large and soundly poised; we are not subject to them but
to other powers that can always enliven and relieve. It is health in
us, I say, to be full of heartiness and of the joy of the world, and of
whether we have such health our comfort in a great wind is a good test
indeed. No man spends his day upon the mountains when the wind is out,
riding against it or pushing forward on foot through the gale, but at
the end of his day feels that he has had a great host about him. It is
as though he had experienced armies. The days of high winds are days of
innumerable sounds, innumerable in variation of tone and of intensity,
playing upon and awakening innumerable powers in man. And the days of
high wind are days in which a physical compulsion has been about us and
we have met pressure and blows, resisted and turned them; it enlivens
us with the simulacrum of war by which nations live, and in the just
pursuit of which men in companionship are at their noblest.

It is pretended sometimes (less often perhaps now than a dozen years
ago) that certain ancient pursuits congenial to man will be lost to him
under his new necessities; thus men sometimes talk foolishly of horses
being no longer ridden, houses no longer built of wholesome wood and
stone, but of metal; meat no more roasted, but only baked; and even of
stomachs grown too weak for wine. There is a fashion of saying these
things, and much other nastiness. Such talk is (thank God!) mere folly;
for man will always at last tend to his end, which is happiness, and he
will remember again to do all those things which serve that end. So it
is with the uses of the wind, and especially the using of the wind with
sails.

No man has known the wind by any of its names who has not sailed his
own boat and felt life in the tiller. Then it is that a man has most to
do with the wind, plays with it, coaxes or refuses it, is wary of it
all along; yields when he must yield, but comes up and pits himself
again against its violence; trains it, harnesses it, calls it if it
fails him, denounces it if it will try to be too strong, and in every
manner conceivable handles this glorious playmate.

As for those who say that men did but use the wind as an instrument for
crossing the sea, and that sails were mere machines to them, either
they have never sailed or they were quite unworthy of sailing. It is
not an accident that the tall ships of every age of varying fashions so
arrested human sight and seemed so splendid. The whole of man went into
their creation, and they expressed him very well; his cunning, and his
mastery, and his adventurous heart. For the wind is in nothing more
capitally our friend than in this, that it has been, since men were
men, their ally in the seeking of the unknown and in their divine
thirst for travel which, in its several aspects—pilgrimage, conquest,
discovery, and, in general, enlargement—is one prime way whereby man
fills himself with being.

I love to think of those Norwegian men who set out eagerly before the
north-east wind when it came down from their mountains in the month of
March like a god of great stature to impel them to the West. They
pushed their Long Keels out upon the rollers, grinding the shingle of
the beach at the fjord-head. They ran down the calm narrows, they
breasted and they met the open sea. Then for days and days they drove
under this master of theirs and high friend, having the wind for a sort
of captain, and looking always out to the sea line to find what they
could find. It was the springtime; and men feel the spring upon the sea
even more surely than they feel it upon the land. They were men whose
eyes, pale with the foam, watched for a landfall, that unmistakable
good sight which the wind brings us to, the cloud that does not change
and that comes after the long emptiness of sea days like a vision after
the sameness of our common lives. To them the land they so discovered
was wholly new.

We have no cause to regret the youth of the world, if indeed the world
were ever young. When we imagine in our cities that the wind no longer
calls us to such things, it is only our reading that blinds us, and the
picture of satiety which our reading breeds is wholly false. Any man
to-day may go out and take his pleasure with the wind upon the high
seas. He also will make his landfalls to-day, or in a thousand years;
and the sight is always the same, and the appetite for such discoveries
is wholly satisfied even though he be only sailing, as I have sailed,
over seas that he has known from childhood, and come upon an island far
away, mapped and well known, and visited for the hundredth time.




The Letter


If you ask me why it is now three weeks since I received your letter
and why it is only today that I answer it, I must tell you the truth
lest further things I may have to tell you should not be worthy of your
dignity or of mine. It was because at first I dared not, then later I
reasoned with myself, and so bred delay, and at last took refuge in
more delay. I will offer no excuse: I will not tell you that I suffered
illness, or that some accident of war had taken me away from this old
house, or that I have but just returned from a journey to my hill and
my view over the Plain and the great River.

Your messenger I have kept, and I have entertained him well. I looked
at him a little narrowly at his first coming, thinking perhaps he might
be a gentleman of yours, but I soon found that he was not such, and
that he bore no disguise, but was a plain rider of your household. I
put him in good quarters by the Hunting Stables. He has had nothing to
do but to await my resolution, which is now at last taken, and which
you receive in this.

But how shall I begin, or how express to you what not distance but a
slow and bitter conclusion of the mind has done?

I shall not return to Meudon. I shall not see the woods, the summer
woods turning to autumn, nor follow the hunt, nor take pleasure again
in what is still the best of Europe at Versailles. And now that I have
said it, you must read it so; for I am unalterably determined. Believe
me, it is something much more deep than courtesy which compels me to
give you my reasons for this final and irrevocable doom.

We were children together. Though we leant so lightly in our
conversations of this spring upon all we knew in common, I know your
age and all your strong early experience—and you know mine. Your mother
will recall that day’s riding when I came back from my first leave and
you were home, not, I think, for good, from the convent. A fixed
domestic habit blinded her, so that she could then still see in us no
more than two children; yet I was proud of my sword, and had it on, and
you that day were proud of a beauty which could no longer be hidden
even from yourself; I would then have sacrificed, and would now, all I
had or was or had or am to have made that beauty immortal.

I say, you remember that day’s riding, and how after it the world was
changed for you and me, and how that same evening the elders saw that
it was changed.

You will remember that for two years we were not allowed to meet again.
When the two years were passed we met indeed by a mere accident of that
rich and tedious life wherein we were both now engaged. I was returned
from leave before Tournay; you had heard, I think, a false report that
I had been wounded in the dreadful business at Fontenoy (which to
remember even now horrifies me a little). I had heard and knew which of
the great names you now bore by marriage. The next day it was your
husband who rode with me to Marly. I liked him well enough. I have
grown to like him better. He is an honest man, though I confess his
philosophers weary me. When I say “an honest man” I am giving the
highest praise I know.

My dear, that was sixteen years ago.

You may not even now understand, so engrossing is the toilsome and
excited ritual of that rich world at Versailles, how blest you are:
your children are growing round you: your daughters are beginning to
reveal your own beauty, and your sons will show in these next years
immediately before us that temper which in you was a spirit and a
height of being, and in them, men, will show as plain courage. During
that long space of years your house has remained well ordered (it was
your husband’s doing). His great fortune and yours have jointly
increased: if I may tell you so, it is a pleasure to all who understand
fitness to know that this is so, and that your lineage and his will
hold so great a place in the State.

As you review those sixteen years you may, if you will—I trust you will
not—recall those occasions when I saw the woods of Meudon and mixed by
chance with your world, and when we renewed the rides which had ended
our childhood. As for me I have not to recall those things. They are,
alas, myself, and beyond them there is nothing that I can call a memory
or a being at all. Nevertheless, as I have told you, I shall not come
to Meudon: I shall not hear again the delightful voices of those many
friends (now in mid-life as am I) who are my equals at Versailles. I
shall not see your face.

I did not take service with the Empire from any pique or folly, but
from a necessity for adventure and for the refounding of my house. It
might have chanced that I should marry: the land demanded an heir. My
impoverishment weighed upon me like an ill deed, for all this belt of
land is dependent upon the old house, which I can with such difficulty
retain and from which I write to-day. I spent all those years in the
service of the Empire (and even of Russia) from no uncertain temper and
from no imaginary quarrel. It is so common or so necessary for men and
women to misjudge each other that I believe you thought me wayward, or
at least unstable. If you did so you did me a wrong. Those two good
seasons when we met again, and this last of but a month ago, were not
accidents or fitful recoveries. They were all I possessed in my life
and all that will perish with me when I die.

But now, to tell you the very core of my decision, it is this: The
years that pass carry with them an increasing weight at once sombre and
majestic. There are things belonging to youth which habit continues
strangely longer than the season to which they properly belong: if,
when we discover them to be too prolonged as cling to their survival,
why, then, we eat dust. So long as we possess the illusion and so long
as the dearest things of youth maintain unchanged, in one chamber of
our life at least, our twentieth year, so long all is well. But there
is a cold river which we must pass in our advance towards nothingness
and age. In the passage of that stream we change: and you and I have
passed it. There is no more endurance in that young mood of ours than
in any other human thing. One always wakes from it at last. One sees
what it is. The soul sees and counts with hard eyes the price at which
a continuance of such high dreams must be purchased, and the heart has
a prevision of the evil that the happy cheat will work as maturity is
reached by each of us, and as each of us fully takes on the burden of
the world.

Therefore I must not return.

Foolishly and without thinking of real things, acting as though indeed
that life of dream and of illusion were still possible to me, I
yesterday cut with great care a rose, one from the many that have now
grown almost wild upon the great wall overlooking the Danube. Then ...
I could not but smile to myself when I remembered how by the time that
rose should have reached you every petal would be wasted and fallen in
the long week’s ride. There is a fixed term of life for roses also as
for men. I do not cite this to you by way of parable. I have no heart
for tricks of the pen to-night; but the two images came together, and
you will understand. If I do not return, it is for the same reason that
I could not send the rose.




The Regret


Everybody knows, I suppose, that kind of landscape in which hills seem
to lie in a regular manner, fold on fold, one range behind the other,
until, at last, behind them all some higher and grander range dominates
and frames the whole.

The infinite variety of light and air and accident of soil provide all
men save those who live in the great plains with examples of this sort.
The traveller in the dry air of California or of Spain, watching great
distances from the heights, will recollect such landscapes all his
life. They were the reward of his long ascents and the visions which
attended his effort as he climbed up to the ridge of his horizon. Such
a landscape does a man see from the Western edges of the Guadarrama,
looking eastward and south toward the very distant hills that guard
Toledo and the Gulf of the Tagus. Such a landscape does a man see at
sunrise from the highest of the Cevennes looking right eastward to the
dawn as it comes up in the pure and cold air beyond the Alps, and shows
you the falling of the foothills to the Rhone. And by such a landscape
is a man gladdened when upon the escarpments of the Tuolumne he turns
back and looks westward over the plain towards the vast range.

The experience of such a sight is one peculiar in travel, or, for that
matter, if a man is lucky enough to enjoy it at home, insistent and
reiterated upon the mind of the home-dwelling man. Such a landscape,
for instance, makes a man praise God if his house is upon the height of
Mendip, and he can look over falling hills right over the Vale of
Severn toward the ridge above ridge of the Welsh solemnities beyond,
until the straight line and high of the Black Mountains ends his view.

It is the character of these landscapes to suggest at once a vastness,
diversity, and seclusion. When a man comes upon them unexpectedly he
can forget the perpetual toil of men and imagine that those who dwell
below in the near side before him are exempt from the necessities of
this world. When such a landscape is part of a man’s dwelling-place,
though he well knows that the painful life of men within those hills is
the same hard business that it is throughout the world, yet his
knowledge is modified and comforted by the permanent glory of the thing
he sees.

The distant and high range that bounds his view makes a sort of
veiling, cutting it off and guarding it from whatever may be beyond.
The succession of lower ranges suggests secluded valleys, and the
reiterated woods, distant and more distant, convey an impression of
fertility more powerful than that of corn in harvest upon the lowlands.

Sometimes it is a whole province that is thus grasped by the eye,
sometimes in the summer haze but a few miles; always this scenery
inspires the onlooker with a sense of completion and of repose, and at
the same time, I think, with worship and with awe.

Now one such group of valleys there was, hill above hill, forest above
forest, and beyond it a great noble range, unwooded and high against
heaven, guarding it, which I for my part knew when first I knew
anything of this world. There is a high place under fir trees, a place
of sand and bracken, in South England whence such a view was always
present to eye in childhood and “There,” said I to myself (even in
childhood) “a man should make his habitation.” In those valleys is the
proper off-set for man.

And so there was.

It was a little place which had grown up as my county grows. The house
throwing out arms and layers. One room was panelled in the oak of the
seventeenth century—but that had been a novelty in its time, for the
walls upon which the panels stood were of the late fifteenth, oak and
brick intermingled. Another room was large and light built in the
manner of one hundred and fifty years ago, which people call Georgian.
It had been thrown out south (which is quite against our older custom,
for our older houses looked east and west to take all the sun and to
present a corner to the south-west and the storms. So they stand
still). It had round it a solid cornice which the modern men of the
towns would have called ugly, but there was ancestry in it. Then,
further on this house had modern roominess stretching in one new wing
after another; and it had a great steading and there was a copse and
some six acres of land. Over a deep ravine looked the little town that
was the mother of the place, and altogether it was enclosed, silent,
and secure.

“The fish that misses the hook regrets the worm.” If this is not a
Chinese proverb it ought to be. That little farm and steading and those
six acres, that ravine, those trees, that aspect of the little
mothering town; the wooded hills fold above fold, the noble range
beyond, will not be mine.

For all I know, some man quite unacquainted with that land took them
grumbling for a debt; or again, for all I know, they may have been
bought by a blind man who could not see the hills, or by some man who,
seeing them, perpetually regretted the flat marshes of the fens. One
day, up high on Egdean Side, not thinking of such things, through a gap
in the trees I saw again after so many years, set one behind the other,
the forests wave upon wave, the summer heat, the high, bare range
guarding all, and in the midst of that landscape, set like a toy, the
little Sabine Farm.

Then I said to it, “Continue. Go and serve whom you will, my little
Sabine Farm. You were not mine because you would not be, and you are
not mine at all to-day. You will regret it perhaps, and perhaps you
will not. There was verse in you, perhaps, or prose, or—infinitely
more!—contentment for a man (for all I know). But you refused. You lost
your chance. Goodbye.” And with that I went on into the wood and beyond
the gap, and saw the sight no more.

It was ten years since I had seen it last. It may be ten years before I
see it again, or it may be for ever. But as I went through the woods
saying to myself:

“You lost your chance, my little Sabine Farm, you lost your chance!”
another part of me at once replied:

“Ah! And so did _you_!”

Then, by way of riposte, I answered in my mind:

“Not at all, for the chance I never had, but what I lost was my
desire.”

“No, not your desire,” said the voice to me within, “but the fulfilment
of it, in which you would have lost your desire.” And when that reply
came I naturally turned as all men do on hearing such interior replies,
to a general consideration of regret, and was prepared, if any honest
publisher should have come whistling through that wood, with an offer
proper to the occasion, namely, to produce no less than five volumes on
the Nature of Regret, its mortal sting, its bitter-sweetness, its power
to keep alive in man the pure passions of the soul, its hints at
immortality, its memory of Heaven. But the wood was empty of
publishers. The offer did not come. The moment was lost. The five
volumes will hardly now be written. In place of them I offer poor this,
which you may take or leave. But I beg leave before I end to cite
certain words very nobly attached to that great inn “The Griffin,”
which has its foundation set far off in another place, in the town of
March, in the Fen Land:

“England my desire, what have you not refused?”




The End Of The World


One day I met a man who was sitting quite silent near Whitney, in the
Thames Valley, in a very large, long, low inn that stands in those
parts, or at least stood then, for whether it stands now or not depends
upon the Fussyites, whose business it is to Fuss, and in their Fussing
to disturb mankind.

He had nothing to say for himself at all, and he looked not gloomy but
sad. He was tall and thin, with high cheekbones. His face was the
colour of leather that has been some time in the weather, and he
despised us altogether: he would not say a word to us, until one of the
company said, rising from his meat and drink: “Very well, there’s a
thing we shall never know till the end of the world” (he was talking
about some discussion or other which the young men had been holding
together). “There’s a thing we shall never know till the end of the
world—and about that nobody knows!”

“You will pardon me,” said the tall, thin, and elderly man with a face
like leather that has been exposed to the weather, “I know about the
End of the World, for I have been there.”

This was so interesting that we all sat down again to listen.

“I wasn’t talking of place, but of time,” murmured the young man whom
the stranger had answered.

“I cannot help that,” said the stranger decisively; “the End of the
World is the End of the World, and whether you are talking of space or
of time it does not matter, for when you have got to the end you have
got to the end, as may be proved in several ways.”

“How did you get to it?” said one of our companions.

“That is very simply answered,” said the elder man; “you get to it by
walking straight in front of you.”

“Anyone could do that,” said the other.

“Anyone could,” said the elder man, “but nobody does. I did.... When I
was quite a boy in my father’s parsonage (for my father was a parson),
having heard so much about the End of the World and seeing that
people’s descriptions of it differed so much and that everybody was
quite sure of his own, I used to take my father’s friends and guests
aside privately, for I was afraid to take my father himself, and I used
to ask them how they knew what the End of the World was really like,
and whether they had seen it. Some laughed, others were silent, and
others were angry; but no one gave me any information. At last I
decided (and it was very wise of me) that the only way to find out a
thing of that sort was to find it out for one’s self, and not to go by
hearsay, so I determined to go straight on without stopping until I got
to the End of the World.”

“Which way did you walk?” said yet another of my companions.

“Young man,” said the stranger, with solemnity, “I walked westward
toward the setting sun ... I walked and I walked and I walked, day
after day and year after year. Whenever I came to the seacoast I would
take work on board a ship—and remember it is always easy to get work if
you will take the wages that are offered, and always difficult to get
it if you will not. Well, then, I went in this way through all known
lands and over all known seas, until at last I came to the shore of a
sea beyond which (so the people told me who lived there) there was no
further shore. ‘I cannot help that,’ said I; ‘I have not yet come to
the End of the World, and it is common sense that such a lot of water
must have something at the back of it to hold it up; besides which
there is a strong wind blowing out of the gates of the west and from
the sunset. Now that wind must rise somewhere, and I am going on to see
where it rises.’ One of them was kind enough to lend me a boat with
oars; I thanked him prettily, and then I set out to row toward the End
of the World, taking with me two or three days’ provisions.

“When I had rowed a long time I went asleep, and when I woke up next
morning I rowed again all day until the second night I went to sleep.
On the third day I rowed again: a little before sunset on the third day
I saw before me high hills, all in peaks like a great saw. On the very
highest of the peaks there were streaks of snow, and at about six
o’clock in the afternoon I grounded my boat upon that gravelly shore
and pulled it up upon the shingle, though it was evident either that
the tide was high or that there was no tide in these silent places.

“I offered up a prayer to the genius of the land, and tied the painter
of the boat to two great stones, so that no wave reaching it might move
it, and then I went on inland. When I had gone a little way I saw a
signpost on which was written, ‘To the End of the World One Mile’ and
there was a rough track along which it pointed. I went along this
track. Everything was completely silent. There were no birds, there was
no wind, there was nothing in the sky. But one thing I did notice,
which was that the sun was much larger than it used to be, and that as
I went along this last mile or so it seemed to get larger still—but
that may have been my imagination, for I must tell you my imagination
is pretty strong.

“Well then, gentlemen, when I had gone a mile or so I saw another
signpost, on which there was a large board marked ‘Danger,’ and a
hundred yards beyond the track went between two great dark rocks—and
there I was! The road had stopped short; it was broken off, jagged,
just like a torn bit of paper ... and there was the End of the World.”

“How do you mean?” said one of the younger men in an awed tone.

“What I say,” said the stranger decidedly. “I had come to the end;
there was nothing beyond. You looked down over a precipice where there
was moss and steep grass, and on the ledges trees far below, and then
more precipice, and then—oh, miles below—a few more trees or so
clinging to the steep, then more precipice, and then darkness; and far
away before me was the whole expanse of sky; and in the midst of it I
saw the broad red sun setting into the brume; it was not yet dark
enough to see the stars, and there was no moon in the sky.

“I assure you it was a very wonderful sight, and I was awed though I
was not afraid. And how glad I was to find that the world had an edge
to it, and that all that talk about its being round was nonsense!

“When the sun was set it grew dark, and I returned to find my boat; but
I must have missed my way, for the track became broader and better, and
at last I came to a gate of a human sort, with an initial on it, which
showed that it had been put up by some landlord. It was an open gate,
and after I had entered it I came upon a broad highway, beautifully
metalled, and when I had gone along this for less than half a mile I
came to this inn where I am now sitting. That was a week ago, and I
have been here ever since. They took me in kindly enough, but they
would not believe what I had to tell them about the End of the World.
It is a great pity, gentlemen, for that wonderful sight is to be
discovered somewhere hereabouts, and a mere accident of my losing my
way in the darkness makes it difficult for me to find it by daylight.”

Having said all this, the stranger was silent.

One of my companions whispered to me that the old man must be mad. The
stranger overheard him, and said with a thin smile:

“Oh, I know all about that; several have suggested it already; but it
is no answer, for if I did not come from the End of the World, where
did I come from? No one has seen me hereabouts during the last few days
until I came to this inn. And all the first part of my journey I can
very easily explain, for I have notes of it, and it lasted for years.
It is only this last part which seems to me so difficult.... I tell you
I lost my way, and when a man has lost his way at night he can never
find it again in the daytime.”

As he spoke he took a little piece of folded paper, rather dirty, out
of his inner pocket, on which a rough sketch-map was drawn, and he
began touching it with a stump of pencil that he held in his hand. His
eyes seemed to grow dimmer as he did so, and he leaned his head upon
his hand. “I think I have got hold of it, gentlemen,” he said.

We did not get up or go too near him, for we thought he might be
dangerous.

“I think, gentlemen,” he repeated in a more mumbling and lower and less
certain voice, “I think I have got hold of it. I go backwards again
through the gate to the right, just as then I went to the left, and
after that it cannot be very far, for I see those two rocks in front of
me. Besides which,” he muttered less and less coherently, “I ought to
have remembered of course those very high and silent hills with nothing
living upon them....” And he added, half asleep, as his head dropped
upon his hand, “It was westward.... I had forgotten that.”
Having so spoken, he seemed to fall asleep altogether, and his head
fell back upon the corner of the wainscoting behind the bench where he
sat. He made no noise in breathing as he slept.

It was the first time that any of us young men had come across this
fairly common sight of a man who took things within for things without;
some of us were frightened, and all of us wished to be rid of the place
and to get away. As we went out we told the landlord nothing either of
the old fellow’s vagaries or of his sleep, but we went out and reached
the town of Whitney, and when we had stayed there a couple of hours or
so we went out southward to the station and waited there for the train
which should take us back to Oxford.

While we were waiting there in the station two farmers were talking
together. One said to the other:

“Ar, if he’d paid them they wouldn’t have minded so much.”

To which the other answered:

“Ar, ’tisn’t only the paying: it’s always an awkward thing when a man
dies in your house, specially if it’s licensed. My wife’s brother was
caught that way.”

Then as they went on talking we found that they were talking of the man
in the inn, who it seems had not slept very long, but was dead, and had
died in that same room. It was a shocking thing to hear. The first
farmer said to the second in the railway carriage when we had all got
in:

“Where’d he come from?”

The other, who was an old man, grinned and said:

“Where we all come from, I suppose, and where we all go to.” He touched
his forehead with his hand. “He said he’d come from the End of the
World.”

“Ar,” said the other gloomily in answer, “like enough!” And after that
they talked no more about the matter.


 [1] The Rhododendrons on the great lawn are modern.




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