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First and Last

by Hilaire Belloc · English · Gutenberg #7352 · 396,393 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: First and Last

Author: Hilaire Belloc


        
Release date: January 1, 2005 [eBook #7352]
                Most recently updated: May 1, 2023

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7352

Credits: 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 formulæ 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 behi

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