*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 61076 ***

ON EVERYTHING




BY THE SAME AUTHOR


  PARIS
  HILLS AND THE SEA
  EMMANUEL BURDEN, MERCHANT
  A CHANGE IN THE CABINET
  ON NOTHING AND KINDRED SUBJECTS
  THE PYRENEES
  MARIE ANTOINETTE




  ON EVERYTHING

  BY

  H. BELLOC

  SECOND EDITION

  METHUEN & CO.
  36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
  LONDON




  _First Published_      _November 4th 1909_
  _Second Edition_       _1910_




  _To
  Madame Antoine Pescatore_




CONTENTS


                                                        PAGE

  ON SONG                                                  1

  ON AN EMPTY HOUSE                                        7

  THE LANDFALL                                            16

  THE LITTLE OLD MAN                                      22

  THE LONG MARCH                                          29

  ON SATURNALIA                                           38

  A LITTLE CONVERSATION IN HEREFORDSHIRE                  45

  ON THE RIGHTS OF PROPERTY                               53

  THE ECONOMIST                                           60

  A LITTLE CONVERSATION IN CARTHAGE                       68

  THE STRANGE COMPANION                                   74

  THE VISITOR                                             81

  A RECONSTRUCTION OF THE PAST                            90

  THE REASONABLE PRESS                                    97

  ASMODEUS                                               104

  THE DEATH OF THE COMIC AUTHOR                          113

  ON CERTAIN MANNERS AND CUSTOMS                         121

  THE STATESMAN                                          130

  THE DUEL                                               138

  ON A BATTLE, OR “JOURNALISM,” OR “POINTS OF VIEW”      148

  A DESCENDANT OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE                    159

  ON THE APPROACH TO WESTERN ENGLAND                     167

  THE WEALD                                              174

  ON LONDON AND THE HOUSES IN IT                         180

  ON OLD TOWNS                                           187

  A CROSSING OF THE HILLS                                194

  THE BARBER                                             201

  ON HIGH PLACES                                         209

  ON SOME LITTLE HORSES                                  217

  ON STREAMS AND RIVERS                                  223

  ON TWO MANUALS                                         230

  ON FANTASTIC BOOKS                                     238

  THE UNFORTUNATE MAN                                    244

  THE CONTENTED MAN                                      253

  THE MISSIONER                                          261

  THE DREAM                                              270

  THE SILENCE OF THE BATTLEFIELDS                        276

  NOVISSIMA HORA                                         283

  ON REST                                                289




These essays appeared for the most part in _The Morning Post_, and are
here reprinted by the courtesy of the Editor.




ON EVERYTHING




On Song


Some say that when that box was opened wherein lay ready the evils of
the world (and a woman opened it) Hope flew out at last.

That is a Pagan thing to say and a hopeless one, for the true comfort
that remained for men, and that embodied and gave reality to their
conquering struggle against every despair, was surely Song.

If you would ask what society is imperilled of death, go to one
in which song is extinguished. If you would ask in what society a
permanent sickness oppresses all, and the wealthy alone are permitted
to make the laws, go to one in which song is a fine art and treated
with criticism and used charily, and ceases to be a human thing. But if
you would discover where men are men, take for your test whether songs
are always and loudly sung.

Sailors sing. They have a song for work and songs for every part of
their work, and they have songs of reminiscence and of tragedy, and
many farcical songs; some brutal songs, songs of repose, and songs in
which is packed the desire for a distant home.

Soldiers also sing, at least in those Armies where soldiers are still
soldiers. And the Line, which is the core and body of any army, is the
most singing of them all. The Cavalry hardly sing, at least until they
get indoors, for it would be a bumping sort of singing, and gunners
cannot sing for noise, while the drivers are busy riding and leading
as well. But the Line sings; and if you will consider quickly, all
the great armies of the world, and consider them justly, not as the
pedants do, but as men do who really feel the past, you would hear
mounting from them always continual song. Those men who marched behind
Cæsar in his triumph sang a song, and the words of it still remain (so
I am told); the armies of Louis XIV and of Napoleon, of the Republic,
and even of Algiers, made songs of their own which have passed into
the great treasury of European letters. And though it is difficult to
believe it, it is true, the little troops of the Parliament marching
down the river made a song about Mother Bunch, coupled with the name of
the Dorchester Hills; but I may be wrong. I was told it by a friend; he
may have been a false friend.

They sang in the Barons’ wars; they sang on the way to Lewes. They sang
in that march which led men to the assault at Hastings, for it was
written by those who saw the column of knights advancing to the foot of
the hill that Taillefer was chosen for his great voice and rode before
the host, tossing his sword into the air and catching it again by the
hilt (a difficult thing to do), and singing of Charlemagne and of the
vassals who had died under Roncesvalles.

Song also illuminates and strengthens and vivifies all common life, and
on this account what is left of our peasantry have harvest songs, and
there are songs for mowing and songs for the midwinter rest, and there
is even a song in the south of England for the gathering of honey,
which song, if you have not heard it, though it is commonly known, runs
thus:--

  _Bees of bees of Paradise,
  Do the work of Jesus Christ,
  Do the work which no man can.
  God made man, and man made money,
  God made bees and bees made honey.
  God made big men to plough, to reap, and to sow,
  God made little boys to keep off the rook and the crow._

This song is sung for pleasure, and, by the way of singing it, it is
made to scan.

Indeed, all men sing at their labour, or would so sing did not dead
convention forbid them. You will say there are exceptions, as lawyers,
usurers, and others; but there are no exceptions to this rule where all
the man is working and is working well, and is producing and is not
ashamed.

Rowers sing, and their song is called a Barcarolle; and even men
holding the tiller who have nothing to do but hold it tend to sing a
song. And I will swear to this that I have heard stokers when they
were hard pressed starting a sort of crooning chorus together, which
shows that there is hope for us all.

The great Poets who are chiefly this, men capable of perfect expression
(though of no more feeling than any other of their kind), are dignified
by Song, much more than by any others of their forms of power. Consider
that song of Du Bellay’s which he translated out of the Italian, and in
which he has the winnower singing as he turns the winnowing fan. That
is great expression, because no man can read it without feeling that if
ever he had to do the hard work of winnowing this is the song he would
like to sing.

Song also is the mistress of memory, and though a scent is more
powerful, a song is more general, as an instrument for the resurrection
of lost things. Thus exiles who of all men on earth suffer most deeply,
most permanently, and most fruitfully, are great makers of songs. The
chief character in songs--that almost any man can write them, that any
man at all can sing them, and that the greatest are anonymous--is never
better proved than in this quality of the songs of exiles. There is a
Highland song of which I have been told, written in the Celtic dialect
and translated again into English by I know not whom, which, for all
its unknown authorship (and I believe its authorship to be unknown)
enshrines that radiantly beautiful line:

  And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.

The last anonymous piece of silver that was struck in the mint of the
Roman language has that same poignant quality.

  Exul quid vis canere?

All the songs that men make (and they are powerful ones) regretting
youth are songs of exile, and in a sense (it is a high and true sense)
the mighty hymns are songs of exile also.

  Qui vitam sine termino
  Nobis donet in patria,

that is the pure note of exile, and so is the

  Coheredes et sodales
  In terra viventium,

and in this last glorious thing comes in the note of marching and of
soldiers as well as the note of separation and of longing. But after
all the mention of religion is in itself a proof of song, for what
spell could there ever be without incantation, or what ritual could
lack its chaunt?

If any man wonders why these two, Religion and Song, are connected, or
thinks it impious that they should so be, let him do this: if he is an
old man let him cover his face with his hand and remember at evening
what occasions stand out of the long past, full of a complete life, and
of an acute observation and intelligence of all that was around: how
many were occasions for song! There are pictures a man will remember
all his life only because he watched them for a pastime, because he
heard a woman singing as he watched them, and there are landscapes
which remain in the mind long after other things have faded, but so
remain because one went at morning with other men along the road
singing a walking song. And if it is a young man who wishes to make
trial of this truth, he also has his test. For he will note as the
years continue how, while all other pleasures lose their value and
gradation, Song remains, until at last the notes of singing become like
a sort of sacrament outside time, not subject to decay, but always
nourishing men, for Song gives a permanent sense of futurity and a
permanent sense of the presence of Divine things. Nor is there any
pleasure which you will take away from middle age and leave it more
lonely, than this pleasure of hearing Song.

It is that immortal quality in the business which makes it of a
different kind from the other efforts of men. Write a good song and
the tune leaps up to meet it out of nothingness. It clothes itself
with tune, and once so clothed it continues on through generations,
eternally young, always smiling, and always ready with strong hands
for mankind. On this account every man who has written a song can be
certain that he has done good; any man who has continually sung them
can be certain that he has lived and has communicated life to others.

It is the best of all trades, to make songs, and the second best to
sing them.




On an Empty House


A man a little over forty years of age had desired to take a house in
London. He had lived hitherto between a cottage in the country, where
he had stables and where he made it his pleasure to ride, and rooms in
town off St. James’s Street. He had also two clubs, one of which he
continually visited. From his thirtieth year onward he had come more
often to town; he was heavier in build; he rode with less pleasure.
He had taken to writing and had published more than one little study,
chiefly upon the creative work of other men. He was under no compulsion
to write or to do any other thing, for he had a private fortune of
about £3000 a year. This he managed with some ability so that it
neither increased nor diminished, and like many other Englishmen, he
had wisely invested abroad, from the year 1897 onwards. Now, I say,
that middle age was upon him, London controlled him more and more. He
was in sympathy with the maturity of the great town, which responded
to his own maturity. He could find a leisure in it which he had never
found in youth. The multitude of the books and the easy access to
them, the sensible and varied conversation of men of his own rank and
age, and that sort of peopled quiet which supports the nights of men
living in London--all these had become a sort of food to him; they
greatly pleased him. So also did the physical food of London. He took
an increasing pleasure in changing the choice of his wine, which (an
invariable effect of age) he now distinguished. His rooms in London had
thus become for now some years past more and more his home; but he had
begun to feel that rooms could not be a home; and he would set up for
himself; he would be a master. He would feel again and in a greater way
that comfortable consciousness of self and of surroundings fitting one
which a man has in early youth every time he enters his father’s house.

With this purpose the man of whom I speak looked at several houses,
going first to agents, but finding himself disappointed in all. He
soon learned a wiser way, which was to ask friends of what houses they
had heard, and then to see for himself whether he liked them, and to
do this before even he knew what rent was asked. Also he would wander
up and down the streets, his heavy, well-dressed figure ponderous and
moving at a measured pace, and as he so wandered he would cast his eyes
over houses.

London, like all great things, has about it a quality for which I do
not know the word, but when I was at school there was a Greek word for
it. “Manifold” is too vague; “multitudinous” would not explain the idea
at all. What I mean is a quality by which one thing contains several
(not many) parts, each individual, each with a separate life and
colour of its own, and yet each living by a common spirit which builds
up the whole. Thus London, a great town, is also a number (not a large
number) of towns within. And to this man, who had cultivation and so
often wrote upon the creative work of other men, the spirit and the
delight of each quarter was well known. The words “Chelsea,” “Soho,”
“Mayfair,” “Westminster,” “Bloomsbury”--all meant to him things as
actual as colours or as chords of music, and each represented to him
not measurable advantages or drawbacks, but separate kinds of pleasure.
He loved them all, but he gravitated, as it is right and natural that
a man of his wealth and sort should do, to the houses north of Oxford
Street and south of the Marylebone Road. He had no territorial blood,
nor had his ancestry engaged in commerce; he was European in every
ramification of his descent. He came of doctors, of soldiers, of
lawyers, and in a word, of that middle class which has now disappeared
as a body and remains among us only in a few examples whose tradition,
though we respect it, is no longer a corporate tradition. For three
hundred years his people had had Greek, Latin, and French, and had in
alternate generations experienced ease or constraint according to the
circumstances of English life. He was the first to enjoy so complete a
leisure.

To this part of London, therefore, he naturally turned at last, and
following the sound rule that a man’s rent should be one-tenth of
his income--if that income is moderate--he looked about for a large
and comfortable house. The very streets had separate atmospheres for
him. He fixed at last upon what seemed a very nice house indeed in
Queen Anne Street. First he looked at it well from without, admired
the ironwork and the old places for lanterns, and the extinguishers;
he looked at the solid brick, and at that expression which all houses
have from the position of their windows. It was a house such as his
own people might have built or lived in under George III, and in
the earlier part of the reign of that unfortunate, though virtuous,
monarch. In a little while he had gone so far as to get his ticket from
the agent, and he would view the house. He came one day and another; he
was very much taken with the arrangement of it and with the quiet rooms
at the back, and he was pleased to see that the second staircase was
so arranged that there would be little noise of service. He remembered
with a sort of sentimental but pleasing feeling his childhood passed in
such a house, for his father had been a surgeon, somewhat famous, and
they lived in such rooms and in such a neighbourhood. He was pleased
with the old-fashioned arrangements for heating the water; he did not
propose to change them. But he was glad that electric light had taken
the place of gas, and he did propose to change the disposition of this
light made by the last tenants.

With every day that he visited the place it pleased him more. It
became a daily occupation of his, and it took up most of his thoughts.
The agents were gentle and kind; no mention of competitors was made,
and the reason for this would have been plain to any other but himself,
for he was offering a larger rent than the house was worth. But his
offer was not yet confirmed. Many years of successful investment, in
which, as I have said, he had neither increased nor diminished his
fortune, had given him a just measure of prudence in these affairs,
and he would not sign in a definite way until the whole scheme was
quite clear in his mind. For a week he visited and revisited, until the
caretaker, an elderly woman of rich humour, began to count upon the
conversation which she enjoyed at his daily appearances.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the wealthier part of London--next door to the modern abomination of
some new man or other who was destined to no succession, to no honour,
and whose fate in the future would probably prove to be some gamble
or other upon the Continent--next door to such a house, just round
the corner, so that you could only see the Park sideways, lived an
admirable woman. She was the wife of a Peer and the mother of numerous
children, of whom the eldest now served as a soldier and was an expense
to them, as was the youngest, from the traditions of his school, which
was also expensive. It was her husband’s business, when that half
of the politicians to which he belonged was not in office, to speak
at meetings and to write lithographed letters imploring aid of the
financial kind for institutions designed to relieve the necessities of
the poor. He also shot both on his own land and on that of friends,
and he would fish in Scotland, but as he had no land there, he had to
hire the fishing. The same was true of his sport with the birds in that
Northern Kingdom; so one way and another they were not rich for their
position, and this admirable woman it was who made all things go well.
She was strong in body, handsome in face, and of a clear, vivacious
temper, which pleased all the world about her, and made it the better
for her presence. But none of these attributes were so worthy, nor gave
her so general an admiration, as the splendid and evident virtue of her
soul. There was in her very gesture, and in every tone of her voice
when she chose to be serious, that fundamental character of goodness
which is at once the chief gift to mortals from Almighty God, and the
chief glory and merit of those recipients who have used it well. She
had done so, and the whole of her life was a sacrament and a support to
all who were blessed with her acquaintance.

Among these was the Man who was taking the House, for he had known her
brother very well at college. She was much of the same rank as himself,
though a little older. During many years of his youth he had so taken
for granted her perfections and her companionship, that these had,
as it were, made his world for him; he had judged the world by that
standard. Now that he knew the world, he used that standard no more.
It would not be just to say that at her early marriage he had felt any
pain save a necessary loss of some companionship. He had never had a
sister; he continued to receive her advice and to enter her house as
a relative, for though he was not a relative, the very children would
have been startled had they ever chosen to remember that he was not
one, and his Christian name came as commonly upon their lips, upon
hers, and upon her husband’s as any name under their own roof. He would
not, of course, finally take this house until she had seen it.

He was waiting, therefore, in the hall one morning of that winter a
little impatiently to show her his choice, and to take her verdict upon
certain details of it before he should write the last letter which
should bind him to the place. He heard a motor-car come up, looked out
and saw that it was hers, and met her upon the steps and led her in.
She also was pleased with everything she saw, and her pleasure suddenly
put light into the house, so that if you had seen her there, moving and
speaking and laughing, you would have had an illusion that the sun had
come shining in all the windows; a true physical illusion. You would
have remembered the place as sunlit. She noted the panelling, she
approved of one carved fireplace, she disapproved of another; she said
the house was too large for him; she was sure it would suit him. She
showed him where his many books would go, and warned him on a hundred
little things which he had never guessed at, in the arrangement of a
home. She was but half an hour in his company, and still smiling, still
full of words, she went away. He was to see her again in a very short
time; he was to lunch at their house, and he stood for a moment after
the door had shut in the silence of the big place, as though wondering
how he should pass his time. The hall in which he lingered was surely
very desolate; the bare boards he was sure he would remember, however
well they were covered; he never could make those cold walls look
warm.... Anyhow, one didn’t live in one’s hall. He just plodded
upstairs slowly to what had been the drawing-room of the house, and the
big brass curtain rods offended him; the rings were still upon them. He
would move them away, but still they offended him. The lines were too
regular, and there was too little to appeal to him. He hesitated for a
moment as to whether he would go up farther and look again at the upper
rooms which they had discussed together, but the great well of the
staircase looked emptier than all the rest; the great mournful windows,
filled with a grey northern sky, lit it, but gave it no light. And he
noticed, as he trod the bare wood of the last flight, how dismally his
footsteps echoed. Then he called up the caretaker and gave her the key,
surprised her with a considerable fee, and said he would communicate
that day with the agents, and left.

When he got to lunch at his friends’ house he told them that he would
not take the Empty House after all, whereat they all buzzed with
excitement, and asked him what he had found at the last moment. And he
said, in a silly sort of way, that it was not haunted enough for him.
But anyhow he did not take it: he went back to live in his rooms, and
he lives there still.




The Landfall


It was in Oxford Street and upon the top of an omnibus during one of
those despairing winter days, the light just gone, and an air rising
which was neither vigorous nor cold, but sodden like the hearts of all
around, that I fell wondering whether there were some ultimate goal for
men, and whether these adventures of ours, which grow tamer and so much
tamer as the years proceed, are lost at last in a blank nothingness,
or whether there are revelations and discoveries to come. This debate
in the mind is very old; every man revolves it, none has affirmed a
solution, though all the wisest of men have accepted a received answer
from authority external to themselves. I was not on that murky evening
concerned with authority, but with the old problem or rather mood of
wonder upon the fate of the soul.

As I so mused to the jolting of the bus I began unconsciously to
compare the keenness of early living with the satiety or weariness
of later years; and so from one thing to another, I know not how, I
thought of horses first, and then of summer rivers, and then of a
harbour, and then of the open sea, and then of the sea at night, till
this vague train took on the form of an exact picture, and my mind
lived in an unforgotten day.

       *       *       *       *       *

In my little boat, with my companion asleep in the bows, I steered at
the end of darkness eastward over a warm and easy sea.

It was August: the roll was lazy, and the stars were few and distant
all around, because the sky, though clear, was softened by the pleasant
air of summer at its close; moreover, an arch of the sky before me was
paling and the sea-breeze smelt of dawn.

My little boat went easy, as the sea was easy. There was just enough
of a following wind dead west to keep her steady and to keep the
boom square in its place right out a-lee, nor did she shake or swing
(as boats so often will before a following wind), but went on with a
purpose gently, like a young woman just grown used to her husband and
her home. So she sailed, and aft we left a little, bubbling wake, which
in the darkness had glimmered with evanescent and magic fires, but now,
as the morning broadened, could be seen to be white foam. The stars
paled for an hour and then soon vanished; although the sun had not yet
risen, it was day.

The line of the horizon before me was fresh and sharp, clear tops
of swell showed hard against the faint blue of the lowest sky, and
for some time we were thus alone together in the united and living
immensity of the sea: my sleeping companion, my boat, and I. Then it
was that I perceived a little northward and to the left of the rising
glow a fixed appearance very far away beyond the edge of the world; it
was grey and watery like a smoke, yet fixed in outline and unchanging;
it did not waver but stood, and so standing confirmed its presence. It
was land; and this dim but certain vision which now fixed my gaze was
one of the mighty headlands of holy Ireland.

The noble hill lifted its mass upon the extreme limits of sight, almost
dissolved by distance and yet clear; its summit was high and plain, and
in the moment it was perceived the sea became a new thing. It was no
longer void or absorbing, but became familiar water neighbourly to men;
and was now that ocean, whose duty and meaning it is to stream around
and guard the shores on which are founded cities and armies, families
and enduring homes. The little boat sailed on, now in the mood for
companions and for friends.

My companion stirred and woke; he raised himself upon his arm, and,
looking forward to the left and right, at last said, “Land!” I told him
the name of the headland. But I did not know that there lay beyond it
a long and narrow bay, nor how, at the foot of this land-locked water,
a group of small white houses stood, and behind it a very venerable
tower.

It was not long before the sun came up out of a sea more clear and into
a sky more vivid than you will see within the soundings of the Channel.
It poured upon all the hills an enlivening new light quite different
from the dawn, and this was especially noticeable upon the swell and
the little ridges of it, which danced and shone so that one thought of
music.

Meanwhile the land grew longer before us and this one headland merged
into the general line, and inland heights could be seen; a little later
again it first became possible to distinguish the divisions of the
fields and the separate colours of rocks and of grassland and of trees.
A little while later again the white thread showed all along that coast
where the water broke at the meeting of the rocks and the sea; the tide
was at the flood.

We had, perhaps, three miles between us and the land (where every
detail now stood out quite sharp and clear) when the wind freshened
suddenly and, after the boat had heeled as suddenly and run for a
moment with the scuppers under, she recovered and bounded forward. It
was like obedience to a call, or like the look that comes suddenly into
men’s eyes when they hear unexpectedly a familiar name. She lifted at
it and she took the sea, for the sea began to rise.

Then there began that dance of vigour which is almost a combat, when
men sail with skill and under some stress of attention and of danger.
I would not take in an inch because of the pleasure of it, but she
was over-canvased all the same, and I put her ever so little round for
fear of a gybe, but the pleasure of it was greater than the fear, and
the cordage sang, and it gave me delight to glance over my shoulder at
that following rush which chases a small boat always when she presses
before a breeze and might poop her if her rider did not know his game.
That which had been a long, long sail through the night with an almost
silent wake and the bursting of but few bubbles, and next a steady
approach before the strong and easy wind, had now become something
inspired and exultant, a course which resembled a charge; and the more
the sea rose the larger everything became--the boat’s career, the land
upon which she was determined, and our own minds, while all about us as
we urged and raced for shore were the loud noises of the sea.

We ran straight for a point where could be seen the gate to the inland
bay; we rounded it, and our entry completed all, for when once we had
rounded the point all fell together; the wind, the heaving of the
water, the sounds and the straining of the sheets. In a moment, and
less than a moment, we had cut out from us the vision of the sea, a
barrier of cliff and hill stood between us and the large horizon. The
very lonely slopes of these western mountains rose solemn and enormous
all around, and the bay on which we floated, with only just that way
which remained after our sharp turning, was quite lucid and clear,
like the seas by southern beaches where one can look down and see a
world underneath our own. The boom swung inboard, the canvas hung
in folds, and my companion forward cut loose the little anchor from
its tie, the chain went rattling down, and so silent was that sacred
place that one could hear an echo from the cliffs close by returning
the clanking of the links; the chain ran out and slowly tautened as
she fell back and rode to it. Then we let go the halyards, and when
the slight creaking of the blocks had ceased there was no more noise.
Everything was still.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was the vision that returned to me.

I was in the midst of it, I was almost present, I had forgotten the
streets of the treacherous and evil town, when suddenly, I know not
what, a cry, or some sharp movement near me, brought me back from such
a place and day, from such an experience, such a parallel and such a
security.

With that return to the common business of living the thought on which
my mind had begun its travel also returned, but in spite of the mood I
had so recently enjoyed my doubts were not resolved.




The Little Old Man


It was in the year 1888 (“O noctes coenasque deum!”--a tag) that, upon
one of the southern hills of England, I came quite unexpectedly across
a little old man who sat upon a bench that was there and looked out to
sea.

Now you will ask me why a bench was there, since benches are not
commonly found upon the high slopes of our southern hills, of which the
poet has well said, the writer has well written, and the singer has
well sung:--

  The Southern Hills and the South Sea
  They blow such gladness into me
  That when I get to Burton Sands
  And smell the smell of the home lands,
  My heart is all renewed, and fills
  With the Southern Sea and the South Hills.

True, benches are not common there. I know of but one, all the way from
the meeting place of England, which is upon Salisbury Plain, to that
detestable suburb of Eastbourne by Beachy Head. Nay, even that one of
which I speak has disappeared. For an honest man being weary of labour
and yet desiring firewood one day took it away, and the stumps only now
remain at the edge of a wood, a little to the south of No Man’s Land.

Well, at any rate, upon this bench there sat in the year 1888 a little
old man, and he was looking out to sea; for from this place the English
Channel spreads out in a vast band 600 ft. below one, and the shore
perhaps five miles away; it looks broader than any sea in the world,
broader than the Mediterranean from the hills of Alba Longa, and
broader than the Irish Sea from the summit of the Welsh Mountains:
though why this is so I cannot tell. The little old man treated my
coming as though it was an expected thing, and before I had spoken to
him long assured me that this view gave him complete content.

“I could sit here,” he said, “and look at the Channel and consider the
nature of this land for ever and for ever.” Now though words like this
meant nothing in so early a year as the year 1888, yet I was willing
to pursue them because there was, in the eyes of the little old man, a
look of such wisdom, kindness, and cunning as seemed to me a marriage
between those things native to the earth and those things which are
divine. I mean, that he seemed to me to have all that the good animals
have, which wander about in the brushwood and are happy all their
lives, and also all that we have, of whom it has been well said that
of every thing which runs or creeps upon earth, man is the fullest
of sorrow. For this little old man seemed to have (at least such was
my fantastic thought in that early year) a complete acquiescence in
the soil and the air that had bred him, and yet something common to
mankind and a full foreknowledge of death.

His face was of the sort which you will only see in England, being
quizzical and vivacious, a little pinched together, and the hair on
his head was a close mass of grey curls. His eyes were as bright as
are harbour lights when they are first lit towards the closing of our
winter evenings: they shone upon the daylight. His mouth was firm, but
even in repose it permanently, though very slightly, smiled.

I asked him why he took such pleasure in the view. He said it was
because everything he saw was a part of his own country, and that just
as some holy men said that to be united with God, our Author, was the
end and summit of man’s effort, so to him who was not very holy, to
mix, and have communion, with his own sky and earth was the one banquet
that he knew: he also told me (which cheered me greatly) that alone of
all the appetites this large affection for one’s own land does not grow
less with age, but rather increases and occupies the soul. He then made
me a discourse as old men will, which ran somewhat thus:--

“Each thing differs from all others, and the more you know, the more
you desire or worship one thing, the more does that stand separate: and
this is a mystery, for in spite of so much individuality all things are
one.... How greatly out of all the world stands out this object of my
adoration and of my content! you will not find the like of it in all
the world! It is England, and in the love of it I forget all enmities
and all despairs.”

He then bade me look at a number of little things around, and see how
particular they were: the way in which the homes of Englishmen hid
themselves, and how, although a great town lay somewhat to our right
not half a march away, there was all about us silence, self-possession,
and repose. He bade me also note the wind-blown thorns, and the
yew-trees, bent over from centuries of the south-west wind, and the
short, sweet grass of the Downs, unfilled and unenclosed, and the long
waves of woods which rich men had stolen and owned, and which yet in a
way were property for us all.

“There is more than one,” said I in anger, “who so little understands
his land that he will fence the woods about and prevent the people from
coming and going: making a show of them, like some dirty town-bred
fellow who thinks that the Downs and the woods are his villa-garden,
bought with gold.”

The little old man wagged his crooked forefinger in front of his face
and looked exceedingly knowing with his bright eyes, and said: “Time
will tame all that! Not they can digest the county, but the county
them. Their palings shall be burnt upon cottage hearths, and their sons
shall go back to be lackeys as their fathers were. But this landscape
shall always remain.”

Then he bade me note the tides and the many harbours; and how there was
an inner and an outer tide, and the great change between neaps and
springs, and how there were no great rivers, but every harbour stood
right upon the sea, and how for the knowledge of each of these harbours
even the life of a man was too short. There was no other country, he
said, which was thus held and embraced by the mastery of the Atlantic
tide. For the patient Dutch have their towns inland upon broad rivers
and ships sail up to quays between houses or between green fields;
and the Spaniards and the French (he said) are, for half their nature
and tradition, taught by a tideless sea, but we all around have the
tide everywhere, and with the tide there comes to character salt and
variety, adventure, peril, and change.

“But this,” I said, “is truer of the Irish.”

He answered: “Yes, but I am talking of my own soil.”

Then when he had been silent for a little while he began talking of the
roads, which fitted into the folds of the hills, and of the low long
window panes of men’s homes, of the deep thatch which covered them, and
of that savour of fullness and inheritance which lay fruitfully over
all the land. It gave him the pleasure to talk of these things which it
gives men who know particular wines to talk of those wines, or men who
have enjoyed some great risk together to talk together of their dangers
overcome.

It gave him the same pleasure to talk of England and of his corner of
England that it gives some venerable people sometimes to talk of those
whom they have loved in youth, or that it gives the true poets to
mouth the lines of their immortal peers. It was a satisfaction to hear
him say the things he said, because one knew that as he said them his
soul was filled.

He spoke also of horses and of the birds native to our Downs, but not
of pheasants, which he hated and would not speak to me about at all.
He spoke of dogs, and told me how the dogs of one countryside were the
fruits of it, just as its climate and its contours were; notably the
spaniel, which was designed or bred by the mighty power of Amberley
Wildbrook, which breeds all watery things. He showed me how the plover
went with the waste flats of Arun and of Adur and of Ouse, and he
showed me why the sheep were white and why they bunched together in a
herd. “Because,” he said, “the chalk pits and the clouds behind the
Down are wide patches of white; so must the sheep be also.” For a
little he would have told me that the very names of places, nay, the
religion itself, were grown right out of the sacred earth which was our
Mother.

       *       *       *       *       *

These truths and many more I should have learned from him, these
extravagences and some few others I should have whimsically heard, had
I not (since I was young) attempted argument and said to him: “But all
these things change, and what we love so much is, after all, only what
we have known in our short time, and it is our souls within that lend
divinity to any place, for, save within the soul, all is subject to
time.”

He shook his head determinedly and like one who knows. He did assure
me that in a subtle mastering manner the land that bore us made us
ourselves, and was the major and the dominant power which moulded, as
with firm hands, the clay of our being and which designed and gave us,
and continued in us, all the form in which we are.

“You cannot tell this,” I said, “and neither can I; it is all guesswork
to the brevity of man.”

“You are wrong,” he answered quietly. “I have watched these things for
quite 3000 years.” And before I had time to gasp at that word he had
disappeared.




The Long March


The French Service, by some superstition of theirs which is probably
connected with clear thinking and with decision, have perpetually in
mind two things where Infantry is (or are) concerned; these two things
are, marching power and carrying weight.

It is their thesis, or rather it is their general opinion, that of
all things in which civilised armies may differ the power of trained
endurance is the most variable, and that the elements in which this
endurance is most usefully manifested are the elements of bearing a
weight for long and of marching for long and far between a sleep and a
sleep.

There is no Service in the world but would agree that rapidity of
movement (other things being equal) is to the advantage of an army.
Not even the Blue Water School (for which school armies are distant
and vague things) would deny that. It is even true that most men
(though by no means all) who have to do with thinking out military
problems would admit that, other things again being equal, the power
of carrying weight was an advantage to an army. But the French Service
differs from its rivals in this, that it regards these two factors in
a sort of fundamental way, testing the whole Army by them and keeping
them perpetually present before the whole of that Army, so that the
stupidest driver in front of the guns is worrying in a muddled way
as to whether the Line have not too much to do, and the cleverest
young captain on the staff is wondering whether the strain put upon
a particular regiment has not been too great that day. The exercise
is continual, and is made as much a part of the men’s mode of thought
as cricket is made a part of the mode of thought of a boy at school,
or as the daily paper is made a part of the mode of thought of a man
who comes in daily from the suburbs to gamble in the City of London.
And the French Service shows its permeation in the matter of these
two ideas by this very characteristic test, that not only are the
supporters of either element in the power of Infantry numerous and
enthusiastic, but also that those (and I believe for a moment Negrier)
who think these theories have been overdone recognise at the back of
their minds the general importance of them; while the great neutral
mass that sometimes discuss, but hardly ever think originally, take
them as it were for granted in all their discussions.

It would be possible to continue for some time the exposition of
this most interesting thing; it would be possible to show how this
point of view was connected with the conservatism of the French mind.
It would be possible and fascinating perhaps to show the relation
of such theories with the mentality which is convinced upon the
retention of private property and upon the subdivision of it, upon the
all-importance of agriculture to a State, upon the possession at no
matter what sacrifice of a vast amount of vaulted, tangible, material
gold. But my business in these lines is not to argue whether the French
are right or wrong in this military aspect of their philosophy, nor to
show them wise or unwise in regarding even the railways of a modern
State as being only supplementary to marching power, and even the vast
and mobile modern methods of road carriage as being only supplementary
to the knapsack, which can go across ploughed fields or climb a tree.
My business is not to discuss the philosophy of the thing, though I am
grievously tempted to do so, but to speak of one particular thing I saw.

I saw the beginning, the middle, and the end of it. Had I myself been
in the Line such things might have been so familiar to me that they
would not in the long run have stood out in my imagination, and I might
not have been as fascinated as I now am by the recollections of that
strange experience.

The Infantry that was the support of our pieces (for we were
Divisionary Artillery) was quartered near to us in a little village
of what is called “the Champagne Pouilleuse,” that is, “the lousy,”
or “the dusty” Champagne, to distinguish it from the chalky range of
the mountain of Rheims, those hot slopes whereon is grown the grape
producing the most northern and the most exhilarating of wines.

In this little village were we side by side, and very far off along the
horizon we had seen the night before, to the north, guns and linesmen
together, the goal of our journey, which was that roll in the ground
upon the summit of which the very tall spire of a famous shrine led the
eye on toward the larger mass of the Cathedral. The Road was straight
both upon the map and in our weary minds. It crossed the fields on
which had been decided the fate of Christendom in the defeat of Attila
and again in the cannonade of Valmy. Little we cared for these things.
What we cared about, or rather what the fellows on foot cared about,
was a distance of nearly thirty miles with fifty pound and more upon
one’s back.

I lay in the straw of the stable near my horses, whose names were Pacte
and Basilique--Basilique was the elder one and was ridden, and Pacte
was the led horse--when I heard the sound of a bugle. I was already
awake, I cannot tell why, I had no duties; I strolled out from the
stable into the square and watched the Line assembling. They were of
all sorts and sizes in the dark morning, for the French are profoundly
indifferent to making a squad look neat. Some shuffled, others ran,
others affected to saunter to where the sergeant, with the roll in his
hand and a lantern held above it, stood ready to call out the names. As
they gathered to fall in I heard their comments, which were familiar
enough, for they did not differ from the comments we also made when
any effort was required of us. They cursed all order and discipline.
Some boasted that the thing was not tolerable, and that they were the
men to make the system impossible. Others cunningly hinted that they
would deceive the doctor and fall out, and in general it would have
been conceded by any man listening to them that this march could never
be accomplished.

With the usual oaths, dreadful to an intellectual ear, but to us a sort
of atmosphere, they fell in, and all over the village square were other
companies falling in and other sergeants holding other rolls. Then
the names were called, with no trappings, in a rather low voice, and
rapidly.

One man was missing, and the sergeant looked round, saw me leaning
against my stable door, and told me to go for the guard; but when I had
got four men from the guard the missing man had come up. He was a very
little man, in a hurry; he was not punished, he was warned. Hardly had
I returned and hardly had the four men of the guard (who that day of
the march were Cavalry) gone back straggling when the various companies
shuffled into place, formed fours, and began the marching column. No
drums rolled, no bugle inspirited them. The little village was now more
clearly seen under a growing light, and there were bands of colour
above the distant ridge of the Argonne. It was not quite four in the
morning, and there was a mist from the meadows beside the road.

They went out silently. There was a sort of step kept, but it was very
loose. They sang no songs, they were a most unfortunate crowd.

       *       *       *       *       *

We had been for two hours upon our horses, we who had started long
after sunrise after our horses had been groomed and fed and watered,
and treated like Christian men--for it was a saying of ours that the
Republic was kinder to a horse than to a man, because a horse cost
money. We had gone, I said, two hours also along the road, trotting and
walking alternately, with the interminable clatter-clank-clank of the
limber and the pieces behind us, and with the occasional oath of the
sergeant or the corporal when a trace went loose or when a bit of bad
riding on the part of some leader checked the column of guns; we had so
pounded along into the heat of the day; the sun was beginning to offend
us--we were more in a sweat than our horses--when we heard a long way
off upon the road before us the faint noise of a song, and soon we saw
from one of those recurring summits of the arrow-like French road, the
jolly fellows of the Line. They were not more than a thousand yards
before us; they made a little dust as they went, and as they went
their rifles swinging on the shoulder gave them a false appearance
of unity--for unity they were not caring at all. Somewhat before we
reached them we saw their cohesion break, they became a doubled mob
upon either side of the road, and we knew that they were making the
regulation halt of five minutes, which is ordered at the end of every
hour; but probably their commanding officer had somewhat advanced or
retarded this in order to make a coincidence with the going by of the
guns.

We saw them as we approached lying in all attitudes upon either side
of the road, some few munching bread from the haversack, and some
few drinking from their gourds. As we came up they were compelled to
rise to salute another arm upon its passage, and their faces, all
their double hedge of faces, were full of insolence and of merriment,
for they had recently sung and eaten, and the march had done them
good--they had covered about eighteen miles.

So we went by, and when we had left them some few hundred yards we
again heard faintly behind us the beginning of a new song, the tune of
which was known among us as “The Washerwoman.” It is a good marching
song. But shortly after this we heard no more, for first the noise of
the horse hoofs extinguished the singing, and later distance swallowed
it up altogether.

       *       *       *       *       *

We had come into quarters early in the afternoon, we had groomed our
horses and fed them, and watered them at the chalkiest stream, we had
brought them back to their stables, and the stable guard was set; those
who were not on duty went off about the village, and several, of
whom I was one, gathered in the house of a man whose relative in the
regiment had led us thither.

He received us well, for he was a farmer in a large way; he gave us
wine, bread, and eggs, and a little bacon. He said he hoped that no
more troops would come into the little village that day. We told him
that the Line would come, so far as we knew, but he answered that he
had heard from his brother, who was mayor of the adjoining commune,
that the Line were to be quartered in that neighbouring parish, that
they would march through the village in which we were, and sleep in the
houses about a mile ahead of us upon the road to Rheims.

While he was speaking thus we heard again, but much louder than before
(for it came upon us round the corner of the village street), the noise
of a marching song. They were singing at the top of their voices--they
were in a sort of fury of singing.

They passed along making more dust than ever before, and anyone who
had not known them would have said they were out of hand. Several were
limping as they went, one or two, recognising the gunners and the
drivers, waved their hands. The rest still sang. No one had fallen out.
Their arms they carried anyhow, and more than one man was carrying
two rifles (probably for money), and more than one man was carrying
none, and some had their rifles slung across their backs, and some
tucked under their arms. So they went forward, and again we heard
their singing dwindle, but this time it continued much longer than
before, and I think we heard it up to the halt, when their task was
accomplished and the march was done.

They are an incredible people!




On Saturnalia


One of the bothers of writing is that words carry about upon their
backs nowadays a great pack of past meanings and derivations, and
that--particularly to-day--no word is standing still as it were and
meaning something once and for all which a plain man can say without
being laughed at for ignorance or for affectation. For instance,
Saturnalia. To one man it means a certain bundle of ritual many
centuries dead, common to a particular district of Italy and practised
in midwinter. To another man it means a lot of poor people having an
exaggerated beanfeast and thereby annoying the rich people. But it does
not mean either of these things to the plain man. It means to the plain
man occasion and specific occasion for turning things upside down and
getting breathing space for a while from the crushing order of this
world. That is what “Saturnalia” means to the ordinary user of the
word, and note, he has no other word by which to express the idea--so
thoroughly has the thing died out since modern English was formed.
I suppose the nearest word for it in English--when such feasts were
still known in England--was the vague word “Misrule.” Anyhow, it is
Saturnalia now, and Saturnalia it shall be here.

If a man were to come back from the past and watch the modern world
into which he had tumbled he would note any number of things that
would, I am certain, intoxicate him with wonder and delight. Just
as one is intoxicated with wonder and delight on landing in youth
upon the quays of a foreign port for the first time--that is, if the
foreign port is well governed, for there is no wonder or delight either
in barbarism or in decay. Such a man would be perpetually running
to telephones, those curious toys, and marvelling at cinematographs
and rejoicing in express trains and clear print and big guns and
phonographs; he couldn’t help it. Motor-cars moving by themselves would
fill him with magic--but he would bitterly mislike certain absences,
and he would complain that half a dozen things were very wrong with the
world. So many men free and yet owning nothing--so much the greater
part of men free and yet owning nothing--would seem to him a monstrous
and perilous thing. The exact and mechanical accuracy that clocks and
railways have made would offend him; he would see it as a disease
wearing out men’s nerves. The modern arguments all in a circle round
and round the old insoluble problems would bore him dreadfully, and
still more perhaps the fresh discoveries every week of principles and
plain truths as old as the Mediterranean--but nothing surely would
astonish him or grieve him or frighten him more than the absence of
topsy-turvydom without some recurrent breath of which the soul of man
perishes.

And why? There is a question you may ask some time before it will be
answered. One thing is sure, though the sureness of it reposes on some
base we cannot see: in the proportion that men are secure of their
philosophy and social scheme, in that proportion they must in some
fixed manner turn it upside down from time to time for their delight
and show it on a stage or enact it in a religious ritual with all
its rules reversed and the whole thing wrong way about. They have
always done this in healthy States, and if ever our State gets healthy
they will begin to do it again. It is a human craving, an intense
craving--but why, it would be a business to say.

It must not be imagined that the craving or the expression of it has
passed from us to-day. They have no more passed from us than the desire
for property or for the tilling of the land. But their corporate
character is broken up, they appear sporadically in individuals only,
and are therefore often evil. They appear in the irony which is an
increasing feature of our letters, in mad freaks and outbreaks for
which men strained beyond bearing are punished, and they appear in
fantastic prophecies of a changed world.

One sees that craving for a burst of misrule in quite unexpected
enthusiasms for things remote from our lives, in great senseless
mobs furious about minor things--the minor actions of a campaign or
the minor details of law-making--in the public clamour about the
misfortunes of some foreign prisoner or the politics of some alien
State. One sees it in the men who suddenly start rules of life based on
some careful negation of what all around them do, in the leaders and
teachers who first note exactly what nearly all their fellow-beings
eat or drink or wear, and then most loudly proclaim salvation to
lie in _not_ eating, drinking, or wearing these obviously necessary
things. The neighbours stare! And no wonder--for private Saturnalia are
dangerously near to vice in the sane, in the weak to insanity.

But true Saturnalia, public Saturnalia, were healthy because they were
corporate. Custom and religion had dug a sort of channel into which
all that emotion could commonly run, and in midwinter, when it had
long been very dark, the mischiefs, the comic spirits came out of the
woods and for some days possessed the souls of men, and these, by that
possession, were purged and freed. So it was for hundreds upon hundreds
of years--until quite the modern time. Why have we lost it, and how
long must we wait for it to return?

When the relations of slave and master seemed as obvious and necessary
as seem to us (let us say) the reading of a daily paper or the taking
of a train, yet the obvious and necessary routine was broken in
midwinter, the slave was the master for a moment and the master a slave.

When the ritual of the Church was as much a commonplace as the ritual
of social life is to us to-day, there was a season (it was this season
between Christmas and the Epiphany) when the dead weight of order was
lifted and a boy was dressed as a bishop or a donkey was put to chaunt
the office, and the people sang:--

  Plebs autem respondet:
            Hé sire Ane, ho! Chantez!
            Vous aurez du foin assez
            Et de l’avoine à manger!

When the awful authority of civil and hereditary powers was
unquestioned they yet set up in English halls Lords of Misrule who
governed that season. The Inns of Court, I believe, delighted in them,
and certainly till quite late in the seventeenth century the peasantry
of the villages.

It has gone. It will return. During its absence (and may that absence
not be much prolonged) perhaps one can see its nature the more
clearly because one sees it from the outside and as a distant though
a desired thing. Perhaps we, living in a very unreasonable age, when
realities are forgotten and imaginaries preferred, when we solemnly
reiterate impossibilities, affirm our faith in scientific guesswork
and our doubts upon the plain rules of arithmetic, can understand
why our much more reasonable fathers thirsted for and obtained these
feasts of unreason. It seems to have been a little like the natural
craving for temporary oblivion (sleep--a chaos) once in every day;
a sort of bath in that muddle or nothingness out of which the world
was made. Equality, which lies at the base of society, was brought
to surface by a paradox and shown at large. Intensity of conviction
and of organisation took refuge in the relief of a momentary--and not
meant--denial of that conviction and organisation, and the whole of
society collectively expanded its soul by one collective foolery at
high pressure, as does the healthy individual by one good farce or peal
of laughter when occasion serves.

How the Saturnalia will return (as return they will) no one can say.
The seeds of reaction from the tangle of the modern world lie all
around in the customs and the demands of the populace: but seeds
are never known or perceived till they have sprouted. Sometimes one
catches the echo of the return in a chance jest; especially if it be a
cabman’s. Sometimes in a solemn hoax largely indulged in by many poor
men against one richer than themselves. Sometimes in the voluntary
humour and cynical goodness of heart of a powerful or wealthy man
exposing the illusions of his kind.

Anyhow, one way or another, sooner or later, the Saturnalia will
return; may it be sooner rather than later, and at the latest not later
than 1938, when so many of us will be so very old.

For my part I shall look for the first signs in the provinces of rich
and riotous blood as on the Border (and especially just north of it)
or in Flanders, or, better still, in Burgundy from Nuits and Beaune
northward and eastward. I have especially great hopes of the town of
Dijon.




A Little Conversation in Herefordshire


There is a country house (as the English phrase goes) in the County
of Hereford, at a little distance from the River Wye; the people who
live in this house are very rich. They are not rich precariously,
nor with doubts here and there, nor for the time, but in a solid
manner; that is, they believe their riches to be eternal. Their income
springs from very many places, of which they have not an idea; it is
spent in a straightforward manner, which they fully comprehend. It is
spent in relieving the incompetence--the economic incompetence--of
all those about them; in causing wine to come into England from Ay,
Vosne, Barsac, and (though they do not know it) from the rougher soil
of Algiers. It also causes (does the way in which they exercise what
only pedants call their Potential Demand) tea to be grown in Ceylon
for their servants and in China for themselves, horses to be bred in
Ireland, and wheat to be sown and most laboriously garnered in Western
Canada, Ohio, India, South Russia, the Argentine, and other places.
Also, were you to seek out every economic cause and effect, you would
find missionaries living where no man can live, save by artifice, and
living upon artificial supply in a strange climate by the strength of
this Potential Demand rooted in the meadows of the Welsh March.

Then, also, if you were to follow the places whence their wealth is
derived, it would interest you very much. You would see one man earning
so much in the docks and handing on a Saturday evening so much of his
wages into their fund. You would see another clipping off cloth in
Manchester and offering it to them, and another plucking cotton in
Egypt and exchanging it, at their order, against something which they,
not he, needed. Altogether you would see the whole world paying tithe,
and a stream flowing into Hereford as into a reservoir, and a stream
flowing out again by many channels.

These good people were at dinner; upon the 5th of October, to be
accurate. Parliament had not yet met, but football had begun, and there
was shooting, also a little riding upon horses, though this is not
to-day a popular amusement, and few will practise it. As for the women,
one wrote and the other read--which was a fair division of labour; but
the woman who wrote was not read by the woman who read, for the woman
who wrote (and she was the daughter) preferred to write upon problems.
But her mother, who did the reading, preferred what is called fiction,
and Mr. Meredith was a favourite author of hers; but, indeed, she would
read all fiction so only that it was in her native tongue.

Now the men of the family were very different from this, and the things
they liked were hunting of a particular kind (which I shall not here
describe), shooting of a similar kind, their country, and politics,
which last interest it would have been abominable to deny them, for the
two men, both father and son, were actively engaged in the making of
laws, each in a different place; the laws they made (it is true in the
company of, and with the advice of, others) are to be found in what is
called the Statute Book, which neither you nor I have ever seen.

All these four, the father, the son, the mother, and the daughter, in
different ways intelligent, but all four very kind and good, were at
dinner upon this day of which I speak, the 5th of October, but they
were not alone. They had to meet them several people who were staying
in the house. The one was a satirist who had been born in Lithuania.
He was poor and proud and had learnt the English tongue, and he wrote
books upon the pride of race and upon battling with the sea. He was an
envious sort of man, but as he never had nor ever would have any home
or lineage, England was much the same to him as any other place. He
hated all our nations with an equal hatred.

Another guest was a little man called Copp. He was a lord; his title
was not Copp. Only his name was Copp, and even this name he hid, for
old father Copp, who had married a Miss Billings in the eighteenth
century, had had a son John Billings, since the Billings were richer
than the Copps. And John Billings had married Mary Steyning, who was
the Squire’s daughter, and they had had a son John Steyning, since
John was by this time the hereditary name. Now John Steyning was in the
Parliament that worked for the Regent, and a short one it was, and he
became plain Lord Steyning, and then he and his son and his grandson
married in all sorts of ways, and the title now was Bramber, but the
family name was Steyning, and the real name was Copp. So much for
Copp. He was as lively as a grig, he had travelled everywhere, and he
knew about ten languages. He was peculiarly brave, and as a boy he had
stoutly refused to go to the University.

Then also there was the Doctor, who was absurdly nervous and could ill
afford to dine out, and there was a young man who was in Parliament
with the son of the family; this young man had been to Oxford with
him also, not at Cambridge; he was a lawyer, and he was making three
thousand pounds a year, but he said he was making six when he talked to
his wife and mother, and most serious men believed that he was making
ten. The women of these were also present with them, saving always that
Copp, who was called Steyning, and whose title was Bramber, was not
married.

These then, sitting round the table, came to talk of something after
all not remote from the interest of their lives. They talked of
Socialists, and it all began by Copp (who called himself Steyning,
while his title was Bramber) saying that his uncle Gwilliam had just
missed being a Socialist because he was too stupid.

The Head of the Family, who had most imperfectly caught the
pronouncement of Copp as to his relative, said, “Yes, Bramber; got to
be pretty stupid to be that!” By which the Head of the House meant that
one had to be pretty stupid to be a Socialist, whereas what Copp had
said was that his uncle had been too stupid to be a Socialist. But it
was all one.

The Son of the House said that there were lots of Socialists going
about, and the young lawyer friend said there were a lot of people who
said they were Socialists but who were not Socialists.

The Daughter of the House said that it was very interesting the way in
which Socialism went up and down. She said: “Look at the Fabians!” The
Mother of the House looked all round, smiling genially, for she thought
that her daughter was speaking of the name of a book.

The Doctor said: “It’s all a pose, those sort of people.” But which
sort he did not say, so the Daughter of the House said sharply: “Which
sort of people?” For she loved to cross-examine struggling professional
men, and the Doctor got quite red, and said; “Oh, all that sort of
people!”

The young lawyer, who was quick to see a difficulty, helped him out by
saying, “He means people like Bensington!”

The Doctor, who had never heard of Bensington, nodded eagerly, and
the Head of the House, frowning a healthy frown, said, “What, not John
Bensington, old William Bensington’s son?”

“Yes,” said the young lawyer. “That’s the kind of man he means,” and
the Doctor nodded again.

His enemy was dropping farther and farther behind him with every
stride, but she made a brilliant rally. “Do you mean John Bensington?”
she said. The Doctor, in some alarm, and with his mouth full, nodded
vigorously for the third time. The Head of the House, still frowning,
broke into all this with a solid roar: “I don’t believe a word of
it.” He sat leaning back again, not relaxing his frown and trying to
connect the son of his old friend with a gang of treasonable robbers.
He remembered Jock’s marriage--for it was a bad one--and a silly book
of verses he had written, and how keen he had been against his father’s
selling the bit of land along the coast, because it was bound to go up.
He could fit Jock in with many unpleasant things, but he couldn’t fit
him in with the very definite picture that rose in his mind whenever he
heard the word “Socialist.” There was something adventurous and violent
and lean about the word--something like a wolf. There was nothing of
all that in Jock. So much thought matured at last into living words,
and the Head of the House said, “Why, he’s on the County Council.”

The Daughter of the House turned to the lawyer and said, “How would
you define a Socialist, Mr. Layton?”

Mr. Layton defined a Socialist, and his silent wife, who was sitting
opposite, looked at him happily on account of the power of his mind.
The Lithuanian, who had said nothing all this while, but had been
glancing with eyes as bright as a bird’s, now at one speaker, now
at another, nerved himself to intervene. Then there passed over his
little soul the vivid pictures of things he had seen and known: the
dens in Riga, the pain, the flight upon a Danish ship, the assumption
first of German, then of English nationality, the easy gullibility of
the large-hearted wealthy people of this land. He remembered his own
confidence, his own unwavering talent, and his contempt of, and hatred
for, other men. He could have trusted himself to speak, for he was in
full command of his little soul, and there was not a trace of anything
in his accent definitely foreign. But the virtue and the folly of these
happy luxurious people about him pleased him too much and pleased him
wickedly.

He went on tasting them in silence, until the Daughter of the House,
who felt awe for him alone of all those present--much more awe than she
did for her strong and good father--said to him, almost with reverence,
that he should take to writing now of the meadows of England, since he
had so wonderfully described her battles at sea. And the Lithuanian
was ready to turn the talk upon letters, his bright eyes darting all
the while. The old man, the Head of the House, sighed and muttered:
“Jock was no Socialist.” That was the one thing that he retained;
... and meanwhile wealth continued to pour in from all corners of
the world into his house, and to pour out again over the four seas,
doing his will, and no one in the world, not even the chief victims
of that wealth, hated it as the little Lithuanian did, and no one in
the world--not even of them who had seen most of that wealth--hungered
bestially for it as did he.




On the Rights of Property


There is in the dark heart of Soho, not far from a large stable
where Zebras, Elephants, and trained Ponies await their turn for the
footlights and the inebriation of public applause, a little tavern,
divided, as are even the meanest of our taverns, into numerous
compartments, each corresponding to some grade in the hierarchy of our
ancient and orderly society.

For many years the highest of these had been called “the Private
Bar,” and was distinguished from its next fellow by this, that the
cushions upon its little bench were covered with sodden velvet, not
with oilcloth. Here, also, the drink provided by the politician who
owned this and many other public-houses was served in glasses of
uncertain size and not by imperial measure. This, I say, had been the
chief or summit of the place for many years; from the year of the
great Exhibition, in fact until that great change in London life which
took place towards the end of the eighties and brought us, among other
things, a new art and a new conception of world-wide power. In those
years, as the mind of London changed so did this little public-house
(which was called “the Lord Benthorpe”), and it added yet another step
to its hierarchy of pens. This new place was called “the Saloon Bar.”
It was larger and better padded, and there was a tiny table in it.
Then the years went on and wars were fought and the modern grip of man
over natural forces marvellously extended, and the wealth of a world’s
Metropolis greatly swelled, and “The Lord Benthorpe” found room for yet
another and final reserve wherein it might receive the very highest of
its clients. This was built upon what had been the backyard, it had
several tables, and it was called “the Lounge.”

So far so good. Here late one evening when the music-halls had just
discharged their thousands, and when the Elephants, the Zebras, and
the Ponies near by were retiring to rest, sat two men, both authors;
the one was an author who had written for now many years upon social
subjects, and notably upon the statistics of our industrial conditions.
He had come nearer than any other to the determination of the Incidence
of Economic Rent upon Retail Exchange and had been the first to show
(in an essay, now famous) that the Ricardian Theory of Surplus did not
apply in the anarchic competition of Retail Dealing, at least in our
main thoroughfares.

His companion wielded the pen in another manner. It was his to analyse
into its last threads of substance the human mind. Rare books proceeded
from him at irregular and lengthy intervals packed with a close
observation of the ultimate motives of men and an exact portrayal
of their labyrinth of deed; nor could he achieve his ideal in this
province of letters save by the use of words so unusual and, above all,
arranged in an order so peculiar to himself, as to bring upon his few
readers often perplexity and always awe.

Neither of these two men was wealthy. Such incomes as they gained had
not even that quality of regular flow which, more than mere volume,
impresses the years with security. Each was driven to continual
expedients, and each had lost such careful habits as only a regular
supply can perpetuate. The consequence of this impediment was
apparent in the clothing of both men and in the grooming of each;
for the Economist, who was the elder, wore a frock-coat unsuited to
the occasion, marked in many places with lighter patches against its
original black, and he had upon his head a top hat of no great age and
yet too familiar and rough, and dusty at the brim. The Psychologist,
upon the other hand, sprawled in a suit of wool, grey and in places
green, which was most slipshod and looked as though at times he slept
in it, which indeed at times he did. Unlike his elder companion he wore
no stiff collar round his throat, a negligence which saved him from
the reproach of frayed linen worn through too many days; his shirt
was a grey woollen shirt with a grey woollen collar of such a sort as
scientific men assure us invigorates the natural functions and prolongs
the life of man.

These two fell at once to a discussion upon that matter which absorbs
the best of modern minds. I mean the organisation of Production in
the modern world. It was their favourite theme. Their drink was Port,
which, carelessly enough, they continued to order in small glasses
instead of beginning boldly with the bottle. The Port was bad, or
rather it was not Port, yet had they bought one bottle of it they would
have saved the earnings of many days.

It was their favourite theme.... Each was possessed of an intellectual
scorn for the mere ritual of an older time; neither descended to an
affirmation nor even condescended to a denial of private property. Both
clearly saw that no organised scheme of production could exist under
modern conditions unless its organisation were to be controlled by the
community. Yet the two friends differed in one most material point,
which was the possibility, men being what they were, of settling thus
the control of _machinery_. Upon land they were agreed. The land must
necessarily be made a national thing, and the conception of ownership
in it, however limited, was, as a man whom they both revered had put
it, “unthinkable.” Indeed, they recognised that the first steps towards
so obvious a reform were now actually taken, and they confidently
expected the final processes in it to be the work of quite the next
few years; but whereas the Economist, with his profound knowledge of
external detail, could see no obstacle to the collective control of
capital as well, the Psychologist, ever dwelling upon the inner springs
of action, saw no hope, no, not even for so evident and necessary a
scheme, save in some ideal despotism of which he despaired. In vain
did the Economist point out that our great railways, our mines, the
main part of our shipping, and even half our textile industry had
now no personal element in their direction save that of the salaried
management; the Psychologist met him at every move with the effect
produced upon man by the mere illusion of a personal element in all
these things. The Economist, not a little inspired as the evening
deepened, remembered and even invented names, figures, cases that
showed the growing unity of the industrial world; the Psychologist
equally inspired, and with an equal increase of fervour, drew picture
after picture, each more vivid and convincing than the last, of
man caught in the tangle of imaginary motive and unobedient to any
industrial control, unless that control could by some miracle be given
the quality of universal tyranny.

Music was added to their debate, and subtly changed, as it must always
change, the colour of thought. In the street without a man with a
fine baritone voice, which evidently he had failed through vice or
carelessness to exploit with success, sang songs of love and war,
and at his side there accompanied him a little organ upon wheels
which a weary woman played. The rich notes of his voice filled “The
Lord Benthorpe” through the opened windows of that hot night, and
drowned or modified the differences of cabmen and others in the Public
Bar; as he sang the two disputants rose almost to the lyric in their
enthusiasm, the one for the new world that was so soon to be, the other
for that gloomy art of his by which he read the hearts of men and saw
their doom.

       *       *       *       *       *

It has been remarked by many that we mortals are surrounded by
coincidence, and least observe Fate at its nearest approach, so that
friends meet or leave us unexpectedly, and that the accidents of
our lives make part of a continual play. So it was with these two.
For as they warmly debated, and one of them had upset and broken
his glass while the other lay back repeating again and again some
favourite phrase, a third was on his way to meet them. A man much
older than either, a man who did nothing at all and lived when his
sister remembered him, was in that neighbourhood, vaguely wandering
and feeling in every pocket for a coin. His hand trembled with age,
and also a little with anxiety, but to his great joy he felt at last
through the lining of his coat a large round hardness, and very
carefully searching through a tear, and aided by the light that shone
from the windows of “The Lord Benthorpe,” he discovered and possessed
half a crown. With that he entered in, for he knew that his friends
were there. In what respect he held them, their accomplishments, and
their public fame, I need not say, for that respect is always paid by
the simple to the learned. He sat by them at the little table, drinking
also, and for some minutes listened to their stream of affirmation and
of vision, but soon he shook his head in a quavering senile way, as
he very vaguely caught the drift of their contention. “You’ve got the
wrong end of the stick,” he said.... “You’ve got the wrong end of the
stick!... Can’t take away what a man’s got ... ’tis _wrawng_!... ’Vide
it up, all the same next week.... Same hands! Same hands!” he went on
foolishly wagging his head, and still smiling almost like an imbecile.
“All in the same hands again in a week!... ’Vide it up ever so much.”
They neglected him and continued their ardent debate, and as they flung
repeated bolts of theory he, their new companion, still murmured to
himself the security of established things and the ancient doctrine of
ownership and of law.

But now the night and the stars had come to their appointed hour,
and the ending which is decreed of all things had come also to their
carousal. A young man of energy stood before them in his shirt sleeves,
crying, “Time, Time!” as a voice might cry “Doom!” and, by force of
crying and of orders, “The Lord Benthorpe” was emptied, and there was
silence at last behind its shutters and its bolted doors.

These three, not yet in a mood for sleep, sauntered together westward
through the vast landed estates of London, westward, to their distant
homes.




The Economist


A gentleman possessing some three thousand acres of land, the most
of it contiguous, one field with another, or, as he himself, his
agent, his bailiff, his wife, his moneylender, and others called it,
“in a ring fence,” was in the habit of asking down to the country at
Christmas time some friend or friends, though more usually a friend
than friends, because the income he received from the three thousand
acres of land had become extremely small.

He was especially proud of those of his friends who lived neither by
rent from land nor from the proceeds of their business, but by mental
activity in some profession, and of none was he prouder than of an
Economist whom he had known for more than forty years; for they had
been at school together and later at college. Now this Economist was
a very hearty, large sort of a man, and he made an amply sufficient
income by writing about economics and by giving economic advice in the
abstract to politicians, and economic lectures and expert economic
evidence; in fact, there was no limit to his earnings except that
imposed by time and the necessity for sleep. He was not married and
could spend all his earnings upon himself--which he did. He was
tall, lean, and active, with bright vivacious eyes and an upstanding
manner. He had two sharp and healthy grey whiskers upon either side of
his face; his hair was also grey but curly; and altogether he was a
vigorous fellow. There was nothing in economic science hidden from him.

This Economist, therefore, and his friend the Squire (who was a short,
fat, and rather doleful man) were walking over the wet clay land which
one of them owned and on which the other talked. There was a clinging
mist of a very light sort, so that you could not see more than about
a mile. The trees upon that clay were small and round, and from their
bare branches and twigs the mist clung in drops; where the bushes were
thick and wherever evergreens afforded leaves, these drops fell with
a patter that sounded almost like rain. There were no hills in the
landscape and the only thing that broke the roll of the clay of the
park land was the house, which was called a castle; and even this they
could not see without turning round, for they were walking away from
it. But even to look at this house did not raise the heart, for it was
very hideous and had been much neglected on account of the lessening
revenue from the three thousand acres of land. Great pieces of plaster
had fallen off, nor had anything been continually repaired except the
windows.

The Economist strode and the Squire plodded on over the wet grass, and
it gave the Squire pleasure to listen to the things which the Economist
said, though these were quite incomprehensible to him. They came to
a place where, after one had pushed through a tall bramble hedge and
stuck in a very muddy hidden ditch, one saw before one on the farther
side, screened in everywhere and surrounded by a belt or frame of low,
scraggy trees and stunted bushes, a large deserted field. In colour
it was very pale green and brown; myriads of dead thistles stood in
it; there were nettles, and, in the damper hollows, rushes growing.
The Economist took this field and turned his voluble talk upon it. He
appreciated that much he said during their walk, being sometimes of an
abstract and always of a technical nature, had missed the mind of his
friend; he therefore determined upon a concrete instance and waved his
vigorous long arm towards the field and said:

“Now, take this field, for instance.”

“Yes,” said the Squire humbly.

“Now, this field,” said the Economist, “_of itself_ has no value at
all.”

“No,” said the Squire.

“_That_,” said the Economist with increasing earnestness, tapping one
hand with two fingers of the other, “that’s what the layman must seize
first ... every error in economics comes from not appreciating that
things in themselves have no value. For instance,” he went on, “you
would say that a diamond had value, wouldn’t you ... a large diamond?”

The Squire, hoping to say the right thing, said: “I suppose not.”

This annoyed the Economist, who answered a little testily: “I don’t
know what you mean. What _I_ mean is that the diamond has no value in
itself....”

“I see,” broke in the Squire, with an intelligent look, but the
Economist went on rapidly as though he had not spoken:

“It only has a value because it has been transposed in some way from
the position where man could not use it to a position where he can.
Now, you would say that land could not be transposed, but it can be
made from _less_ useful to man, _more_ useful to man.”

The Squire admitted this, and breathed a deep breath.

“Now,” said the Economist, waving his arm again at the field, “take
this field, for instance.”

There it lay, silent and sullen under the mist. There was no noise of
animals in the brakes, the dirty boundary stream lay sluggish and dead,
and the rank weeds had lost all colour. One could note the parallel
belts of rounded earth where once--long, long ago--this field had been
ploughed. No other evidence was there of any activity at all, and it
looked as though man had not seen it for a hundred years.

“Now,” said the Economist, “what is the value of this field?”

The Squire had begun his answer, when his friend interrupted him
testily. “No, no, no; I don’t want to ask about your private affairs;
what I mean is, what is it builds up the economic value of this field?
It is not the earth itself; it is the use to which man puts it. It is
the crops and the produce which he makes it bear and the advantage
which it has over other neighbouring fields. It is the _surplus value_
which makes it give you a rent. What gives _this_ field its value is
the competition among the farmers to get it.”

“But----” began the Squire.

The Economist with increasing irritation waved him down. “Now, listen,”
he said; “the worst land has only what is called prairie value.”

The Squire would eagerly have asked the meaning of this, for it
suggested coin, but he thought he was bound to listen to the remainder
of the story.

“That is only true,” said the Economist, “of the worst land. There _is_
land on which no profit could be made; it neither _makes_ nor loses. It
is on what we call the _margin of production_.”

“What about rates?” said the Squire, looking at that mournful stretch,
all closed in and framed with desolation, and suggesting a thousand
such others stretching on to the boundaries of a deserted world.

How various are the minds of men! That little word “rates”--it has but
five letters; take away the “e” and it would have but four--and what
different things does it not mean to different men! To one man the
pushing on of his shop just past the edge of bankruptcy; to another the
bother of writing a silly little cheque; to another the brand of the
Accursed Race of our time--the pariahs, the very poor. To this Squire
it meant the dreadful business of paying a great large sum out of an
income that never sufficed for the bare needs of his life ... to tell
the truth, he always borrowed money for the rates and paid it back out
of the next half year ... he had such a lot of land in hand. Years
ago, when farms were falling in, in the eighties, a friend of his, a
practical man, who went in for silos and had been in the Guards and
knew a lot about French agriculture, had told him it would pay him to
have his land in hand, so when the farms fell in he consoled himself by
what the friend had said; but all these years had passed and it had not
paid him.

Now to the Economist this little word “rates” suggested the hardest
problem--the perhaps insoluble problem--of applied economics in our
present society. He turned his vivacious eyes sharply on to the Squire
and stepped out back for home, for the Castle. For a little time
he said nothing, and the Squire, honestly desiring to continue the
conversation, said again as he plodded by his friend’s side, “What
about rates?”

“Oh, they’ve nothing to do with it!” said the Economist, a little
snappishly. “The proportionate amount of surplus produce demanded
by the community does not affect the basic process of production. Of
course,” he added, in a rather more conciliatory tone, “it _would_ if
the community demanded the total unearned increment and _then_ proposed
taxes beyond that limit. _That_, I have always said, would affect the
whole nature of production.”

“Oh!” said the Squire.

By this time they were nearing the Castle, and it was already dusk;
they were silent during the last hundred yards as the great house
showed more definitely through the mist, and the Economist could note
upon the face of it the coat-of-arms with which he was familiar. They
had been those of his host’s great-grandfather, a solicitor who had
foreclosed. These arms were of stucco. Age and the tempest had made
them green, and the head of that animal which represented the family
had fallen off.

They went into the house, they drank tea with the rather worried but
well-bred hostess of it, and all evening the Squire’s thoughts were of
his two daughters, who dressed exactly alike in the local town, and
whose dresses were not yet paid for, and of his son, whose schooling
was paid for, but whose next term was ahead: the Squire was wondering
about the extras. Then he remembered suddenly, and as suddenly put out
of his mind by an effort of surprising energy in such a man, the date
February 3rd, on which he must get a renewal or pay a certain claim.

They sat at table; they drank white fizzy wine by way of ritual, but it
was bad. The Economist could not distinguish between good wine and bad,
and all the while his mind was full of a very bothersome journey to the
North, where he was to read a paper to an institute upon “The Reaction
of Agricultural Prosperity upon Industrial Demand.” He was wondering
whether he could get them to change the hour so that he could get back
by a train that would put him into London before midnight. And all this
cogitation which lay behind the general talk during dinner and after it
led him at last to say: “Have you a ‘Bradshaw’?”

But the Squire’s wife had no “Bradshaw.” She did not think they could
afford it. However, the eldest daughter remembered an old “Bradshaw” of
last August, and brought it, but it was no use to the Economist.

       *       *       *       *       *

How various is man! How multiplied his experience, his outlook, his
conclusions!




A Little Conversation in Carthage


HANNO: Waiter! Get me a copy of _The Times_. [_Mutters to himself.
The waiter brings the copy of_ The Times. _As he gives it to Hanno he
collides with another member of the Club, and that member, already
advanced in years, treads upon Hanno’s foot._]

HANNO: Ah! Ah! Ah!... Oh! [_with a grunt_]. Bethaal, it’s you, is it?

BETHAAL: Gouty?

HANNO [_after saying nothing for some time_]: ’Xtraordinary thing....
Nothing in the papers.

BETHAAL: Nothing odd about that! [_He laughs rather loudly, and
Hanno, who wishes he had said the witty thing, smirks gently without
enthusiasm. Then he proceeds on another track._] I find plenty in the
papers! [_He puffs like a grampus._]

HANNO: Plenty about yourself!... That’s the only good of politics, and
precious little good either.... What I can’t conceive--as you _do_
happen to be the in’s and not the out’s--is why you don’t send more men
from somewhere; he has asked for them often enough.

BETHAAL [_wisely_]: They’re all against it; couldn’t get anyone to
agree but little Schem [_laughs loudly_]; he’d agree to anything.

HANNO [_wagging his head sagely_]: He’ll be Suffete, my boy! He’ll be a
Sephad all right! He’s my sister’s own boy.

BETHAAL [_surlily_]: Shouldn’t wonder! All you Hannos get the pickings.

HANNO: You talk like a book.... Anyhow, what about the
reinforcements?--that _does_ interest me.

BETHAAL [_wearily_]: Oh, really. I’ve heard about it until I’m tired.
It isn’t the reinforcements that are wanted really; it’s money, and
plenty of it. That’s what it is. [_He looks about the room in search
for a word._] That’s what it is. [_He continues to look about the
room._] That’s what it is ... er ... really. [_Having found the word
Bethaal is content, and Hanno remains silent for a few minutes, then_:]

HANNO: He doesn’t seem to be doing much.

BETHAAL [_jumping up suddenly with surprising vigour for a man of close
on seventy, and sticking his hands into his pockets, if Carthaginians
had pockets_]: That’s it! That’s exactly it! That’s what I say, What
Hannibal really wants is money. He’s got the _men_ right enough. The
_men_ are splendid, but all those putrid little Italian towns are
asking to be bribed, and I _can’t_ get the money out of Mohesh.

HANNO [_really interested_]: Yes, now? Mohesh has got the old
tradition, and I do believe it’s the sound one. Our money is as
important to us as our Fleet, I mean our _credit’s_ as important to
us as our Fleet, and he’s perfectly right is Mohesh.... [_Firmly_] I
wouldn’t let you have a penny if I were at the Treasury.

BETHAAL [_surlily_]: Well, he’s bound to take Rome at last anyway, so I
don’t suppose it matters whether he has the money or not; but it makes
_me_ look like a fool. When everything was going well I didn’t care,
but I do care now. [_He holds up in succession three fat fingers_].
First there was Drephia----

HANNO [_interrupting_]: Trebbia.

BETHAAL: Oh, well, I don’t care.... Then there was Trasimene; then
there was that other place which wasn’t marked on the map, and little
Schem found for me in the very week in which I got him on to the Front
Bench. You remember his speech?

[HANNO _shakes his head_.]

BETHAAL [_impatiently_]: Oh well, anyhow you remember Cannae, don’t you?

HANNO: Oh yes, I remember Cannae.

BETHAAL: Well, he’s bound to win. He’s bound to take the place, and
then [_wearily_], then, as poor old Hashuah said at the Guildhall,
“Annexation will be inevitable.”

HANNO: Now, look here, may I put it to you shortly?

BETHAAL [_in great dread_]: All right.

HANNO [_leaning forward in an earnest way, and emphasising what he
says_]: All you men who get at the head of a Department only think
of the work of that Department. That’s why you talk about Hannibal’s
being bound to win. Of course he’s bound to win; but Carthage all
hangs together, and if he wins at too great a price in money _you’re_
weakened, and your _son_ is weakened, and _all_ of us are weakened. We
shall be paying five per cent where we used to pay four. Things don’t
go in big jumps; they go in gradations, and I do assure you that if you
don’t send more men----

BETHAAL [_interrupting impatiently_]: Oh, curse all that! One can
easily see where _you_ were brought up; you smell of Athens like a
Don, and you make it worse by living out in the country, reading books
and publishing pamphlets and putting people’s backs up for nothing. If
you’d ever been in politics--I mean, if you hadn’t got pilled by three
thousand at....

[_At this moment an obese and exceedingly stupid Carthaginian of the
name of Matho strolls into the smoking-room of the club, sees the two
great men, becomes radiant with a mixture of reverence, admiration, and
pride of acquaintance, and makes straight for them._]

HANNO: Who on earth’s that? Know him?

BETHAAL [_in a whisper astonishingly vivacious and angry for so old a
man_]: Shut your mouth, can’t you? He’s the head of my association!
He’s the Mayor of the town!

MATHO: Room for little un? [_He laughs genially and sits down,
obviously wanting an introduction to Hanno._]

BETHAAL [_nervously_]: I haven’t seen you for ages, my dear fellow! I
hope Lady Matho’s better? [_Turning to Hanno_] Do you know Lady Matho?

HANNO [_gruffly_]: Lady _Who_?

BETHAAL [_really angry, and savage on that half of his face which is
turned towards Hanno_]: This gentleman’s wife!

MATHO [_showing great tact and speaking very rapidly in order to bridge
over an unpleasant situation_]: Wonderful chap this Hannibal! Dogged
does it! No turning back! Once that man puts his hand to the plough he
won’t take it off till he’s [_tries hard, and fails to remember what a
plough does--then suddenly remembering_] till he’s finished his furrow.
That’s where blood tells! Same thing in Tyre, same thing in Sidon, same
thing in Tarshish; I don’t care who it is, whether it’s poor Barca, or
that splendid old chap Mohesh, whom they call “Sterling Dick.” They’ve
all got the blood in them, and they don’t know when they’re beaten.
Now [_as though he had something important to say which had cost him
years of thought_], shall I tell you what I think produces men like
Hannibal? I don’t think it’s the climate, though there’s a lot to be
said for _that_. And I don’t think it’s the sea, though there’s a lot
to be said for _that_. I think it’s our old Carthaginian home-life
[_triumphantly_]. That’s what it is! It isn’t even hunting, though
there’s a lot to be said for that. It’s the old---- [_Hanno suddenly
gets up and begins walking away._]

BETHAAL [_leaning forwards to Matho_]: Please don’t mind my cousin.
You know he’s a little odd when he meets anyone for the first time;
but he’s a really good fellow at heart, and he’ll help anyone. But,
of course [_smiling gently_], he doesn’t understand politics any more
than---- [_Matho waves his hand to show that he understands._] But such
a good fellow! Do you know Lady Hanno? [_They continue talking, chiefly
upon the merits of Hannibal, but also upon their own._]




The Strange Companion


It was in Lichfield, now some months ago, that I stood by a wall that
flanks the main road there and overlooks a fine wide pond, in which you
may see the three spires of the Cathedral mirrored.

As I so gazed into the water and noted the clear reflection of the
stonework a man came up beside me and talked in a very cheery way.
He accosted me with such freedom that he was very evidently not from
Europe, and as there was no insolence in his freedom he was not a
forward Asiatic either; besides which, his face was that of our own
race, for his nose was short and simple and his lips reasonably thin.
His eyes were full of astonishment and vitality. He was seeing the
world. He was perhaps thirty-five years old.

I would not say that he was a Colonial, because that word means so
little; but he talked English in that accent commonly called American,
yet he said he was a Brittishur, so what he was remains concealed;
but surely he was not of this land, for, as you shall presently see,
England was more of a marvel to him than it commonly is to the English.

He asked me, to begin with, the name of the building upon our left, and
I told him it was the Cathedral, to which his immediate answer was,
was I sure? How could there be a cathedral in such a little town?

I said that it just was so, and I remembered the difficulty of the
explanation and said no more. Then he looked up at the three spires and
said: “Wondurful; isn’t it?” And I said: “Yes.”

Then I said to him that we would go in, and he seemed very willing; so
we went towards the Close, and as we went he talked to me about the
religion of those who served the Cathedral, and asked if they were
Episcopalian, or what. So this also I told him. And when he learnt that
what I told him was true of all the other cathedrals, he said heartily:
“Is thet so?” And he was silent for half a minute or more.

We came and stood by the west front, and looked up at the height of it,
and he was impressed.

He wagged his head at it and said: “Wondurful, isn’t it?” And then he
added: “Marvlurs how they did things in those old days!” but I told him
that much of what he was looking at was new.

In answer to this (for I fear that his honest mind was beginning to be
disturbed by doubt), he pointed to the sculptured figures and said that
they were old, as one could see by their costumes. And as I thought
there might be a quarrel about it, I did not contradict; but I let him
go wandering round to the south of it until he came to the figure of
a knight with a moustache, gooseberry eyes, and in general a face so
astoundingly modern that one did not know what to say or do when one
looked at it. It was expressionless.

My companion, who had not told me his name, looked long and
thoughtfully at this figure, and then came back, more full of time
and of the past of our race than ever; he insisted upon my coming
round with him and looking at the image. He told me that we could not
do better than that nowadays with all our machinery, and he asked me
whether a photograph could be got of it. I told him yes, without doubt,
and what was better, perhaps the sculptor had a duplicate, and that we
would go and find if this were so, but he paid no attention to these
words.

The amount of work in the building profoundly moved this man, and he
asked me why there was so much ornament, for he could clearly estimate
the vast additional expense of working so much stone that might have
been left plain; though I am certain, from what I gathered of his
character, he would not have left any building wholly plain, not even
a railway station, still less a town hall, but would have had here and
there an allegorical figure as of Peace or of Commerce--the figure
of an Abstract Idea. Still he was moved by such an excess of useless
labour as stood before him. Not that it did not give him pleasure--it
gave him great pleasure--but that he thought it enough and more than
enough.

We went inside. I saw that he took off his hat, a custom doubtless
universal, and, what struck me much more, he adopted within the
Cathedral a tone of whisper, not only much lower than his ordinary
voice, but of quite a different quality, and I noticed that he was
less erect as he walked, although his head was craned upward to look
towards the roof. The stained glass especially pleased him, but there
was much about it he did not understand. I told him that there could be
seen there a copy of the Gospels of great antiquity which had belonged
to St. Chad; but when I said this he smiled pleasantly, as though I
had offered to show him the saddle of a Unicorn or the tanned skin of
a Hippogriff. Had we not been in so sacred a place I believe he would
have dug me in the ribs. “St. _Who_?” he whispered, looking slily
sideways at me as he said it. “St. Chad,” I said. “He was the Apostle
to Mercia.” But after that I could do no more with him. For the word
“Saint” had put him into fairyland, and he was not such a fool as to
mix up a name like Chad with one of the Apostles; and Mercia is of
little use to men.

However, there was no quarrelsomeness about him, and he peered at the
writing curiously, pointing out to me that the letters were quite
legible, though he could not make out the words which they spelled,
and very rightly supposed it was a foreign language. He asked a little
suspiciously whether it was the Gospel, and accepted the assurance that
it was; so that his mind, sceptical to excess in some matters, found
its balance by a ready credence in others and remained sane and whole.
He was again touched by the glass in the Lady Chapel, and noted that
it was of a different colour to the other and paler, so that he liked
it less. I told him it was Spanish, and this apparently explained the
matter to him, for he changed his face at once and began to give me the
reason of its inferiority.

He had not been in Spain, but he had evidently read much about the
country, which was moribund. He pointed out to me the unnatural
attitude of the figures in this glass, and contrasted its half-tones
with the full-blooded colours of the modern work behind us, and he was
particularly careful to note the irregularity of the lettering and
the dates in this glass compared with the other which had so greatly
struck him. I was interested in his fixed convictions relative to the
Spaniards, but just as I was about to question him further upon that
race I began to have my doubts whether the glass were not French. It
was plainly later than the Reformation, and I should have guessed the
end of the sixteenth or beginning of the seventeenth century. But I
hid the misgiving in my heart, lest the little trust in me which my
companion still had should vanish altogether.

We went out of the great building slowly, and he repeatedly turned to
look back up it, and to admire the proportions. He asked me the exact
height of the central spire, and as I could not tell him this I felt
ashamed, but he told me he would find it in a book, and I assured him
this could be done with ease. The visit had impressed him deeply; it
may be he had not seen such things before, or it may be that he was
more at leisure to attend to the details which had been presented to
him. This last I gathered on his telling me, as we walked towards the
Inn, that he had had no work to do for two days, but that same evening
he was to meet a man in Birmingham, by whom, he earnestly assured
me, he was offered opportunities of wealth in return for so small
an investment of capital as was negligible, and here he would have
permitted me also to share in this distant venture, had I not, at some
great risk to that human esteem without which we none of us can live,
given him clearly to understand that his generosity was waste of time,
and that for the reason that there was no money to invest. It impressed
him much more sharply than any plea of judgment or of other investments
could have done.

Though I had lost very heavily by permitting myself such a confession
to him, he was ready to dine with me at the Inn before taking his
train, and as he dined he told me at some length the name of his native
place, which was, oddly enough, that of a great German statesman,
whether Bismarck or another I cannot now remember; its habits and its
character he also told me, but as I forgot to press him as to its
latitude or longitude to this day I am totally ignorant of the quarter
of the globe in which it may lie.

During our meal it disturbed him to see a bottle of wine upon the
table, but he was careful to assure me that when he was travelling he
did not object to the habits of others, and that he would not for one
moment forbid the use in his presence of a beverage which in his native
place (he did not omit to repeat) would be as little tolerated as any
other open temptation to crime. It was a wine called St. Emilion, but
it no more came from that Sub-Prefecture than it did from the hot
fields of Barsac; it was common Algerian wine, watered down, and--if
you believe me--three shillings a bottle.

I lost my companion at nine, and I have never seen him since, but he is
surely still alive somewhere, ready, and happy, and hearty, and noting
all the things of this multiple world, and judging them with a hearty
common sense, which for so many well fills the place of mere learning.




The Visitor


As I was going across Waterloo Bridge the other day, and when I had got
to the other side of it, there appeared quite suddenly, I cannot say
whence, a most extraordinary man.

He was dressed in black silk, he had a sort of coat, or rather shirt,
of black silk, with ample sleeves which were tied at either wrist
tightly with brilliant golden threads. This shirt, or coat, came down
to his knees, and appeared to be seamless. His trousers, which were
very full and baggy, were caught at his ankles by similar golden
threads. His feet were bare save for a pair of sandals. He had nothing
upon his head, which was close cropped. His face was clean shaven.
The only thing approaching an ornament, besides the golden threads of
which I have spoken, was an enormous many-coloured and complicated
coat-of-arms embroidered upon his breast, and showing up magnificently
against the black.

He had appeared so suddenly that I almost ran into him, and he said
to me breathlessly, and with a very strong nasal twang, “Can you talk
English?”

I said that I could do so with fluency, and he appeared greatly
relieved. Then he added, with that violent nasal twang again, “You
take me out of this!”

There was a shut taxi-cab passing and we got into it, and when he had
got out of the crush, where several people had already stopped to stare
at him, he lay back, panting a little, as though he had been running.
The taxi-man looked in suddenly through the window, and asked, in the
tone of voice of a man much insulted, where he was to drive to, adding
that he didn’t want to go far.

I suggested the “Angel” at Islington, which I had never seen. The
machine began to buzz, and we shot northward.

The stranger pulled himself together, and said in that irritating
accent of his which I have already mentioned twice, “Now say, _you_,
what year’s this anyway?”

I said it was 1909 (for it happened this year), to which he answered
thoughtfully, “Well, I have missed it!”

“Missed what?” said I.

“Why, 1903,” said he.

And thereupon he told me a very extraordinary but very interesting tale.

It seems (according to him) that his name was Baron Hogg; that
his place of living is (or rather will be) on Harting Hill, above
Petersfield, where he has (or rather will have) a large house. But the
really interesting thing in all that he told me was this: that he was
born in the year 2183, “which,” he added lucidly enough, “would be
your 2187.”

“Why?” said I, bewildered, when he told me this.

“Good Lord!” he answered, quite frankly astonished, “you must know,
even in 1909, that the calendar is four years out?”

I answered that a little handful of learned men knew this, but that we
had not changed our reckoning for various practical reasons. To which
he replied, leaning forward with a learned, interested look:

“Well, I came to learn things, and I lay I’m learning.”

He next went on to tell me that he had laid a bet with another man that
he would “hit” 1903, on the 15th of June, and that the other man had
laid a bet that he would get nearer. They were to meet at the Savoy
Hotel at noon on the 30th, and to compare notes; and whichever had won
was to pay the other a set of Records, for it seems they were both
Antiquarians.

All this was Greek to me (as I daresay it is to you) until he pulled
out of his pocket a thing like a watch, and noted that the dial was set
at 1909. Whereupon he began tapping it and cursing in the name of a
number of Saints familiar to us all.

It seems that to go backwards in time, according to him, was an art
easily achieved towards the middle of the Twenty-second Century, and it
was worked by the simplest of instruments. I asked him if he had read
“The Time Machine.” He said impatiently, “You have,” and went on to
explain the little dial.

“They cost a deal of money, but then,” he added, with beautiful
simplicity, “I have told you that I am Baron Hogg.”

Rich people played at it apparently as ours do at ballooning, and with
the same uncertainty.

I asked him whether he could get forward into the future. He simply
said: “What _do_ you mean?”

“Why,” said I, “according to St. Thomas, time is a dimension, just like
space.”

When I said the words “St. Thomas” he made a curious sign, like a man
saluting. “Yes,” he said, gravely and reverently, “but you know well
the future is forbidden to men.” He then made a digression to ask if
St. Thomas was read in 1909. I told him to what extent, and by whom. He
got intensely interested. He looked right up into my face, and began
making gestures with his hands.

“Now that really _is_ interesting,” he said.

I asked him “Why?”

“Well, you see,” he said in an off-hand way, “there’s the usual
historic quarrel. On the face of it one would say he wasn’t read at
all, looking up the old Records, and so on. Then some Specialist gets
hold of all the mentions of him in the early Twentieth Century, and
writes a book to show that even the politicians had heard of him. Then
there is a discussion, and nothing comes of it. _That’s_ where the fun
of Travelling Back comes in. You find out.”

I asked him if he had ever gone to the other centuries. He said, “No,
but Pop did.” I learned later that “Pop” was his father.

“You see,” he added respectfully, “Pop’s only just dead, and, of
course, I couldn’t afford it on my allowance. Pop,” he went on, rather
proudly, “got himself back into the Thirteenth Century during a walk in
Kent with a friend, and found himself in the middle of a horrible great
river. He was saved just before the time was up.”

“How do you mean ‘the time was up’?” said I.

“Why,” he answered me, “you don’t suppose Pop could afford more than
one hour, do you? Why, the Pope couldn’t afford more than six hours,
even after they voted him a subsidy from Africa, and Pop was rich
enough, Lord knows! Richer’n I am, coz of the gurls.... I told you I
was Baron Hogg,” he went on, without affectation.

“Yes” said I, “you did.”

“Well, now, to go back to St. Thomas,” he began----

“Why on earth----?” said I.

He interrupted me. “Now that _is_ interesting,” he said. “You know
about St. Thomas, and you can tell me about the people who know about
him, but it _does_ show that he had gone out in the Twentieth Century,
for you to talk like that! Why, I got full marks in St. Thomas. Only
thing I did get full marks in,” he said gloomily, looking out of the
window. “That’s what _counts_,” he added: “none of yer high-falutin’
dodgy fellows. When the Colonel said, ‘Who’s got the most stuff in
him?’ (not because of the rocks nor because I’m Baron Hogg), they all
said, ‘_That’s_ him.’ And that was because I got first in St. Thomas.”

To say that I simply could not make head or tail of this would be to
say too little: and my muddlement got worse when he added, “That’s why
the Colonel made me Alderman, and now I go to Paris by right.”

Just at that moment the taxi-man put in his head at the window and
said, with an aggrieved look:

“Why didn’t you tell me where I was going?”

I looked out, and saw that I was in a desolate place near the
River Lea, among marshes and chimneys and the poor. There was a
rotten-looking shed close by, and a policeman, uncommonly suspicious.
My friend got quite excited. He pointed to the policeman and said:

“Oh, how like the pictures! Is it true that they are the Secret Power
in England? Now _do_----”

The taxi-man got quite angry, and pointed out to me that his cab was
not a caravan. He further informed me that it had been my business to
tell him the way to the “Angel.” His asset was that if he dropped me
there I would be in a bad way; mine was that if I paid him off there he
would be in a worse one. We bargained and quarrelled, and as we did so
the policeman majestically moved up, estimated the comparative wealth
of the three people concerned, and falsely imagining my friend to be an
actor in broad daylight, he took the taxi-man’s part, and ordered us
off back to the “Angel,” telling us we ought to be thankful to be let
off so lightly. He further gave the taxi-man elaborate instructions for
reaching the place.

As I had no desire to get to the “Angel” really, I implored the
taxi-man to take me back to Westminster, which he was willing to do,
and on the way the Man from the Future was most entertaining. He
spotted the public-houses as we passed, and asked me, as a piece of
solid, practical information, whether wine, beer, and spirits were sold
in them. I said, “Of course,” but he told me that there was a great
controversy in his generation, some people maintaining that the number
of them was, in fiction, drawn by enemies; others said that they were,
as a fact, quite few and unimportant in London, and others again that
they simply did not exist but were the creations of social satire. He
asked me to point him out the houses of Brill and Ferguson, who, it
seems, were in the eyes of the Twenty-second Century the principal
authors of our time. When I answered that I had never heard of them he
said, “That _is_ interesting.” I was a little annoyed and asked him
whether he had ever heard of Kipling, Miss Fowler, or Swinburne.

He said of course he had read Kipling and Swinburne, and though he
had not read Miss Fowler’s works he had been advised to. But he said
that Brill for wit and Ferguson for economic analysis were surely the
glories of our England. Then he suddenly added, “Well, I’m not sure
about 1909. The first _Collected_ Brill is always thought to be 1911.
But Ferguson! Why he knew a lot of people as early as 1907! He did the
essay on Mediæval Economics which is the appendix to our school text of
St. Thomas.”

At this moment we were going down Whitehall. He jumped up excitedly,
pointed at the Duke of Cambridge’s statue and said, “That’s Charles I.”
Then he pointed to the left and said, “That’s the Duke of Buccleuigh’s
house.” And then as he saw the Victoria Tower he shouted, “Oh, that’s
Big Ben, I know it. And oh, I say,” he went on, “just look at the
Abbey!” “Now,” he said, with genuine bonhomie as the taxi drew up with
a jerk, “are those statues symbolic?”

“No,” I said, “they are real people.”

At this he was immensely pleased, and said that he had always said so.

The taxi-man looked in again and asked with genuine pathos where we
really wanted to go to.

But just as I was about to answer him two powerful men in billycock
hats took my friend quietly but firmly out of the cab, linked their
arms in his, and begged me to follow them. I paid the taxi and did so.

The strange man did not resist. He smiled rather foolishly. They hailed
a four-wheeler, and we all got in together. We drove about half a
mile to the south of Westminster Bridge, stopped at a large Georgian
house, and there we all got out. I noticed that the two men treated the
stranger with immense respect, but with considerable authority. He,
poor fellow, waved his hand at me, and said with a faint smile as he
went through the door, arm in arm with his captors:

“Sorry you had to pay. Came away without my salary ticket. Very silly.”
And he disappeared.

The other man remaining behind said to me very seriously, “I hope his
Lordship didn’t trouble you, sir?”

I said that on the contrary he had behaved like an English gentleman,
all except the clothes.

“Well,” said the keeper, “he’s not properly a Lord as you may say; he’s
an Australian gent. But he’s a Lord in a manner of speaking, because
Parliament did make him one. As for the clothes--ah! you may well ask!
But we durstn’t say anything: the doctor and the nurse says it soothes
him since his money trouble. But _I_ say, _make_ ’em act sensible and
they will be sensible.”

He then watched to see whether I would give him money for no particular
reason, and as I made no gestures to that effect I went away, and thus
avoided what politicians call “studied insolence.”




A Reconstruction of the Past


“It has been said with some justice that we know more about the
Victorian Period in England than we do of any one of the intervening
nine centuries, even of those which lie closest to our own time, and
even of such events as have taken place upon our own soil in the Malay
Peninsula. I will attempt to put before you very briefly, as a sort of
introduction to the series of lectures which I am to deliver, a picture
of what one glimpse of life in London towards the end of the Nineteenth
Century must have resembled.

“It is a sound rule in history to accept none but positive evidence and
to depend especially upon the evidence of documents. I will not debate
how far tradition should be admitted into the reconstruction of the
past. It _may_ contain elements of truth; it _must_ contain elements of
falsehood, and on that account I propose neither to deny nor to admit
this species of information, but merely to ignore it; and I think the
student will see before I have done with my subject that, using only
the positive information before us, a picture may be drawn so fully
detailed as almost to rival our experience of contemporary events.

“We will imagine ourselves,” continued the professor, with baleful
smile of playful pedantry, “in Piccadilly, the fashionable promenade of
the city, at nine o’clock in the morning, the hour when the greatest
energies of this imperial people were apparent in their outdoor life;
for, as we know from the famous passage which we owe to the pen of the
pseudo-Kingsley, the English people, as befitted their position, were
the earliest risers of their time. We will further imagine (to give
verisimilitude to the scene) the presence of a north-east wind, in
which these hardy Northerners took exceptional delight, and to which
the anonymous author above alluded to has preserved a famous hymn.

“Piccadilly is thronged with the three classes into which we know the
population to have been divided--the upper class, the middle, and the
lower, to use the very simple analytical terms which were most common
in that lucid and strenuous period. The lower class are to be seen
hurrying eastward in their cloth caps and ‘fustian,’ a textile fabric
the exact nature of which is under dispute, but which we can guess,
from the relics of contemporary evidence in France, to have been of a
vivid blue, highly glazed, and worn as a sort of sleeved tunic reaching
to the knees. The headgear these myriads are wearing is uniform: it is
a brown skull cap with a leather peak projecting over the eyes, the
conjectural ‘cricket cap,’ of which several examples are preserved.
It has been argued by more than one authority that the article in
question was not a headgear. It appears in none of the statuary of
the period. No mention of it is made in any of the vast compilations
of legal matter which have come down to us, and attempts have been
made to explain in an allegorical sense the very definite allusions
to it with which English letters of that time abound. I am content
to accept the documentary evidence in the plain meaning of the words
used, and to portray to you these ‘toiling millions’ (to use the phrase
of the great classic poet) hurrying eastward upon this delightful
morning in March of the year 1899. Each is carrying the implement of
his trade (possession in which was secured to him by law). The one
holds a pickaxe, another balances upon his head a ladder, a third is
rolling before him a large square box or ‘trunk’--a word of Oriental
origin--upon a ‘trolley’ or small two-wheeled vehicle dedicated to
some one of the five combinations of letters which had a connection
not hitherto established with the system of roads and railways in the
country. Yet another drags after him a small dynamo mounted on wheels,
such as may be seen in the frieze illustrating the Paris Exhibition of
ten years before.

“Interspersed with this crowd may be seen the soldiery, clad entirely
in bright red. But these, by a custom which has already the force of
law, are compelled to occupy the middle of the thoroughfare. They are
of the same class as the labouring men round them, and like these
carry the implements of their trade, with which we must imagine them
from time to time threatening the passers-by. All, I say, are hurrying
eastward to their respective avocations in the working part of this
great hive.

“Appearing as rarer units we perceive members of the second or _middle_
class proceeding at a more leisurely and dignified pace towards their
professional or commercial pursuits, the haunts of which lie less to
the eastward and more in the centre of the city. These are dressed
entirely in black, and wear upon their heads the round hat to which
one of my colleagues erroneously gave the title of a religious emblem,
a position from which, I am glad to see, he has recently receded.
Nothing is more striking in the scene than the absolute uniformity of
this costume. In the right hand is carried, according to the ritual
of a secret society to which the greater part of this class belong, a
staff or tube. The left hand grasps a roll of printed paper which we
may premise without too much phantasy to be the original news-sheet
from which the innumerable forgeries and copies of the succeeding dark
ages proceeded. We are, of course, ignorant of its name, but we may
accept it as the prototype of that vast mass of printed matter which
purports to be contemporary in date, but which recent scholarship has
definitely proved to be of far later origin. Beyond these, but in
numbers certainly few, the exact extent of which I shall discuss in
a moment, are the _upper_ classes, or Gentry. How many they may be
in such a crowd, I repeat, we cannot tell. We know that to the whole
population they stood somewhat as one to 10,000. The proportion in
London may have been slightly higher, for we have definite documentary
information that in certain provincial centres ‘not a gentleman’ could
be discovered, though for what reason these centres were less favoured
we are not told. In a street full of some thousands we shall certainly
not be exaggerating if we put the number of the Gentry present at
certainly a couple of individuals, and we may put as our highest limits
half a dozen. How are they dressed? In a most varied manner. Some in
grey, some in pink (these are off to hunt the fox in the fields of
Croydon or upon the heath of Hampstead, or possibly--to follow the
conjecture of the Professor of Geology in his fascinating book on the
Thames Valley--to Barking Level). Others are in black silk with a
large oval orifice exposing the chest. Others again will be in white
flannel, and others in a species of toga known as ‘shorts.’ These are
students from the university, or their professors, and they will be
distinguished by a square cap upon the head which, unlike so many other
conjectural forms of headgear, we can definitely pronounce to have had
a religious character. A tassel sometimes of gold hangs from the centre
of this square. With the exception of this headgear the Gentry discover
upon their heads as uniform a type of covering as their inferiors of
the middle class, who salute them as they pass by lifting the round
hat with the right hand. This headgear is tubular and probably of some
light metal, polished to a highly reflecting surface, and invariably
(as we know by the fascinating diaries recently collected by the
University Press) polished in the same direction upon some sort of
lathe.

“If we are lucky we may see at this hour one member of a class
restricted even among the few gentlemen of that period, the Peers.
Should we see such an one he will be walking in a red plush robe.
It is probable that he will carry upon his head the same species of
hat as the others of his rank, but I admit that it is open to debate
whether this hat were not surrounded by a circle of metal spikes, each
surmounted with a small ball. Such a person will be walking at an even
more leisurely pace than the few other members of the Gentry who may be
present, and upon the accoutrements of his person will be discovered
a small shield, varying in size from a couple of inches to as many
feet, stamped with a representation of animals and often ornamented by
a device in the English or in the Latin tongue. These devices, many
of which have come down to us engraved upon metal, are of the utmost
value to the historian. They have enabled him to reconstruct the exact
appearance of animals now long extinct, and it is even possible in some
cases to ascertain the particular families to which they belonged. No
class of object, however, has suffered more from frequent forgeries
than these emblems. Luckily there is an almost invariable test for
recognising such forgeries, which consists in the use of the French
language misspelt. Of some thousands of such signs many hundreds affect
a legend in the French tongue, and of these hardly one is correctly
spelt. Moreover, essential words are often omitted, and in general the
forgeries betray that imperfect acquaintance with the contemporary
language of Paris which was one of the marks of social inferiority
at that time. When I add that the total number of Peers at any given
moment was less than seven hundred out of forty million people,
while the number of these shields which have been discovered already
amounts to over five hundred thousand, it will be apparent that the
proportion of genuine emblems must be very small. Now and then a house
will bear the picture of some such shield painted and hung out upon a
board before it. This sometimes, but not universally, indicates the
nobility of the tenant. In the matter of religion....” At this point
the professor looked narrowly at his notes, held one sheet of them in
various positions, put it up to the light, shook his head, and next,
observing the hour, said that he would deal with this important subject
upon the following Wednesday or Thursday, according to sale of tickets
during the intervening days. With these words, after a fit of coughing,
he withdrew.




The Reasonable Press


THE OPPOSITION PAPER: LEADER

It is difficult to repress a feeling of natural indignation when one
considers the policy which the Government and Mr. Robespierre have
seen fit to pursue during the last two years, and especially since the
unfortunate blunder of Mr. Danton and Mr. Desmoulins. We have never
hidden our opinion that these two gentlemen--able and disinterested men
as they undoubtedly were--acted rashly in stepping out of the party
(as it were) and attempting to form an independent organisation at a
moment when the strictest discipline was necessary in the face of the
enormous and servile majority commanded by the Government. However
unrepresentative that majority may be of the national temper at this
moment, the business of a member of the Convention lies chiefly on the
floor of the House, and it is the height of unwisdom to divide our
forces even by an act of too generous an enthusiasm for the cause.
We would not write a word that might give offence to the surviving
relatives of the two statesmen we have named, but this much _must_
be said: the genius of the nation is opposed to particular action of
this sort; the electors understand Government and Opposition, by
separate action like Mr. Danton’s and Mr. Desmoulin’s they are simply
bewildered. Such eccentric displays do no good, and may do very great
harm. Meanwhile, we must repeat that the general attitude of the
Government is indefensible. That is a strong word, but hardly too
strong under the circumstances. It is not the executions themselves
which have (as we maintain) alienated public sentiment, nor their
number--though it must be admitted that 1200 in four months is a high
record--it is rather the pressure of business in the Courts and the
disorganisation of procedure which the Plain Man in the Street notices
and very rightly condemns, and we would warn Mr. Robespierre that
unless a larger number of judges are created under his new Bill the
popular discontent may grow to an extent he little imagines, and show
itself vigorously at the polls. We are all agreed that Mr. Carnot shows
admirable tact and energy at the War Office, and it is characteristic
of that strong man that he has left to others the more showy trappings
of power. We would urge upon him as one who is, in a sense, above
party politics, to counsel his colleagues in the Government in the
direction we have suggested. It may seem a small point, but it is one
of practical importance, and the Man in the Street cares more for
practical details than he does for political theories.


THE GOVERNMENT PAPER: LEADER

The present moment is opportune for reviewing the work of the
Government to date, and drawing up a political balance-sheet as it
were of its successes and failures. We have always been open critics
of the present Administration, whenever we thought that national
interests demanded such criticism, and our readers will remember that
we heartily condemned the ill-fated proposal to change the place of
public executions from the Place de la Revolution to the Square de
l’Egalité--a far less convenient spot; but apart from a few tactical
errors of this sort it must be admitted, and is admitted even by his
enemies, that Mr. Robespierre has handled a very difficult situation
with admirable patience and with a tremendous grasp of detail. It is
sometimes said of Mr. Robespierre that he owes his great position
mainly to his mastery over words. To our thinking that judgment is as
superficial as it is unjust. True, Mr. Robespierre is a great orator,
even (which is higher praise) a great _Parliamentary_ orator, but it
is not this one of his many talents which is chiefly responsible for
his success. It is rather his minute acquaintance with the whole of
his subject which impresses the House. No assembly in the world is a
better judge of character than the Convention, and its appreciation
of Mr. Robespierre’s character is that it is above all a practical
one. His conduct of the war--for in a sense the head of the Government
and Leader of the House may be said to conduct any and every national
enterprise--has been remarkable. The unhappy struggle is now rapidly
drawing to a close and we shall soon emerge into a settlement to which
may be peculiarly applied the phrase “Peace with Honour.” The restraint
and kindliness of our soldiers has won universal praise, even from
the enemy, and it is a gratifying feature in the situation that those
of our fellow-citizens in Toulon, Lyons, and elsewhere who could not
see eye to eye with us in our foreign and domestic policy are now
reconciled to both. One last word upon the Judges Bill. We implore Mr.
Robespierre to stand firm and not to increase the present number, which
is ample for the work of the Courts even under the somewhat exceptional
strain of the last four years. After all it is no more fatigue to
condemn sixty people to death than one. The delay in forensic procedure
is (or rather was) due to its intolerable intricacy, and the reforms
introduced by Mr. Robespierre himself, notably the suppression of
so-called “witnesses” and of the old-fashioned rigmarole of “defence,”
has done wonders in the way of expedition. We too often forget that Mr.
Robespierre is not only a consummate orator and a past master of prose,
but a great lawyer as well. We should be the last to hint that the
demand for more judges was due to place-hunting: vices of that kind are
happily absent in France whatever may be the case in other countries.
The real danger is rather that if the new posts were created jealousy
and a suspicion of jobbery might arise _after_ they were filled. Surely
it is better to leave things as they are.


THE OPPOSITION PAPER: LOBBY NOTES

Really the Government Press seems determined to misrepresent last
Friday’s incident! Mr. Talma has already explained that his allusion
to cripples was purely metaphorical and in no way intended for Mr.
Couthon, for whom, like everyone in the House, he has the highest
respect.


THE GOVERNMENT PAPER: LOBBY NOTES

Last Friday’s incident is happily over. Mr. Talma has assured Mr.
Couthon that he used the word “cripple” in a sense quite different from
that in which that highly-deservedly popular gentleman unfortunately
took it.


SOCIAL AND PERSONAL

The Marquis de Misenscene is leaving Paris tonight for Baden Baden.
His Lordship intends to travel in the simplest fashion and hopes his
incognito may be preserved.

Mr. Couthon, the deservedly popular M.P., made a pathetic sight
yesterday at Mr. Robespierre’s party in the Tuileries Gardens. As
most people know, the honourable gentleman has lost the use of his
lower limbs and is wheeled about in a bath-chair, but he can still
gesticulate freely and his bright smile charms all who meet him.

Madame Talma was At Home yesterday on behalf of the Society for the
Aid and Rescue of Criminal Orphans. Whatever our political differences
we all can unite in this excellent work, and the great rooms of Talma
House were crowded. At Madame Talma’s dinner before the reception
were present Major Bonaparte, Mr. Barrere, Mr. St. Just, Mrs. Danton
(widow of statesman), Mrs. Desmoulins (mother of the late well known
author-journalist), and Miss Charlotte Robespierre, who looked charming
in old black silk with a high bodice and jet trimmings.


LETTERS TO THE PAPERS

Sir,--I hope you will find space in your columns for a protest against
the disgraceful condition of the public prisons. I have not a word to
say, sir, against the presence of the prisoners in such large numbers
at this exceptional moment; moreover, as nearly all their cases are
_sub judice_ it would be highly improper in me to comment upon them. I
refer, sir, only to the intolerable noise proceeding from the cells and
rendering life a burden to all ratepayers in the vicinity. Prisoners
are notoriously degenerate and often hysterical, and the nuisance
created by their lamentations and protests is really past bearing. I
can assure the Government that if they do not provide gags, _and use
them_, they shall certainly not have my vote at the next election.--I
am, &c.,

                                                              DISGUSTED.

Sir,--_May_ I trespass upon your space to make known to our _many_
friends that the memorial service for my late husband, the Archbishop
of Paris, is postponed till the 1st Decadi in Fructidor?--With many
thanks in advance for your courtesy, I am, &c.,

                                                          ASPASIA GOREL.


OFFICIAL NEWS

We are requested by the Home Office to give publicity to the
arrangements for to-morrow’s executions. These will be found on page 3.
There will be no executions on the day after to-morrow.




Asmodeus


“Can you not show me,” said the Student, as they flew swiftly through
the upper air over Madrid, he clinging tightly to the Devil’s skirts,
“can you not show me other sights equally entertaining before we finish
our journey?”

“Readily,” replied Asmodeus, “for I have the power of showing you every
heart and thought in Madrid, and of unroofing every house if it be my
pleasure, and I am determined to repay you in whatever way you choose
for the service you have done me. First, then, cast your eyes down at
the very well-dressed gentleman whom you see in that open taxi-cab,
enjoying as he whirls along the warm air of a night in the season. He
is a wealthy man in charge of one of the great departments of State;
nay, I can tell you which one, for the mines in Peru are his special
department.”

“Doubtless,” said the Student, “he is at this moment considering some
weighty matter in connection with his duties.”

“No,” said the Devil; “you must guess again.”

“Why, then, since you have shown me so many diverting weaknesses in
men I must believe that he is plotting for the advancement of some
favourite.”

“Yet again you are wrong,” said the Devil. “His whole mind is occupied
in watching the sums marked by the taximeter, which he constantly
consults by the aid of a match; only last Wednesday, the Feast of St.
Theresa, he was overcharged a matter of a quarter of a real by one of
these machines, and he is determined this shall not happen again. You
perceive the great house which he is now passing. It is lit up at every
window, and the sounds of music are proceeding from it.”

“I not only see it,” said the Student, “but have seen this sort of
sight so often during the season in Madrid that I am certain you will
not find anything here to surprise me.”

“No,” said the Devil, “I was perhaps wrong in attempting to amuse you
by so commonplace a spectacle as that of a moneylender entertaining
very nearly all those in Madrid with whom he has had no dealings,
and even some of those who are in his power; that is, if, on account
of their nobility or from some other cause, it is worth his while to
have them seen in his rooms. But what I would particularly point out
to you is, not this kind of feast which (as you say) you have seen a
thousand times, but the old man who is mumbling strange prayers over a
dish of food in that common servants’ room which you may perceive to
lie half above the ground and half beneath it next to the kitchen. He
is the father of the wealthy gentleman who is entertaining the guests
upstairs.”

“It is evident,” said the Student, “that he has no liking for High
Life.”

“No,” said Asmodeus, “and in this eccentricity he is supported with
true filial sympathy by his son.”

“I perceive,” said the Student, “a man tossing uneasily in his sleep,
and from time to time crying out as one does to a horse when it is
restive, or rather as men cry to horses which they can hardly control.”

“I am well acquainted with him,” said the Devil. “He is one of my most
earnest clients, but in nothing does he divert me more than in these
nightmares of his wherein he cries ‘Whoa there! Steady, old girl!’
And again, ‘Now then! Now then!’ not omitting from time to time, ‘You
damned brute!’ and a cuff upon his pillow.”

“To what, my dear Asmodeus, do we owe this diversion?” asked the
Student wonderingly. “He seems to be a wealthy man, if we may judge by
the house in which we see him and the furniture of the room in which he
so painfully sleeps. And surely there is nothing upon his mind?”

“You are wrong,” said the Devil; “there is upon his mind a most
weighty matter, for he considers it a necessity in his position to ride
every morning along the soft road especially prepared for that exercise
upon the banks of the Manzanares, where he may meet the wealth and
fashion of Madrid occupied in the same pastime. But unfortunately for
him he is wholly devoid of the art of equitation and stands in as much
terror of his mount as does a lady of her dressmaker. For one hour,
therefore, of every day, he suffers such tortures that I greatly fear
we shall not be able to add to them appreciably in my dominions when
the proper time arrives. But let us leave these wealthy people, whose
foibles are, after all, much the same, and turn to the poorer quarters
which lie south of the King’s Royal Palace.”

In a few moments they had reached these and were examining a mean house
not far from the Church of St. Alphonso, in a bare upper room of which
a woman with a starved and anxious expression was writing, late as was
the hour, at top speed.

“Poor woman!” said the Student. “I perceive that she is one of those
unhappy people whom grinding poverty compels to produce ephemeral
literature which is afterwards printed and sold at one real for the
divertisement of the populace of Madrid. I know of no trade more
pitiful, and I can assure you the sight of her industry moves me to the
bottom of my heart.”

“The sight is indeed pitiful,” said the Devil, “to those at least who
permit themselves the luxury of pity--a habit which I confess I have
long ago abandoned. For you must know that in the company of Belphegor,
Ashtaroth, and the rest even the softest-hearted of devils will grow
callous. But more interesting to you perhaps than the sad necessities
of her trade is the matter which she is at present engaged upon.”

“What is that?” said the Student.

“Why,” said Asmodeus, “she is writing ‘Nellie’s Notes’ for a paper
called _The Spanish Noblewoman_, and she is at this very moment setting
down her opinion that there is no better way to pass a rainy afternoon
than taking out and cleaning one’s Indian Bracelets, Ropes of Pearls,
Diamonds, and other gems. She is good enough to add that she herself
thinks it wise and a good discipline to clean her own jewellery and not
leave it to a maid.”

“In the room below you will see a young man whom I very much regret to
say is in a state of complete intoxication.”

“I do not know,” said the Student, “why you should regret such a sight,
for I had imagined that all human frailty was a matter of pleasure to
your highnesses.”

“Yes,” replied Asmodeus, “in the general it is so, but you must know
that this particular vice is so inimical to the province which I
control that I regard it with peculiar detestation, and I am not upon
so much as speaking terms with Shamarel, who has been deputed by the
Council to look after those who exceed in wine.”

“Is not that the same,” asked the Student, “whom they say twice
appeared to a hermit at Carinena?”

“You are right,” said Asmodeus, betraying a slight annoyance, “but
pray do not put it about that a personage of such importance was at
the pains of appearing to a common hermit. The fact is, he was at that
moment visiting the Campo Romano to assure himself that the vines were
in good condition, and it was by the merest accident that the hermit
caught sight of him during this journey, for you must know that he
makes it a punctilio never to appear in person to one under the rank of
Archbishop, and even then he prefers that the recipient of the favour
should be a Cardinal into the bargain, and if possible a Grandee of
Spain.”

“You have told me so much about your amiable colleague,” said the
Student, “that you have forgotten to tell me whether any moral
divertisement attached to the poor young fellow whom we see in that
offensive stupor.”

“No,” said the Devil, “now I come to think of it, there is perhaps
nothing remarkable in his condition, unless you think it worthy of
notice that he is a medical student and will shortly be entrusted with
the nerves and veins of the poor in the public hospitals of Madrid. It
is to be hoped that he will soon put behind him these youthful follies,
for if he persists in them they will make his hand tremble, and in that
case he will never be permitted to practise the art of surgery upon the
persons of the wealthy and more remunerative classes.”

“Outside the house,” said the Student, “I see a policeman walking with
some solemnity, and I confess that the sight is pleasing to me, for
it gives me a feeling that the good people of Madrid are well looked
after when so expensive an instrument of the law is spared for so poor
a quarter.”

“You are right,” said Asmodeus, “and were I now to show you the inner
heart of the Duke of Medina y Barò who controls the police forces of
Madrid, you would find that his chief anxiety in the distribution of
his men came from the dilemma in which he perpetually finds himself,
whether to furnish them rather in large numbers to the wealthier
quarters for the defence of which policemen exist, or for the poorer
quarters, the terrorising of which is necessarily their function.”

“At any rate,” said the Student, “he need not bother himself about the
houses of that large number of people (and I am one) from whom there
is nothing to steal and who yet have never learnt any of the arts of
theft. In a word, he is spared the trouble either of protecting or of
keeping down what are called the middle classes.”

“True,” said Asmodeus, “but most unfortunately this kind of person does
not herd together in special districts. If they did so it would be a
great relief to the strain upon the Police Department; but they are
scattered more or less evenly throughout the wealthier and the poorer
quarters.”

“Can you tell me,” asked the Student, “whether it is worth our while
to watch the policeman for a few moments in the exercise of his duties
and whether he would provide us with any entertainment as we watched
him unseen?”

“Alas!” answered the Devil sadly, “I have no power to forecast the
future; but from my knowledge of the past I can tell you that during
the ten years since he has joined the force this officer has not once
arrested a rich man in error on a dark night, nor perjured himself
before a Magistrate so openly as to be detected, nor done any of those
things which legitimately amuse us in people of his kind.”

“But do you not think,” said the Student, “that we might by remaining
here see him help an old woman across the road amid the plaudits of the
governing classes, or take a little child that is lost by the hand and
lead it to its mother’s home?”

“Doubtless,” said the Devil, yawning, “we should find him up to tricks
of that sort were we willing to wait here, floating in the air, for
another ten or dozen hours, when the streets will be full of people.
But the play-acting to which you so feelingly allude is but rarely
indulged in by these gallant men when onlookers are wanting. Come, the
sky is already pale in the direction of the eastern mountains; it will
soon be day, and I desire before you are completely tired out to show
you one more sight.”

With these words Asmodeus took the Student by the hand and darted with
inconceivable rapidity over the roofs of the city until he came to a
particular spot which he had evidently marked in his flight.

“Cast your eyes,” he said, “upon this narrow but busy thoroughfare
beneath us. It is the only street in Madrid which at so late an hour is
still full of people and of business. It is called Fleet Street.”

“I have heard of it,” said the Student.

“No doubt,” said the Devil; “but what I particularly desire to point
out to you is a man whom you will see in his shirt-sleeves, seated upon
a swivel-chair and writing away for dear life, matter which will appear
to-morrow in the _Morning Post_.”

“Well,” said the Student, “what of that?”

“Can you guess what he is writing?” asked Asmodeus.

“That I am quite unable to do,” said the Student.

“It is,” said the Devil, “a series of satirical remarks upon the
frailties and follies of others--and yet he is a journalist!”




The Death of the Comic Author


A Comic Author of deserved repute was lodging at the beginning of this
month in a house with broken windows, in a court off the Gray’s Inn
Road.

He had undertaken to produce a piece of Humorous Fiction to the length
of 75,000 words.

The Comic Author, a man of experience (for this was his forty-seventh
book), had sat down to begin his task. He calculated how long it would
last him. He was good for 1500 words a day, if they were short words,
and even when doom or accident compelled him to the use of long ones he
could manage from 1163 to 1247.

The specification was lucid and simple. There was to be nothing in
the work that could offend the tenderness of the patriot nor the ease
of good manners, let alone the canons of decency and right living. A
powerful love interest which he was compelled under Clause VII of his
contract to introduce immediately after each of the wittiest passages
had been deftly woven into the fabric, and (as was clearly laid down
in Clause IX) no matter already published might appear in those virgin
pages. If any did so, be sure it was so veiled by the tranposition
of phrases and other slight changes of manner as to escape the
publisher’s eye.

So far so good. But upon the 13th of August, a day of great beauty, but
of excessive heat, the Comic Author, sitting at his desk, was struck by
Apollo, the God and patron of literary men.

It was the custom of the Comic Author, who was a teetotaler and a
vegetarian, to wear a soft shirt entirely made of wool and devoid of
a collar, which ornament, he was assured by Members of the Faculty,
exercised a prejudicial effect upon the health. It was equally his
custom to compose his famous periods with his back turned to the light.
This habit he had also adopted at the dictation of the Faculty, who
had proved to him beyond possibility of refutation that the human eye
is damaged by nothing more than by reading or writing with one’s face
towards the window. With his back, therefore, to the window in his room
(it was unbroken), it was the Comic Artist’s wont to sit at a plain
and dirty small deal table and express his mind upon paper, his head
reposing upon his left hand, his fountain pen grasped firmly in his
right, and his lips and tongue following the movement of his nib as it
slowly crawled over the page before him.

The Comic Author (again under the impulse of the Faculty) kept his
hair cut short at the back; to cut it short all over was more than his
profession would allow. You have, then, the Comic Author sitting at his
desk with his back to the unbroken window, his neck exposed from the
shortness of hair and the absence of collar, under the brilliant light
of the 13th of August.

A fourth condition must now be considered: by some physical action
never properly explained, glass, though it may act as a screen to
radiant heat, will also store and intensify the action of sunlight.
So that anything placed immediately beneath it upon a bright day will
(it is notorious) suffer or enjoy an effect of heat far greater than
that discoverable upon its outer side. The common greenhouse is a proof
of this. The Comic Author was therefore in a situation to receive the
full power of Apollo. It took the form of a sunstroke, and with his
story uncompleted, nay, in the midst of an unfinished phrase, he fell
helpless.

His Landlady, summoning a neighbour to her aid (for the charwoman never
stayed after ten o’clock, and it was already noon), dragged him to his
room and sent for the parish doctor, who, after a brief examination of
the patient, declared him to be in some danger; but the poor fellow was
not so far gone as to forget his obligations, and he murmured a few
words which, after some difficulty, they understood to be the address
of the publisher whom he would not for worlds have disappointed.
Imagining this address to be in some way connected with a pecuniary
advantage to herself, the Landlady sent to it immediate word of his
accident, and within half an hour a motor-car of surpassing brilliance
and immense power was purring at the door. From this vehicle descended
in a gentlemanly but commanding manner One who seemed far too great
for the humble lodging which he entered. And the Doctor, leaving his
patient for a moment, was pleased to receive the visitor in a lower
room, while the Landlady, who was also interested in the event,
listened with due courtesy in the passage without.

The Publisher (for it was he) learned with increasing concern the
desperate position of the Comic Author, and while he was naturally
chiefly concerned with the financial loss the little accident might
involve, it should be remembered to his credit that he made inquiries
as to the state of the patient and even asked whether he suffered
physical pain. Upon hearing that the Comic Author, though fuddled
by cerebral congestion, did undoubtedly suffer the Visitor’s brow
perceptibly darkened; he pointed out to the Doctor that if this
accident had but happened ten days later it would have had consequences
much less serious to himself.

The Doctor was eager to point out that the fault was none of his. He
had come the moment he had heard of the case, and, moreover, sunstroke
was a disease which betrayed itself by no premonitory symptoms. He
assured the Publisher that if the Comic Author’s survival could in any
way be of service to the firm he would do everything in his power to
save his life.

The Publisher replied, a little testily, that the value of the Comic
Author’s survival would entirely depend upon the talent remaining to
him after his recovery, and pointed out what the Doctor had overlooked,
that a sensational death, if it received due recognition from the
Press, often caused the works of the deceased to sell for a week or
more with exceptional rapidity.

He next asked whether the Comic Author had not left manuscripts, and
the Landlady was pleased to bring him not only all that lay upon the
deal table, but much more beside, and all his private correspondence
as well, which she found where she had often perused it, in various
receptacles of her lodger’s room.

The Publisher upon receiving these seemed to feel his position less
acutely, and sending the sheets out at once to his secretary in the car
(with instructions that those stories or sketches hitherto unpublished
should be carefully noted) he resumed his conversation with the medical
man. He was first careful to ask how long cases of this sort when they
proved fatal commonly endured, and expressed some relief at hearing
that certain benignant exceptions had lingered for several days. He
was further assured that lucid intervals might be counted on, and in
general he discovered that the lines upon which the story had been
intended to proceed might be recovered from the lips of the dying man
before he should exchange the warm and active existence of this world
for the Unknown Beyond.

He re-entered his motor-car, therefore, with a much lighter heart,
promising to send an Expert Stenographer who should take down the last
and necessary instructions from the lips of Genius. The motor-car
then left that court off the Gray’s Inn Road where the tragedy was in
progress, and swept westward to the larger atmosphere of St. James’s.

At this point again, when the activity and decision of one master brain
seemed to have saved all, Fate intervened. The Expert Stenographer,
having lacked regular employment for nearly eighteen weeks, was
so overjoyed at learning the news and the price attached to his
immediate services, that he could not resist cheerful refreshment and
conversation with friends in celebration of the occasion. He reached
the Gray’s Inn Road, therefore, somewhat late in the day; he was
further delayed by a difficulty in discovering the house with broken
windows which had been indicated to him, and when he entered it was to
receive the unwelcome news that the Comic Author was dead.

The Doctor, whose duties had already for some hours called him to other
scenes where it was his blessed mission to alleviate human suffering,
was not present to confirm the sad event, and the Expert Stenographer,
who could not believe that he had been baulked of so unexpected a
piece of fortune, insisted upon proof which the Landlady was unable
to afford. He even sat for some few moments by the side of the Poor
Lifeless Clay in the vain hope that some further indication as to the
general trend of the book might fall from the now nescient lips. But
they were dumb.

How many consequent misfortunes depended upon this untoward accident
the reader may easily guess. The Landlady, to whom the Comic Author
had owed thirty shillings for a month’s rent and service, was in a
very natural anxiety for some days, an anxiety which was increased by
the discovery that her former lodger had no friends, while his few
relatives seemed each to have, in their own small way, claims against
him of a pecuniary nature.

His dress clothes, upon which she had confidently counted, turned out
to belong to a costumier of the neighbourhood, who loudly complained
that he had had no notice of this intempestive demise, and was at least
a sovereign out of pocket by so awkward a conjunction; nor was he
appreciably relieved when it was pointed out to him that the suit would
at least carry no contagious disease.

The Stenographer, as I have already indicated, lost the remuneration
dependent upon his Expert Services, and was further at the charge of
the refreshment which he had foolishly consumed in anticipation of that
gain.

The Doctor, indeed, was not disappointed, for he had expected nothing,
but by far the worst case was that of the generous and wealthy man who
had been at all the risk of advertising, partly printing, and already
ordering the binding of the work which he now found himself at a loss
to produce.

There is no moral to this simple story: it is one of the many tragedies
which daily occur in this great city, and from what I know of the Comic
Author’s character, he would have been the last to have inflicted so
much discomfort had it in any way depended upon his own volition; but
these things are beyond human ordinance.




On certain Manners and Customs


I was greatly interested in the method of government which I discovered
to obtain in the Empire of Monomotapa during my last visit there. I
say “during my last visit” because although, as everyone knows, I have
repeatedly travelled in the more distant provinces of that State, I had
never spent any time to speak of in the capital until I delayed there
last month for the purpose of visiting a friend of mine who is one of
the State Assessors. He was good enough to explain to me many details
of their Constitution which I had not yet grasped, and I conceive
it--now that I have a full comprehension of it--to be as wise a method
of governing as it is a successful one.

I must first put before the reader the elements of the matter. Every
citizen in Monomotapa takes a certain fixed rank in the State; for
the inhabitants of that genial clime have at once too much common
sense and too strict a training to talk nonsense about equality or
any other similar metaphysical whimsey. Every man, therefore, can
precisely tell where he stands in relation to his fellows, and all
those heart-burnings and jealousies which are the bane of other States
are by this simple method at once exorcised. Moreover, the method by
which a man’s exact place is determined is simplicity itself, for it
reposes upon his yearly revenue; and there is a gradually ascending
scale from the poorest, whose revenue may not amount from all sources
to more than 40 Tepas a month, to the Supreme Council, the wealthier
members of which may have as much as 10,000,000 Tepas a month, or
even more. There is but one drawback to this admirably practical and
straightforward way of ordering the State, which is that by a very
ancient article of their religion the Monomotapians are each forbidden
to disclose to others what the state of their fortunes may be. It is
the height of impertinence in any man, even a brother, to put questions
upon the matter; all documents illuminating it are kept strictly
secret, and though religious vows and binding oaths are very much
disliked among this people, yet one is rigidly observed, which is that
forbidding the divulgence by a bank of the sums of money entrusted to
it by its clients. Certain rash spirits have indeed proposed to destroy
the anomaly and either to make some other standard arrange the order
of society (which is unthinkable) or else to allow questions of money
to be freely debated, and the incomes of all to be matter of public
comment.

Now, like many excellent and rational attempts at religious or social
reform, these propositions must wholly fail in practice. As for setting
up some other standard than that of wealth by which to decide the
importance of one’s fellow citizens, the Monomotapians very properly
regard such a proposal as fantastic to the point of buffoonery. Nor,
to do them justice, do those who propose the scheme seriously intend
this part of it. They rather put it forward to emphasise the second
half of their programme, which has much more to be said for it. But
here a difficulty arises of a sort that often upsets the calculations
of idealists, namely, that however much you change the laws you can
with more difficulty change the customs of the people, and though you
might compel all banking accounts to be audited, or even insist upon
every man making a public return of his income, yet it is certain that
the general opinion upon this matter would result, in practice, in much
the same state of affairs as they now have. Men would devise some other
system than that of banks; their returns would be false, and there
would be a sort of general unconscious conspiracy among all to support
fraud in this matter.

My host next explained to me the manner in which laws are made among
the Monomotapians and the manner in which they are administered. It
seems that by a fundamental rule of their Constitution no law may be
passed in less than twenty-five years, unless it can be proved to have
its origin in terror.

If indeed those who are the wealthiest and therefore the most important
in the State can prove to the satisfaction of all that they have gone
blind with panic, then indeed the passage of a law is permitted even
in a few hours. Thus, when a certain number of young gentlemen had
so far forgotten their good breeding as to torture by way of sport
considerable numbers of the poorer classes, one of these in his turn,
oblivious to the rules of polite behaviour, so far forgot himself as to
strike his young master in the face. It was under these circumstances,
when the greater part of the governing classes had fled abroad, or were
closely locked in behind their doors, that the “Tortures Restrictions
Bill” was passed; but this haste was even then regarded as somewhat
indecent, and it would have been thought more honourable to have
discussed the matter for at least two days. Nominally, however, affairs
of real importance cannot be legislated upon, as I have said, in less
than twenty-five years. It is customary for the Monomotapians first to
wait until some neighbouring State has attempted a particular reform.
When that reform has been working for some years, if it be successful
in its working, the wealthier Monomotapians begin to talk about it
according to set rules. And it is again a fundamental point in their
Constitution that one-half of those who so debate must be for, the
other half against the proposed change. The discussion is carried
on by some seventy or eighty men, of whom two-thirds at least must
possess a fortune of at least 1000 Tepas a month, but it is customary
to mix among them one or two men of exceptional poverty, as this is
imagined in some way or other to please the Gods. The middle class,
on account of their intolerable habit of referring to learned books
and to the results of their travel, are very properly excluded. These,
then, debate for a term of years, and when they are weary of it they
will very often begin to debate again. Meanwhile the institution or
the reform upon which their discussion has turned will have taken
root in those foreign countries which it is their pride to copy, and
they can at last be certain that in following suit Monomotapa will
have nothing to lose. When all this is decided a certain number of
men are set apart, the poorer of whom are given a sum of money and
the wealthier certain titles on condition that they vote in favour of
the change; while another body of men are set apart and rewarded in a
precisely similar manner for giving a pledge of the opposite sort. But
great care is taken that the first body shall be slightly larger than
the second, for by an unexplained decision of their priests the force
of a law depends upon the margin between the two bodies so chosen.
These electors once named are put into an exceedingly narrow passage
in which it would be difficult for any very stout person to move at
all. At the end of the passage doors still narrower open upon the
street, the door upon the left being used to record affirmative, that
upon the right negative votes. The whole mass, which consists of near
a thousand men, is then kindly but firmly pushed by Assistants of
the King (as they are called) until its last member has been squeezed
through one of the two doors. This process is immensely popular among
the Monomotapians, who will gather in crowds to cheer the wretched
men whom avarice or ambition has devoted to so pleasant a task. And
when they have come out, covered with sweat and perhaps permanently
affected in their hearts by the ordeal, they are very often granted
civic honours by their fellow-townsmen over and above the sums of money
or titles which they have already received. With such frenzied delight
do the Monomotapians regard this singular practice that even women have
lately petitioned to be permitted to join in the scrimmage. This they
will undoubtedly be granted in cases where they can prove a certain
wealth, for, indeed, there is no reason why an exercise of this sort
should be confined to one sex. But it is understood that a certain part
of the women of Monomotapia, many of them also wealthy, are willing to
pay money to prevent such a result, and if this indeed be the case a
very curious situation, almost unknown in the annals of Monomotapia,
will arise; for since all government is in the hands of the rich, it
is necessary that the rich should act together in serious affairs of
State. And what on earth will happen when one section of the wealthy,
whether men or women, are opposed to the actions of another section, it
would indeed be difficult to determine. Nor are the older men and the
more experienced without grave misgivings as to the issue of such an
unprecedented conflict.

I cannot conclude without telling you briefly the manner in which
their Kings are elected, for it reflects in every detail at once the
originality and the wisdom of this people.

There are in Monomotapa some three or four hundred public halls in
which is conducted the national sport, which consists in competitions
between well-known talkers as to who can talk the longest without
exhaustion, and it rapidly becomes known, through well-developed
agencies of information as well as by public repute, which individuals
have attained to the greatest proficiency in this regard. Sometimes
in the remotest province will arise a particular star, but more often
it is in the Metropolis or its neighbourhood that your really great
talkers can be found; a man in the tradition of that great King of the
last century who upon one occasion talked the clock round and was in
reward for that feat permitted to hold the Kingship for three terms in
succession.

When by a process of elimination the two strongest talkers have been
discovered, they are brought to the capital, set up upon a stage before
a vast audience of Assessors (of which my friend, as I have told you,
was one), and begin talking one against the other with great rapidity,
starting at a signal made by an official who is paid for this duty a
very high salary indeed. It may well be imagined that the interest
in the struggle grows keen after the first few hours have passed. The
panting breath, the discoloured cheeks, the drooping attitude of either
competitor, call forth cheers of encouragement from his supporters and
even murmurs of sympathy from his numerous judges. At last, it may be
in the sixth or the seventh hour, one of the two goes groggy--if I may
so express myself--he falters in his words, perhaps repeats himself,
passes his hand to his forehead or takes a drink of gin (which, from
its resemblance to water, is greatly favoured in these contests). Such
signals of distress are the beginning of the end. His successful rival,
straining himself to one last effort, will pour out a great string of
sentences of an approved pattern, dealing as a rule with the glories
and virtues of those who have listened to him, of their ancestry, and
their hold upon the Monomotapian State, and as the defeated competitor
falls lifeless to the floor this successful fellow is crowned amid the
applause of the vast assembly. I was at the pains to ask whether it was
necessary that these long harangues should make sense, for it seemed to
me that this added labour would very materially handicap many men who
might otherwise possess all the physical requirements of victory, and
I was free to add that it would seem to me, at least, as a foreigner,
very foolish to weigh down some fine athlete worthy of the Crown by
demanding of him the rare characteristics of the pedant. I was relieved
to hear that there was no obligation as to the choice of words used
or the order in which they were to be pronounced, saving that they
must be words in the vulgar tongue. But it seems, oddly enough, that
the trainers in this sport after generations of experience have
discovered that the competitors actually suffer less fatigue if they
will repeat certain set and ritual phrases than if they take refuge in
mere gibberish, just as men marching in step are said to suffer less
fatigue than men marching at ease. So at least I was assured, but my
insufficient acquaintance with the Monomotapian tongue forbade me to
make certain upon the matter.




The Statesman


                              “HÔTEL DE FERRAS, PARIS, _August 1, 1846_.

“My dear Father,--I got in here last night, after a very painful and
tiresome journey, at eleven o’clock. At least it was eleven o’clock
by Calais time, but they are so careless in this country about their
clocks that it would be very difficult to say what the right time
really was were I not able to consult the excellent chronometer
which you and Mamma were so kind as to give me after my success in
the Schools at Oxford this summer. I confess to the childishness of
having rung the chimes in it five or six times during the night to
while away the tedium of the journey in the Diligence from Beauvais.
Beauvais contains a really remarkable cathedral, but it is unfinished.
I notice, indeed, that many of the buildings undertaken by the French
remain in an incomplete condition. The Louvre, for instance (which is
so near this hotel, and the roofs of which I can see from my window),
would be a really fine building if it were completed, but this has
never been done, and the total effect is very distressing. I fancy it
is the numerous wars, in which the unhappy people have been engaged
at the caprice of their rulers, which have led to such deplorable
inconsequence. You have often warned me not to judge rashly upon
a first impression, but I confess the people seem to me terribly
poverty-stricken, especially in the country districts, where the
children may often be seen hobbling about in rough _wooden_ shoes,
without stockings to their feet. I say no more. I hope, dear Papa,
that when Parliament meets I shall be returned from Italy, and that I
shall be able to follow your action in the House of Commons. You know
how ardently I attend to the great struggle for Free Trade, to the
attainment of which, as of every form of Righteousness, you have ever
trained my early endeavours.

                                  “I am, your affectionate son,

                                                          “JO. BILSTED.”


                                  “HÔTEL DE FERRAS, _January 15, 1853_.

“My dear Julia,--I write you a hurried note to tell you that I have
left behind me, at Number Eleven, my _second beaver hat_. It is in
the hatbox in the white cupboard on the landing outside the nursery
door. Do not send anything else with it, as you were imprudent enough
to do last time I asked you to despatch luggage; the Customs are
very particular, and it is important for me just now, amid all these
political troubles, not to have what the French call ‘histoires.’ I
have really nothing to tell you more as to the condition of affairs,
nor anything to add to the brief remarks in my last letter. Were I not
connected by business ties with the Continent nothing should tempt
me to this kind of journey again. The train service is ridiculously
slow, and there is a feeling of distress and ill-ease wherever one
goes. It is truly amazing to me that any people, however stunted by
centuries of oppression, should tolerate the form of government which
has been recently set up by brute force in this unhappy country!
Meanwhile, though everyone discusses politics, nothing is _done_, and
the practical things of life are wholly neglected. The streets still
remain the narrow, ill-lit thoroughfares which would be a disgrace to
a small English provincial town, and the Army, so far as any civilian
can judge, is worthless. The men slouch about with their hands in
their pockets; the Cavalry sit their horses very badly; and even the
escort of the ‘Emperor’ would look supremely ridiculous in any other
surroundings. I have little doubt that if horse racing were more
thoroughly developed the Equine Race would improve. As it is, the
horses here are deplorable. I hope to persuade M. Behrens, who is one
of the few sensible and clear-sighted men I have met during this visit,
to accept our proposals, and I will write you further on the matter.

                                 “Your affectionate husband,

                                                           “JO. BILSTED.

“P.S.--I somewhat regret that you have accepted the invitation to the
Children’s Party. However, I never interfere with you in these matters.
I must, however, positively forbid your taking little Charles, who,
though he is eldest, suffers, I fear, from a weak heart, inherited from
your dear mother. I hope to return this day fortnight.”


                                      “HÔTEL DE FERRAS, _July 15, 1870_.

“My dear Julia,--It was a matter of great regret to me that you should
have been compelled to leave Paris a few days before myself; but I
shall follow to-morrow, and hope to be at Number Eleven by Thursday at
the latest. You will then have learned the terrible truth that war has
been finally declared. Nothing could have more deeply _im_pressed and
_op_pressed me at the same time. The overwhelming military power which
in better hands and under a proper guidance might have been turned to
such noble uses is to be hurled against the insecure combination of
German States which have recently been struggling, perfectly rightly
in my opinion, to become One Great Nation; for I make no doubt that
the lesser States will throw in their lot with Prussia: a menace to
one is a menace to all. I write from the bottom of my heart (my dear
Julia), when I say that I am convinced that after the first triumphs
of this Man of Blood our own Government will speak with no uncertain
voice, and will defend the new German people against the aggressor. It
was sufficiently intolerable that his Italian policy should have been
framed before our eyes, without intervention, and that the unity of
that ancient land should be deferred through his insolence. I have not
borne to visit Rome since the hateful presence of a foreign garrison
was established there. I will even go so far (perhaps against your own
better judgment) as to raise the matter in Parliament, but I greatly
fear that the House will not be sitting when the most drastic action
is needed. However, I repeat what I have said; I am confident in the
ultimate Righteousness of our intervention. I am therefore confident
that we shall not allow the further expansion of this Military Policy.

“As I write the garish, over-lit façades of this luxurious Babylon, its
broad, straight streets, with their monotonous vulgar splendour, and
the swarms of the military all round, fill me with foreboding. It would
be a terrible thing if this very negation of True Civilisation and
Religion were to triumph, and I am certain that unless we speak boldly
we ourselves shall be the next victim. But we _shall_ speak boldly....
My faith is firm.

                                 “Your affectionate husband,

                                                           “JO. BILSTED.

“P.S.--I am glad that Charles has got through his examination
successfully. I hope he clearly understands that I have no intention of
letting him be returned for Pensbury until a year has elapsed.”


                                      “HÔTEL DE FERRAS, _April 1, 1886_.

“My dear Charles,--It was a filial thought in you to send a letter
which would reach me upon my sixtieth birthday, and believe me that,
speaking as your father, I am not insensible to it.

“I wish you could come and see your mother and me if only for a few
hours, but I know that your Parliamentary duties are heavier than ever;
indeed, life in the House of Commons is not what it used to be! In my
time it was often called ‘the best club in Europe.’ Alas, no one can
say that now! Meanwhile your mother and I are very happy pottering
about our old haunts in Paris; but you have no idea, my dear Charles,
how changed it all is! You can, of course, remember the Second Empire
as a child, but to your mother and me, who were so intimate with
Paris during its most brilliant period, there is something tragic
in the sight of this great capital since the awful chastisement of
fifteen years ago. We ought not, of course, to judge foreign nations
too harshly, but after no inconsiderable experience of Parliamentary
life I cannot but have the most gloomy forebodings as to the future of
this nation. There seems no settled policy of any kind. Yesterday I
attended a debate in the Chamber, but the various speakers articulated
so rapidly that I was not able to follow them with any precision. It is
surely an error to pour out torrents of words in this fashion, and I
cannot believe there is any mature thought behind it at all. I regret
to say that the practice of duelling, though denounced by all the best
thought in the country, is still rife, and nowhere do occasions for its
exercise arise more frequently than in the undisciplined political
life of this capital. One must not, however, look only on the dark
side; there are certainly some very fine new buildings springing up,
especially in the American quarter towards the Arc de Triomphe. Of
course your mother and I keep to the old Hôtel de Ferras. We are at an
age now when one does not easily change one’s habits, but it seems to
me positively dingy compared with some of these new great palaces. It
is a comfort, however, to deal with people who know what an English
banknote is, and who will take an English cheque, and who can address
one properly on the outside of an envelope. It amused your dear mother
to see how quickly they seized the new honour which her Majesty has so
graciously conferred upon me.

                                 “Your affectionate father,

                                                          “JO. BILSTED.”


                                   “HÔTEL DE FERRAS, _October 19, 1906_.

“My dear Charles,--I cannot tell you how warmly I agree with your last
letter upon the state of Europe. I am an old man, I have seen many men
and things, and I have been particularly familiar with foreign policy
ever since I first entered the House of Commons, now nearly fifty years
ago, but rarely have I known a moment more critical than the present.
My one comfort lies in the fact that in spite of the divisions of
Party, the heart of the nation is still sound, and the leaven of common
sense in the electors will save us yet. I feel a shade of regret
sometimes to think that the division no longer retains its old name;
I should like to feel that, father and son, we had held it for three
generations, but though the name has changed, the spirit of the place
is the same.... I beg you to mark my words; I may say without boasting
that I have rarely been wrong in my judgment of foreign affairs. When
one sees things here one sometimes trembles for the future.

“This Hotel is not at all what it was. It is ill-kept and damp, and I
shall not return to it.

“Expect me in London before the end of the week.

                                                            “PENSHURST.”

  [Lord Penshurst died shortly after his return to London. He was
  succeeded by his son Charles, second Baron, but the Division is still
  represented by a member of the family in the person of Mr. George
  Bilstead, his second son, the husband of Mrs. Bilstead, and author of
  _The Coming Struggle in the Balkans_.]




The Duel


In the year 1895 of blessed memory there was living in the town of
Paris at the expense of his parents a young English gentleman of the
name of Bilbury; at least, if that were not his name his name was so
nearly that that it doesn’t matter. He spoke French very well, and had
for his age (which was twenty-four) a very good working acquaintance
with French customs. He was popular among the students with whom he
associated, and it was his especial desire not to seem too much of a
foreigner on the various occasions when French life contrasts somewhat
with that of this island. It was something of a little mania of his,
for though he was patriotic to a degree when English history or English
habits were challenged, yet it made him intolerably nervous to feel
exceptional or eccentric in the town where he lived. It was upon this
account that he fought a duel.

There happened to be resident in the town of Paris at the same time
another gentleman, whose name was Newman; he also was young, he
also was English, but whereas Mr. Bilbury was by genius a painter,
Mr. Newman was by vocation an engineer. And while Mr. Bilbury would
spend hours in the studio of a master whom (in common with the other
students) he despised, Mr. Newman was continually occupied in playing
billiards with his fellow students of engineering in the University.
And while Mr. Bilbury was spending quite twelve hours a day in finding
out how to make a picture look like a thing if you stood a long way
off from it (which is the end and object of his school in Paris), Mr.
Newman had already acquired the art of making a billiard ball come
right back again towards the cue after it had struck its neighbour. Mr.
Bilbury had learned how to sing in chorus with the other students songs
relating in no way to pictorial excellence; Mr. Newman had learned to
sing those songs peculiar to students of engineering, but relating in
no way to applied physics. In a word, these two young gentlemen had
never met.

But one day Mr. Bilbury, going arm-in-arm with three friends towards
the river, met upon the pavement of the Rue Bonaparte Mr. Newman in
much the same posture, but accompanied by a rather larger bodyguard. It
would have been astonishing to anyone little acquainted with the temper
of students in the University, and indeed it _was_ astonishing both to
Mr. Newman and to Mr. Bilbury, though they had now for some months been
acquainted with the inhabitants of that strange corner of the universe,
to see how this trifling incident provoked an altercation which in its
turn degenerated into a vulgar quarrel. Each party refused to give way
to the other, and the members of each began comparing the members of
the other to animals of every kind such as the pig, the cow, and even
certain denizens of the deep. In the midst of the hubbub Mr. Bilbury,
not to be outdone in the racy vigour of youth, shouted at Mr. Newman
(who for all he knew might have been a Russian revolutionary or a man
from St. Cyr) an epithet which he had come across in the contemporary
literature of the capital, and which he imagined to be of common
exchange among the merry souls of the University. To his surprise--nay,
to his alarm--a dead silence followed the use of this very humble and
ordinary word. Mr. Newman, to whom it was addressed, was not indeed
ignorant of its meaning (for it meant nothing in particular and was
offensive), but was astonished at the gravity of those round him when
the little epithet had been uttered. With a sense of surprise now far
exceeding that of Mr. Bilbury he saw his companions draw themselves
up stiffly, take off their eccentric felt hats with large sweeping
gestures, and march him off as stiff as pokers, leaving the Bilbury
group solemn with the solemnity of men who have a duty to perform.

That duty was very quickly accomplished. The eldest and most
responsible of the three friends told Bilbury very gently but very
firmly that there could be no issue but one to the scene which had just
passed.

“I am not blaming you, my dear John,” he said kindly (Mr. Bilbury’s
name was John), “but you know there can be only one issue.”

Meanwhile Mr. Newman’s friends, after maintaining their strict and
haughty parade almost the whole length of the Rue Bonaparte, broke
silence together, and said: “It is shameful, and you will not tolerate
it!” To which Mr. Newman replied by an assurance that he would in no
way fall beneath the dignity of the situation.

More than this neither Mr. Bilbury nor Mr. Newman knew, but they both
went to bed that night much later than either intended, and each felt
in himself a something of what Ruth felt when she stood among the alien
corn, or words to that effect.

And next morning each of them woke with the knowledge that he had some
terrible business on hand with some ass of a foreigner who had got
excited, or, to be more accurate, had suddenly stopped being excited
for wholly incomprehensible reasons at a particular moment in a lively
conversation. Both Mr. Newman and Mr. Bilbury were, I say, in this mood
when there entered to Mr. Newman in his room in the Rue des Ecoles
(which he could ill afford) two of his friends of the night before, who
said to him very simply and rapidly that it would be better for them
to act as his seconds as the others had chosen them as most fitted. To
this Mr. Newman murmured his adhesion, and was about to ask anxiously
whether he would soon see them again, when, with a solemnity quite out
of keeping with their usual good-fellowship, they bowed in a ritual
manner and disappeared.

Meanwhile a similar scene was taking place in the little fourth-floor
room which Mr. Bilbury occupied, and Mr. Bilbury, somewhat better
acquainted with the customs of the University, dismissed his two
friends with a little speech and awaited developments.

Before lunch the thing was arranged, and Mr. Newman, who was waiting in
a rather hopeless way for his friends’ return, was informed at about
twelve o’clock that all was settled; it was to be at the end of the
week, up in Meudon, in a field which belonged to one of his friends’
uncles. “We are less likely to be disturbed there,” said the friend,
“and we can carry the affair to a satisfactory finish.” Then he added:
“It has a high wall all round it.”

“But,” said the other second, interrupting him, “since we have chosen
pistols that will not be much good, for the report will be heard.”

“No,” said the first second in a nonchalant manner, “my uncle keeps
a shooting gallery and the neighbours will think it a very ordinary
sound. You had,” he explained courteously to Mr. Newman, “the choice of
weapons as the insulted party, and we chose pistols of course.”

“Of course,” said Mr. Newman, who was not going to give himself away
upon details of this kind.

“The other man’s seconds,” went on Mr. Newman’s friend genially,
“wanted swords, but we told them that you couldn’t fence; besides
which, with amateurs nothing ever happens with swords. And then,” he
continued, musing, “if the other man is really good you’re done for,
whereas with pistols there is always a chance.”

To Mr. Bilbury, equally waiting for the luncheon hour in some
gloominess of soul, the same tale was told, _mutatis mutandis_, as they
say in what is left of the classical school of the University. His
adversary had chosen pistols. “And you know,” said one of his seconds
to Bilbury sympathetically, “he had the right of choice; technically
he was the insulted party. Besides which, pistols are always better if
people don’t know each other.”

The other second agreed, and was firmly of the opinion that swords were
only for intimate friends or politicians. They also mentioned the field
at Meudon, but with this difference that it became in their mouths the
ancient feudal property of one of their set, and they were careful to
point out that the neighbours were all Royalists, devotedly attached to
the family, and the safest and most silent witnesses in the world.

For the remaining days Mr. Bilbury and Mr. Newman were conducted by
their separate groups of friends, the first to a shooting gallery near
Vincennes, the second to a shooting gallery near St. Denis. Their
experiments were thus conducted many miles apart: and it was just as
well. It was remarkable what an affluence of students came as the
days proceeded to see the exercise in martial sport of Mr. Newman. At
first from fifty to sixty of the students with one or two of the pure
mathematicians and three or four chemists comprised the audience, but
before the week was over one might say that nearly all the Applied
Physics and Positive Sciences of the University were crowding round
Vincennes and urging Mr. Newman to accurate and yet more accurate
efforts at the target. At St. Denis the number of artists increased in
a similar proportion, and to these, before the week was ended, were
added great crowds of poets, rhetoricians, and even mere symbolists,
who wore purple ties and wigs. These also urged Mr. Bilbury to add to
his proficiency; and sometimes that principal himself would shudder
to see a long-haired and apparently inept person with a greenish face
pick up a pistol with dreadful carelessness and put out the flame of a
candle at a prodigious distance with unerring aim.

When the great day arrived two processions of such magnitude as gave
proof of the latent wealth of the Republic crawled up the hill to
Meudon. The occasion was far too solemn for a trot, and two men at
least of those present thought several times uncomfortably about
funerals. I must add in connection with funerals that a large coffin
was placed upon trestles in a very conspicuous part of the field, into
which each party entered by opposite wooden gates which, with the high
square wall all round, quite shut out the surrounding neighbourhood.
The two groups of friends (each over a hundred in number), all dressed
in black and most of them in top-hats, retired to opposite corners of
the field, nor was there any sign of levity in either body in spite
of their youth; the four seconds, who were in frock-coats and full
of an unnatural importance, deposited upon the ground between them a
very valuable leather case which, when it was opened, discovered two
perfectly new pistols of a length of barrel inordinate even for the use
of Arabs, let alone for civilised men. These two were loaded in private
and handed to either combatant, and Mr. Bilbury and Mr. Newman, having
been directed each to hold the pistol pointed to the ground, were set
apart by either wall while the seconds proceeded to pace the terrain.
Mr. Newman remembered the cricket pitches of his dear home which
perhaps he would never see again; Mr. Bilbury could think of nothing
but a tune which ran in his head and caused him grave discomfort.

When the ceremony of the pacing was over the two unfortunate gentlemen
were put facing each other, but twisted, with the right side of the one
turning to the corresponding side of the other, so as to afford the
smallest target for the deadly missiles; and then one of the seconds
who held the handkerchief retired to some little distance to give the
signal.

It was at this juncture, as Mr. Newman and Mr. Bilbury stood with their
pistols elevated towards heaven, and waiting for the handkerchief
to drop, each concentrated with a violent concentration upon the
emotions of the moment, that a prodigious noise of hammering and
shouting was heard at one of the doors of the enclosure, and that three
gentlemen--the one wearing a large three-coloured sash, the like of
which neither Mr. Bilbury nor Mr. Newman had ever seen--entered, and
ordered the whole party to desist in the name of the law. So summoned,
the audience with the utmost precipitation climbed over the wall,
forced itself through the gates, and in every manner at its disposal
vanished. And the gentleman with the tri-coloured sash, sitting down
in the calmest manner upon one of the trestles and turning the coffin
over by way of making a table, declared himself a public officer, and
took notes of all that had occurred. It was interesting to see the
businesslike way in which the seconds gave evidence, and the courtesy
with which the two principals were treated as distinguished foreigners
by the gentleman with the three-coloured sash. He was young, like all
the rest, amazingly young for a public official of such importance, but
collected and evidently most efficient. When he had done taking his
notes he stood up in a half-military fashion, ranged Mr. Newman and
Mr. Bilbury before him, and very rapidly read out a series of legal
sentences, at the conclusion of which was a fine of one hundred francs
apiece, and no more said about the matter. Mr. Bilbury and Mr. Newman
were astonished that attempted homicide should cost so little in this
singular country. They were still more astonished to discover that
etiquette demanded a genial reconciliation of the two combatants under
such circumstances, and they were positively amazed to find after that
reconciliation that they were compatriots.

It was their seconds who insisted upon standing the dinner that
evening. The whole incident was very happily over save for one passing
qualm which Mr. Bilbury felt (and Mr. Newman also) when he saw the
gentleman, whom he had last met as the tri-coloured official of the
Republic, passing through the restaurant singing at the top of his
voice and waving his hand genially to the group as he went out upon the
boulevard.

But they remembered that in democracies the office is distinguished
from the man. Luckily for democracies.




On a Battle, or “Journalism,” or “Points of View”

  “_The art of historical writing is rendered the less facile in
  expression from I know not what personal differences which the most
  honest will admit into their record of events, and the most observant
  wilt permit to colour the picture proceeding from their pens._”
  (Extract from the Judicious Essay of a Gentleman in Holy Orders,
  author of _A History of Religious Differences_.)


I

FROM HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF TO THE MINISTER OF WAR
  OF HIS BROTHER THE EMPEROR OF PATAGONIA.

  (Begins)

I have the honour to report: Upon the morning of Sunday, the 31st,
the enemy attacked the left of my position in great force, a little
before dawn. I withdrew the XIth, XIIIth, and IInd Brigades, which were
here somewhat advanced, covering their retirement with detachments
from the First, the Thirty-seventh, and the Forty-second of the Line.
The retirement was executed in good order and with small loss, the
total extent of which I cannot yet determine, but of which by far the
greater part consists of men but slightly wounded. Several pieces which
had been irretrievably damaged were destroyed and abandoned. Upon
reaching a position I had determined in my general plan before leaving
the capital (see annexed sketch map A) the forces entrenched, defending
a line which the enemy did not care to attack. I have reinforced the
Brigade with two groups drawn from the Corps Artillery, and have
despatched all aids, medicaments, etc., required.

A simultaneous attack delivered upon the centre of my position was
repulsed, the enemy flying in the utmost disorder, and leaving behind
them two pieces of artillery and a colour, which last I have sent under
the care of Major the Duke of Tierra del Fuego to be deposited among
the glorious trophies that adorn the Military Temple.

By noon the action showed no further development. In the early
afternoon I determined to advance my right, largely reinforced from the
centre, which was now completely secure from attack. The movement was
wholly successful, and the result coincided exactly with my prearranged
plans. The enemy abandoned all this upper portion of the right bank
of the Tusco in the utmost confusion; his main body is therefore now
in full retreat, and there is little doubt that over and above the
decisive and probably final character of this success I shall be able
to report in my next the capture of many prisoners, pieces, and stores.
I congratulate His Majesty upon the conspicuous courage displayed in
every rank, and recommend for distinguished service the 1847 names
appended. His Majesty’s Government may take it that this action
virtually ends the war. (Ends.)


II

FROM FIELD-MARSHAL THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS THE LORD DUKE OF RAPELLO TO
  THE MINISTER OF WAR OF THE REPUBLIC OF UTOPIA.

(Begins) Upon the morning of Sunday, the 31st, in accordance with the
plan which I had drawn up before leaving the capital, I advanced my
right a little before dawn against the left of the Imperial position,
which was very strongly posted upon the edge of a precipitous cliff,
one flank reposing upon an impassable gulf and the other on a deep and
torrential river. The enemy resisted with the utmost stubbornness, but
was eventually driven from his positions, though these were strongly
entrenched after more than a week’s work with the spade. He abandoned
the whole of his artillery. A great number of prisoners have fallen
into my hands, and the loss of the enemy in killed alone must amount to
many thousands. Particulars will follow later, but I am justified in
saying that the left wing of the enemy is totally destroyed. Meanwhile,
General Mitza, most ably carrying out my instructions, contained the
enemy upon the centre without loss, save for one pom-pom and a Maxim,
which were shattered by a chance shell early in the action. The 145th
also report the loss by burning of a waggon containing their Colours,
eighteen cans of tinned beef, and the Missionaries’ travelling library.
Somewhat later in the day the enemy attempted to retrieve a hopeless
position by advancing his right in great force. I had been informed of
the movement (which was somewhat clumsily executed) in ample time, and
withdrew the petty outposts I had thrown out for observation in his
neighbourhood. There is little doubt that the enemy will now attempt
to withdraw his main force along the line of the Tusco Valley, but a
glance at the map will show that this retreat is closed to him by my
occupation of the line X Y (see annexed sketch map), and he is now
virtually contained.

I congratulate the Government of the Republic upon the signal and
decisive victory our troops have driven home, and I may confidently
assure them that it is tantamount to the successful ending of the
present campaign. Appended is a list of officers recommended for
distinguished service, which I have made as brief as possible, and
which I particularly beg after so glorious a day may not be curtailed
by political intrigues, of which I have already been compelled to
complain. (Ends.)


III

EXTRACT FROM A LEADING ARTICLE IN ONE OF THE MOST REPUTABLE
  NEWSPAPERS OF THE CAPITAL OF PATAGONIA UPON MONDAY THE 1ST.

“We have always maintained in these columns that His Imperial Majesty’s
Government was amply justified in undertaking the short, and now
happily successful, campaign in which it was proposed to chastise the
so-called ‘Republic’ of Utopia, whose chronic state of anarchy is a
menace to the peace and prosperity of civilisation. It is a pleasure to
be able to announce this morning what was already a foregone conclusion
in the minds of all educated men. The enemy’s forces--if we may dignify
them by that name--have been overwhelmed at the first contact, and it
is now only a question of whether they will be utterly disorganised
during retreat or will prefer to capitulate while some semblance of
discipline remains to them. We must, however, implore public opinion
to preserve at this juncture the calm, sane courage which is among the
best traditions of our race, and we reiterate the absolute necessity of
abstaining from any wild cat policy of annexation. It should be enough
for us that the ‘Republic’ of Utopia will now exist in name only, and
has ceased for ever to be a menace to its neighbours. A specially
gratifying feature in the news before us is the skill and mastery
displayed by the Prince, whose advanced years (we blush to remember it)
had been the cause of so much secret criticism of his command.”


IV


EXTRACT FROM THE LEADING ARTICLE OF THE MOST POPULAR JOURNAL OF THE
  UTOPIAN REPUBLIC, SAME DATE.

“Citizens, awake! All ye that kneel, arise! Ares (the god of battles)
has breathed upon the enemy, and he has been destroyed! The cowardly
mercenaries who handle the gold of Patagonia have broken and fled
before our troops upon the very first occasion when their reputed
valour was put to the test. The glorious and aged Mitza has guaranteed
that the next news will be that of their complete submission. It will
then be for the Government to decide whether our victorious lads should
complete a triumphant march upon the Patagonian capital or whether it
may not be preferable to wring from that corrupt and moribund society
such an indemnity as shall make them for ever impotent to disturb the
frontiers of free men.”


V

EXTRACT FROM THE NOTE OF THE MILITARY EXPERT OF THE AFORESAID WEIGHTY
  AND REPUTABLE JOURNAL OF THE CAPITAL OF PATAGONIA: A JOURNALIST.

“It is not easy to reconstruct from the fragmentary telegrams that
have come through from the front the tactical nature of the great
and happily decisive victory upon the Tusco which has just ended
the campaign. So far as one can judge, His Royal Highness the
Commander-in-Chief lay _en biais_, reposing his right upon the river
itself and his left upon the Cañon of the Encantado, his centre
somewhat advanced ‘in gabion,’ his pivot points refused, and his right
in double concave. Upon a theory of Ballistic and Shock, which all
those who have read His Royal Highness’s daring and novel book of
thirty years ago, entitled ‘Cavalry in the Field,’ will remember, our
Corps Artillery and reserve of horse were doubtless some miles in the
rear of the firing line. The enemy, with an amazing ignorance of the
elements of military knowledge, appear to have attacked the _left_ of
this position. It is an error to which we should hardly give credence
were not the telegrams so clear and decisive on this point. The reader
will immediately grasp the obvious result of such a piece of folly. His
Royal Highness promptly refused _en potence_, wheeled his left centre
round upon the Eleventh Brigade as a pivot, and supported this masterly
move by the sudden and unexpected appearance of no less than thirty-six
guns, the converging fire of which at once arrested the ill-fated and
mad scheme of the enemy. The rest is easily told. Our centre retaining
its position, in spite of the burning zeal of the men to take part in
the general advance, the right, which had not yet come into action, was
thrown forward with a sudden, sweeping movement, and behind its screen
of Cavalry debouched upon the open plateau which dominates the left
bank of the Tusco. After that all was over; the next news we shall have
will certainly be the capitulation of our broken foe, unless, indeed,
he prefer to be destroyed piecemeal in a scattered flight.”


VI

EXTRACT FROM THE NOTE OF THE MILITARY EXPERT OF THE POPULAR JOURNAL
  OF UTOPIA: FORMERLY A SERGEANT IN THE COMMISSARIAT DEPARTMENT OF THE
  ARMY.

“It is not easy to reconstruct from the fragmentary telegrams which
have come through from the front the tactical nature of the great and
happily decisive victory upon the Tusco. Some points are obvious. In
the first place, it was ‘a soldiers’ battle.’ Gallant old Mitz (to whom
all honour is due) drew up the line of battle, but the hard work was
done by Bill Smith and Tom Jones, and the rest in the deadly trenches
above the right bank. It seems probable that all the heaviest work was
done on our right, and therefore against the enemy’s left, unless,
indeed, the private telegram received by a contemporary be accurate,
which would make out the heaviest work to have been on our left
against the enemy’s right. The present writer has an intimate personal
knowledge of the terrain, over every part of which he rode during the
manoeuvres of five years ago. It is sandy in places, interspersed
with damp, clayey bits; much of it is undulating, and no small part
of it rocky. Trees are scattered throughout the expanse of the now
historic battlefield; their trunks afford excellent cover. The River
Tusco, as our readers will have observed, is the dominating feature of
the quadrilateral, which it cuts _en échelon_. The Patagonians boasted
that though our army was acknowledgedly superior to their own, their
commercial position would enable them to weary us out in the field.
Yes, I don’t think!”


VII

EXTRACT FROM A LECTURE DELIVERED BY A PROFESSOR OF MILITARY HISTORY
  ONE HUNDRED YEARS LATER, IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LIMA.

“Among the minor factors of this complicated situation was the
permanent quarrel between Patagonia and Utopia, and though it has been
much neglected by historians, and is, indeed, but a detail upon the
flank of the great struggle of the coalition, a few moments must be
given to the abortive operations in the Tusco Valley. They appear to
have been conducted without any grasp of the main rules of strategy,
each party advancing in a more or less complete ignorance of the
position of the other, their communications parallel, their rate of
advance deplorably slow, and neither possessing the information nor the
initiative to strike at his opponent during a three-weeks’ march, at no
point of which was either army so much as fifty miles from the other.
These farcical three weeks ended in a sort of skirmish difficult to
describe, and apparently confined to the extreme left of the Patagonian
forces. The Utopians here effected some sort of confused advance,
which was soon checked. At the other end of the line they retired
before a partial movement of the enemy, effected without any apparent
object, and certainly achieving no definite result. The total losses
in killed and wounded were less than seven per cent of those engaged.
The next day negotiations were entered into between the two generals;
their weary discussion occupied a whole week, during which hostilities
were suspended. The upshot of the whole thing was the retirement of
the Patagonian Army under guarantees, and in consideration of the
acceptation of the old frontier by the Utopian Government. Politically
the campaign is beneath notice, as both territories were absorbed six
months after in the recasting of the map after the Treaty of Lima, and
the policing of them handed over to the now all-conquering Northern
Power. Even as military history the operations deserve little more
than passing notice, save, perhaps, as an example of the gross yet
ever recurrent folly of placing numerically large commands in the
hands of aged men. Mitza, upon the occasion of this fiasco, was over
seventy-five years of age and long in his dotage, while the Prince
of the Blood who had been chosen to lead (nominally, at least) the
Patagonian Army was, apart from his increasing years, a notorious
drunkard, and what is perhaps worse from a military point of view,
daily subject to long and complete lapses of memory.”




A Descendant of William Shakespeare


It was during the early months of 1909 that I first became acquainted
with a descendant of William Shakespeare the great dramatist, who
happened at that moment to be in London.

This gentleman (for he was of the male sex) was one of our American
visitors, and was stopping at the Carlton Hotel. His name, as he
assured me, Charlemagne K. Hopper. He resided, when he was at home, in
the rapidly rising township of Bismarckville, Mo., where he added to a
considerable private income the profits of an extensive corn business,
dealing in wheat both white and red, and of both spring and autumn
varieties, maize or Indian corn, oats, rye, buckwheat of every variety,
seed corn, and bearded barley; indeed, no kind of cereal was unfamiliar
to this merchant. His quick eye for the market and the geniality of his
character had (he convinced me) made him friends in every circle. He
has the entrée to the most exclusive coteries of Albany and Buffalo,
and he had that season been received by the patrons of literature in
Park Lane, Clarges Street, and Belgrave Square.

Mr. Hopper’s descent from the Bard of Avon has been established but
quite recently: these lines are perhaps the first to lay it before the
public, and the discovery is an excellent example of the way in which
two apparently insignificant pieces of evidence may, in combination,
suggest an historical discovery of capital importance.

It is, of course, common knowledge that Lady Barnard of Abington was
a lineal descendant of William Shakespeare. She died (without issue,
as was until recently supposed) at the end of the seventeenth century.
But two almost simultaneous finds made in the early part of the present
year have tended to modify the old-established conviction that this
lady was the last descendant of the poet.

The first of these finds was made by Mr. Vesey, of the British Museum,
well known for his monograph on _The Family of Barnard of Abington_. It
consisted in a small diary or notebook belonging to the Lady Barnard in
question, in which, among other entries, was the record of the payment
of twenty guineas made to a “Mrs. M.” just before Christmas of the
year 1678. Mr. Vesey published this document in pamphlet form at the
beginning of March, 1908.

In the April number of _Cambridgeshire Notes and Queries_ Major Pepper,
of Bellevue Villa, Teversham (not far from the Gog Magog Hills),
published, as a matter of curiosity, a letter which he had purchased
in a sale of MSS., but only so published on the chance that it might
have an interest for those who follow the history of the county. It
was a letter from one Joan Mandrell, the governess of Anne Hall,
praying her correspondent to send “twenty guineas for the payment of
rent.” The interest of this document to the students of local history
lay in the fact that this Anne Hall was the ancestress of the Pooke
family. Joan Mandrell’s letter was addressed upon the back of the
sheet, though the name of the addressee was no longer decipherable,
but the letters “...bington Hall” were, and are, clearly legible, as
also the date. The letter further contains a minute description of
Anne Hall’s return to London from a foreign school and of the writer’s
devotion to the addressee, whom she treats throughout as mother of the
young woman committed to her care. This Anne Hall later married Henry
Pooke, whose son Charles made his fortune in politics under Walpole’s
administration, founding the family and estate of Understoke, which is
so familiar to every Cambridgeshire man.

More than one student noted the coincidence between these two
publications appearing but a fortnight apart; and at the end of May
a paper was already prepared to be read to the Genealogical Society
showing that the lineage of the poet had been continued in the Pookes.

So far the matter was of merely antiquarian interest, for Charles
Pooke’s great grandson, General Sir Arthur Pooke, had died in 1823 at
Understoke without issue. It was, however, of some importance to all
those who care for the literary history of their country to know that
the blood of the poet could be traced so far.

Just before the paper was read a further discovery came in to add a
much greater and more living interest to the matter.

Mr. Cohen, a charming and cultivated genealogist, whose business is
mainly with America and the Colonies, had been for some months actively
engaged for Mr. Hopper in tracing the arms of his, Mr. Hopper’s,
maternal grandfather--a Mr. Pooke. When Mr. Cohen became acquainted
with the facts mentioned above he cabled to Mr. Hopper, who sent
by return of post copies of certain family documents which clearly
proved that this Mr. Pooke was identical with a younger brother of Sir
Arthur. This younger brother was an erratic and headstrong lad who had
enlisted in early youth under Cornwallis, and had been killed, as it
was believed, at Yorktown. He was as a fact wounded and made prisoner;
he was not killed. He was released at the Peace of 1783, preferred
remaining in the New World to facing his creditors in the Old, married
the daughter of Peter Kymers, of Orange, N.J., and soon afterwards
went West. In 1840 his only daughter Cassiopea, who was then keeping a
small store in Cincinnati, married the Rev. Mr. Aesop Hopper, a local
minister of the Hicksite persuasion. Charlemagne K. Hopper is the only
issue of that marriage.

The genealogy stands thus:


  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
    [+]1616 | (the Immortal Bard)
            |
         Susannah=+=Dr. John Hall
                  |
  Elizabeth Lady Barnard (of Abington)
                  |
              Anne Hall=+=Henry Pooke
              ([+]1703) |
                        |
            Charles Pooke (First Bart.)
               [+]1772  |
                        |
        +---------------------+-------------------+
        |                     |                   |
     William          Gen. Sir Arthur Pooke   Henry Pooke=+=Maria Kymers
  (died in infancy)        o.s.p. 1823         [+]1830    |
                                                          |
                                  Rev. Aesop Hopper=+=Cassiopea Pooke
                                      [+]1883       |    [+]1902
                                                    |
                                           CHARLEMAGNE K. HOPPER

This family tree is now so well established that a full publication
of the lineage, with a commentary upon the whole romantic story, is
about to appear in one of the reviews from the pen of “Thersites,” a
pseudonym which, as many of our readers are aware, barely hides the
identity of one of our best-known experts upon Foreign Affairs.[1]

Mr. Hopper did not remain in London beyond the close of the season.
He had proposed to leave for Biskra a week or so after I made his
acquaintance, but the change in the weather decided him to go no
farther south than Palermo, whence he will return by Naples, Rome,
Assisi, Genoa, and Boulogne, visiting on the way the quaint old city
of Strasbourg. He will reach England again some time in the month of
April, 1910, and on his return he proposes to devote some part of
his considerable fortune to the erection of a suitable monument at
Stratford-on-Avon in memory of his great ancestor. This generous gift
will be accompanied by certain conditions, but there is little doubt
that the town will accept the same, and that a fine fountain surrounded
with symbolical figures of Justice, Prudence, and Mercy, and adorned
with medallions of Queens Elizabeth and Victoria, George Washington and
President Roosevelt, will soon adorn the quiet little Warwickshire town.

Mr. Hopper also proposes to found a Shakespeare Scholarship at
Sidney-Sussex College in Cambridge, and another at Wadham College in
Oxford, each of the value of £300 a year, on the model of the Rhodes
Scholarships, such scholarships to be granted not merely for book work
but for business capacity and physical development. He has also planned
a Chair for the propagation of Shakespearean knowledge in Glasgow, and
he will endow a Reader in Shakespeare to the University of Aberdeen.

Mr. Hopper is himself no mean _littérateur_, though a characteristic
modesty has hitherto restrained him from publishing his verse, whether
rhyme, blank, or in sonnet form. It is possible that now he is
acquainted with his great descent his reluctance may be overcome and
he may think better of this decision. I may add that Mr. Hopper places
no credence in the Baconian theory, and hopes by diligent search among
his family papers to prove the authenticity of at least the five major
tragedies and _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_.

Mr. Hopper is a total abstainer; he neither smokes nor chews; his
religious views, always broad and tolerant, incline him strongly
towards the New Theology, and, in common with many other men of
exceptional intelligence, he has been profoundly affected by the
popular translation of Dr. Haeckel’s _Riddle of the Universe_.

Though delighting in social intercourse, Mr. Hopper has the true
gentleman’s instinct against being lionised, and in particular stands
in dread of the Duchess of Dundee. He has therefore begged me to
insist as little as possible on his identity in anything I thought it
my duty to record in print upon so interesting a matter, and I have so
far acceded to his request as to have refrained from publishing these
lines until he had left our shores; but I make little doubt that on his
return in the spring this missing link between the two branches of the
Anglo-Saxon kin cannot but receive the public recognition he deserves.




On the Approach to Western England


How difficult it is to say what one really feels about the landscapes
and the countrysides and the subtle souls of Europe! I think that all
men who are of European blood feel those countrysides and the soul of
them very strongly; but I think that they feel as I feel now, as I
write, a difficulty of expression. There is something in it like the
difficulty of approaching a personality. One may admire, or reverence,
or even love, but the personality is different from one’s own; it has
a chastity of its own that must be respected, it has its boundaries
and its honour, and one always fears that one will transgress such
boundaries if one so much as speaks of the new thing one has come upon
and desired to describe.

With distant travel it is not so. One comes far over seas to a quite
strange land and one treats it brutally. One’s appreciation is a sort
of conquest; and you will note that those who speak of the Colonies,
or of America, or of Africa, or of Asia speak of them with a hard
intolerance as of something quite alien, or with a conventional set of
phrases, as of something not worth the real expression of emotion. Now
it is not so with our ancient provinces of Europe.

A man coming out of the Cis-Alpine Gaul into old Italy across the
Apennines feels something; indeed he feels it! What it is he feels very
few men have written down; none has said it fully. You get out of one
thing into something other when you climb up out of the Valley of the
Parma and cross the High Apennines and look southward into the happy
Garfagnana, and hear the noise of the little Serchio beginning in its
meads. In the same way no one has described (to my knowledge at least)
that shock of desolation and yet of mystery which comes upon a man when
he crosses the River Couesnon and passes from Normandy into Brittany.
Normandy is rich, Brittany is poor. Normandy loves ritual, Brittany
religion. Normandy can make things, Brittany prayers. Normandy lives
by Brittany in the matter of the soul, Brittany not by Normandy in the
matter of the body. What Norman ever gave a Breton anything? You cross
that river and everything changes. The men and women have dreamier
eyes, the little children play more wonderfully, everybody is poor.

Or, again, the passage from the hard industry of the Lancashire Plain
suddenly on to the moors, where the farming men and women are so quiet
and silent and self-respectful and seem so careful rather to preserve
what they own than to add to it. Or, again, the startling passage
over Carter Fell from the Englishmen of Rede-Dale to the Scotchmen of
Jedburgh; or the sharp passage from the violent, active, sceptical,
cruel, courageous, well-fed, ironical Burgundians into the gentle
Germans of the Vosges: here is a boundary which is not marked in any
political way, and yet how marked it is!

Now in England we have many such approaches and surprises. I will not
speak of that good change which comes upon a man as he travels south
from Victoria Station and hears, almost at the same time that he first
smells earth, the South Country tongue; nor will I speak of that other
change which perhaps some of my readers know very well, the change from
the active and grasping Cockney into the quiet tenacity of East Anglia.
It is not my province--but if I am not wrong one strikes it within half
an hour in the fast expresses--these people push with quants, they sail
in wherries, they inhabit flat tidal banks, they are at peace. Nor will
I here speak of the Marches and how, between a village and a village,
one changes from the common English parish with the Squire’s house and
the church and the cottages and all, into the hard slate roofs and the
inner flame of Wales. Rather I would speak of something the boundary
of which has never yet been laid down, but which people call (I think)
“The West Country.”

       *       *       *       *       *

One never knows, when one is tackling a thing like this, where one
should first begin to tackle it, or by what end one should take it.
Every man according to his own study, every man according to his own
bent or accident of experience, takes it by his own handle, and the
one man speaks of the language, the other of the hills, another of the
architecture, another of the names. For my part I would desire to speak
of all.

When one gets over a certain boundary one is in a peculiar district
of this world, a special countryside of Europe, a happy land with a
conviction and a tradition of its own which may not have a name, but
which is in general the West Country, and which by its hills and by its
men and women convinces any true traveller at once of its personality.
More than one man after a dreary wandering southwards through the
Midlands has walked by night up one of its fresh streets to an inn and
cried: “What! Have I come upon Paradise?” And this feeling comes also
when one has climbed up the Cotswold through the little places of stone
and suddenly sees the valley floor of the Severn so full of orchards,
or has come over the flat deserts of the Upper Thames and had revealed
to him the Golden Valley; or, after plodding through Wiltshire, has
smelt an air which told him that not far off were the heavy tides of
that haunted sea which runs between the Welsh hills and the peninsula
of Cornwall and Devon. Men are lost in these seas and are saved in them
perpetually as by miracles: I can appeal, in this print, to how many?
They have been saved by the miracle of that water. Here Arthur was
cast up by the waves: on to that flat salt, in its calm, full of mists,
looked out those who gave us our legend of his Court.

The boundary into this particular land is not only fetched by men on
foot; in no matter what kind of travel one pursues, one recognises that
boundary in a flash as one traverses it. It is not only the orchards,
nor the abrupt and pointed hills, nor those domestic towns, happy with
memories, nor those clear waters, nor those meadows, bounded by careful
walls of stone, but something much more which tells one that one has
got into the enchanted land. That spirit in it which made the stuff of
our early history, which gave us the landing of Joseph of Arimathea and
the glorious bush of Glastonbury and the cycle of the Round Table and
those good verses with regard to passion unrestrained:

  ... well you wot that of such life
  There comes but sore battaille and strife
  And blood of men and hard Travail....

And the prophecies of Merlin, and the story of Tristan and Iseult and
all the vision of immortality and of resurrection inhabits it still.

I never can believe (I speak for myself alone) that man can be
dissociated from his earth any more than I can believe that the soul
can be dissociated from the body. When men say to me that there is no
soul, they can go on saying. But when men say that the soul can neglect
the body then there is matter for argument; and when the argument is
finished one finds it is not so. Now thus it is with the earth that
breeds us and into which if we are content to die at home (and since
we must die somewhere, better die there) we should at last return. The
landscapes of Europe make European men, and it is not for nothing that
the climate and the shapes of the hills and the nature of the building
stuff change just where man changes.

There is enchantment upon every high place of England, but the
enchantment of the Devonshire Moors and of the Tors to the North and
upwards from them is different from the enchantment of the Downs. There
is a great delight in the proper fireplaces of the English people, but
who, thoroughly alive, could mistake a fireplace in the West Riding for
a fireplace on the Western Rother or either of these for a fireplace
a little before Sherborne in the tumbles and the hollows where Dorset
and Somerset meet? There is a richness of the speech and a contentment
of the tongue which any man from the new countries might think common
to all English agricultural men: yet there was a man from Sussex who,
hearing the Sussex tongue in the Choughs at Yeovil, felt himself indeed
come home. Our provinces differ very much.

I have sometimes wondered whether in the process of time these little
intimate differences of ours will survive. I wish they would! I wish
they would, by the Lord! The Greeks were a little people, yet their
provinces have survived, and the contempt that Aspasia felt for the
Peloponnesus is (or should be) yet recorded. The hill tribes behind
the Phoenician coast were a little people, but the fame of their
religion, of their civil wars, has survived that of the merchants of
Tyre. Rome, Veii, and the others were little places like Arundel and
Pulborough, quite close together; but they were talked of, and men know
much of them to-day.

I could wish the differences of this island were so known and that
people coming from a long way off would be humble and learn those
differences. Surely a nation grows great in this way, by many provinces
reacting one upon the other, recognised by the general will, sometimes
in conflict with it. At any rate the West Country is a province of
Europe; no one can get into it without touching his youth again and
putting his fingers to earth, and getting sustenance from it, as a man
does when he turns at the turning point of a race and touches earth
with his fingers and is strong again to spring forward.




The Weald


Among the changes that have come upon England with the practice and
facility for rapid travel many would put first the conquest (some would
call it the spoiling) of little-known and isolated stretches of English
landscape; and men still point out with a sort of jealous pride those
districts, such as the upper Cotswolds, which modern travel has not
disturbed. It seems to me that there is another feature attaching to
the facility for travel, and that is this, that men can now tell other
men what their countrysides are like; men can now compare one part of
England with another in a way that once they could not do, and this
facility in communication which so many deplore has so much good about
it at least, in that it permits right judgments. There have been men in
the past who have travelled widely for the mere pleasure of seeing many
parts of their own country--Cobbett was one--but they were rare. As the
towns grew, commercial travelling led men only to the towns, but now
the thing is settling down. Men travel everywhere, all kinds of men,
and no part of England remains of which a man can say that he loves it
without knowing why he loves it, or that its character is indefinable.
So it is with the Weald.

All that roll of land which lies held between and above the chalk of
South-Eastern England, the clay and the sand, and the uncontinuous
short trees, the muddy little rivers, the scattered homesteads, the
absence of levels, and almost the absence of true hills, the distant
prospects northwards and southwards of quite another land, the blue
lines and naked heights a day’s journey away against the sky--all that
is the Weald. And it runs from the place where the two lines of chalk
meet in Hampshire beyond Selborne, and beyond Petersfield, right away
to the sea which it sweeps upon in a grand curve, between Pevensey
(which was once the chief port of the Weald) and the heights round
Hastings: for though these heights are in a manner part of the Weald,
yet between them and the chalk again by Folkestone no true Wealden
country lies.

Unless a man understands the Weald he cannot easily write about the
beginnings of England, and yet historians have not understood it.
Only the men mixed into it and married with it or born upon it have
understood it, and these, I say, until lately were not permitted by
constant travel that judgment by analogy and by contrast which teaches
us the true meaning of things that we had hitherto only instinctively
known. Now a Wealden man can say certain things about his countryside
which are of real value to history and perhaps to politics as well; at
any rate, to politics in that larger sense of patriotism intelligently
appreciating the future of one’s own land. Thus the Wealden man, now
that he knows so much else in England, can tell the historian that the
Weald was never the impenetrable forest which historians would make of
it. It lay in a barrier between the ports of the Channel and the Thames
Valley. But the barrier was not uninhabited; it was not impassable.
Its scattered brushwood was patchy, its soil never permanently marshy
nor ever for long distances difficult for a mounted man or a man on
foot. The Weald from the very beginning had homesteads in it, but it
had not agglomerations of houses, nor had it parishes save in very few
places. If you look at the map now you can see how the old parishes
stretch northward and southward in long strips from the chalk and
loam country up towards the forest ridge which is the centre of the
Weald. Those long strips were the hunting rights of the village folk
and their lords. Of some parishes carved out of the central Weald we
can accurately tell the origin. We know that they were colonised as it
were, cleared, and had their church built for them in the great spurt
of civilisation which marked the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Men
would understand the early history of the Weald better, and with it the
early military history of South-Eastern England, if they would take
one of the old forest paths--as that from Rusper, for instance, which
works its way down, now as a metalled road, now as a green lane, now as
a mere footpath with right of way, past the two old “broad” fords on
the upper Arun and the marshy land east of Pulborough until it gets to
Roundabout, and so to Storrington. All the history of communications in
the Weald is exemplified in such a journey--and it is a journey which,
though it is little more than twenty miles in length, takes quite a
day. You have the modern high road, the green lane of the immediate
past, and in places a mere track of remote antiquity. You see just
how difficult it is to traverse the clay, how the occasional knobs of
sand relieve your going; you can notice the character of the woodland
where it is still untouched, and if you are wise you will notice one
thing above all, and that is the character of the water. Now it is
this which explains the Weald. Many bad bits of clay in Europe have
formed highways for armies--for instance, all that rotten land in the
great bend of the Loire which the Romans called the _Solitarium_, and
which the French called the _Sologne_. But the Weald differs from most
others in this, that good and plentiful water is hard to find. It is
not the muddiness of the streams that is the chief defence of the place
against human travel and habitation; it is the way in which, when rain
has fallen and when water is plentiful, going is difficult, and the
way in which, when a few days of dry weather come, the going becomes
easy, but the water in the little streams disappears. There is evidence
that the Romans, when they built their great military road--perhaps
their only purely military road in Britain--across the Weald skipped
one intervening station which should, upon the analogy of others, have
been present upon it in the heart of the Weald, and pressed the march
in this place to nearly double its usual length. The French armies
do precisely the same thing in the bad lands of the Plain of Chalons
to-day. Wherever there is ancient habitation in the Weald, or rather
upon the fringes of the Weald, there is good, plentiful, and perennial
water; elsewhere the Weald is still what it has been throughout
history--a great rolling place, not deserted, not lonely, and yet not
humanised. It is exactly the place for a seclusion from men, for you
can see some men, but not too many of them; and I have always thought
that King wise, who, when his enemies desired to kill him, wandered
in the Andredsweald. The historians say that he took refuge in the
impassable thickets of the forest. This is bosh. No man can sleep
out in this climate for a season round, nor can any man live without
cooked meat, nor do I see an Anglo-Saxon king living without wine and
a good deal of pomp into the bargain. As to the wine, men might argue,
but as to the pomp, they cannot. I will tell you what this King did
without any doubt. He went from steading to steading and was royally
entertained, and if you ask why it was a refuge for him the answer is
that it was a refuge against the pursuit of many men.

The Weald is a refuge against the pursuit of many men. It was so then:
it is so now.

And this leads me to my conclusion. The Weald will never be conquered.
It will always be the Weald. To be conquered is to suffer the will
of another: the Weald will suffer no will but its own. The men of
the Weald drive out men odious to them in manner sometimes subtle,
sometimes brutal, always in the long run successful. Economics break
against the Weald as water breaks against stone. It is not a long walk
from London. Your Londoner in summer comes and builds in it. So foreign
birds their nests. But unlike the foreign birds, he does not return
with each returning spring. For the Weald will welcome the bird for the
pleasure the bird gives it, and drive it out when the pleasure is done.
Now it welcomes the Londoner for his money, and this feature in the
Londoner is not recurrent with the seasons.

Here is some Latin which I am assured is grammatical and correctly
spelled as well:

  Stat et stabit: manet et manebit, spectator orbis.

She stands and still shall stand; she remains and shall remain: a
watcher of the generations.




On London and the Houses in it


The aspect of London, as the man who knows it grows older, begins to
take on characters of permanence and characters of change, both of
which are comparable to those of a human life. It is perceived that
certain qualities in the great soul of the place are permanent, and
that the memories of many common details merge after the passage of
years into a general picture which is steadfast and gives unity to the
whole.

This is especially true of the London skies, and more true, I think, of
the London skies in autumn than at any other season of the year. Men go
home from the City or from the Courts westward at an hour which is that
of sunset, when the river catches more light than at any other time:
the mixture of mist and smoke and of those shapes in our clouds, beyond
the reek of the town, which are determined by the south-west wind
blowing up the line of the valley, make together an impression which
is the most lasting of the landscapes in which we live. These it was
which inspired Turner when he drew them from the deserted room in the
tower of Battersea Church, or from that corner house over the River,
whence he could watch evening after evening the heavy but transparent
colours which enter into the things he painted. Many foreigners, caught
by the glamour of that artist, have missed the source whence his mellow
and declining sunlight was inspired; its source was in these evening
and autumn skies of London. There is a permanence also in the type of
home which London built for more than two centuries, and which was
laid down after the Great Fire, and there is a permanence in the older
stonework. It is difficult or impossible to define what there is in
common between the brown stock brick of London, which is the stuff of
all its background whether of large houses or mean, and the black and
white weathering of Portland stone. Perhaps the unity which seems to
bind them is wholly in the mind, and depends merely upon association,
but it is very strong upon anyone who has grown up from childhood into
middle age surrounded by the vision of this town; and it would seem as
though London was only London because of those rough surfaces of soft
stonework, streaked with white wedges, scaling off the grime of St.
Martin’s, or St. Clement Dane’s, or the fine front of the Admiralty,
and standing out clear against the general brown mass of the streets.
The quite new things have no character at all. One wonders what
cosmopolitan need can have produced them. London never produced them,
with their stone that so often is plaster, and their alien suggestion
of whatever is least national in Paris or New York. London never
produced them.

The noise of the streets in spite of every change remains the same,
it is the same comforting and distant roar, like the roar of large
waters among hills, which every visitor has noticed, with its sharp
contrast to the rattle and cries of other great capitals. Why it should
be so no one, I think, has discovered, though many have described it,
but it remains an unmistakable thing, and if a London man, who had
travelled and was far away, should be set down by a spirit in London,
not knowing where he was, when he heard through a window high above the
street this distant and continuous roar, he would know that he had come
home. It should surely in theory have disappeared, this chief physical
characteristic of the great place, yet neither the new electricity and
the hissing of the wires, nor the new paving, nor even the new petrol
seem to change it. It is still a confused and powerful and subdued
voice, like a multitude undecided. The silence also does not change.
The way in which in countless spots you pass through an unobserved
low passage, or through an inconspicuous narrow turning, and find
yourself in a deserted place, from which the whole life of London seems
blanketed out, has been to every traveller and to every native part of
the charm and surprise of London. Dickens knew it very well, and makes
of it again and again a dramatic something in his work which stamps it
everywhere with the soul of London. In every decade men growing older
deplore the disappearance of this or that sanctuary of isolation and
silence, but in the aggregate they never disappear; something in the
very character of the people reproduces them continually, and if any
man will borrow the leisure--even a man who knows his London well--to
peer about and to explore for one Saturday afternoon in one square mile
of older London, how many such unknown corners will he not find! The
populace also upon whom all this is founded remain the same.

What changes in London are the things that also change in the life of
a man, and nothing more than the relationship of particular spots and
particular houses to our own lives. There is perhaps no city in the
world where, under the permanence of the general type, there is so
perpetual a flow and disturbance of association. It has even become
normal to the life of the citizens, and the conception of a fixed home
has left them. Here and there--but more and more rarely with every
year--you may point out a great house which some wealthy family has
chosen to inhabit for some few generations; but fixity of tenure,
tradition, family tradition at least, and sacred hereditary things,
either these were never proper to London or they have gone; it is this
which overspreads a continued knowledge of London with an increasing
loneliness and with memories that find no satisfaction or expression,
but re-enter the heart of a man and do a hurt to him there.

There are so many strange doors that should be familiar doors. Turning
sometimes into some street where one has turned for years to find at a
very well-known number windows of a certain aspect and little details
in the drab exterior of the house, every one of which was as familiar
as a smile, one is (by the mere association of years and of a gesture
repeated a thousand times) in the act of coming to the steps and of
seeking an entry. The whole place is as much one’s friend and as much
indicative of one’s friend as would be his clothes or his voice or any
other external thing. He is not there, and the house is worse than
empty. London grows full of such houses as a man grows older. Most of
us have other losses sharper still, which men of other cities know less
well, for most of us pass and repass the house where we were born, or
where as children we gathered all the strongest impressions of life. It
is impossible to believe that other souls are inheriting the effect of
those familiar rooms. It is worse than a death; it is a kind of treason.

I know a house in Wimpole Street of which every part is as familiar
quite as the torn leaves of the old books of childhood, but I have
passed it and repassed it for how many years, forbidden an entrance,
and finding that ancient and fixed friend in league, so to speak,
with strangers. Or, in another manner, which of us does not know a
house like any other house, amid the thousand unmarked houses in the
better streets of the town, but to us quite individual because there
met within it once so many who were for us the history of our time?
It was in that room (where are the three windows) that she received
her guests, retaining on into the last generations of a worse and
degraded time the traditions of a better society. Here came men who
could discuss and reveal things that are now distorted legends, and
whose revelations were real because they came as witnesses: soldiers of
the Crimea, of India, of Italy, and of Algiers, or men who remembered
great actions within the State: actions that were significant through
conviction, before we became what we are. Here was breeding; here were
the just limits of tone and emphasis and change, and here was that
type of intercourse which was surely as great and as good a thing as
Europe or England has known. Who sees that room to-day? What taste has
replaced her taste? What choice of stuff or colour mars the decoration
on the walls? What trash or alien thing takes the place of that careful
elaborate womanly work in which her travels throughout the world were
recorded, and in which the excellent modesty of an art sufficient for
her purpose reproduced in line and in colour the ironic nobility of her
mind and the wide expanse of her learning? We do not know and we cannot
know. The house is neither ours nor hers. To whomever it has passed it
has turned traitor to us who knew.

It is better, I think, for those who have such memories when the
material things that enshrine them wholly disappear, for then there is
no jar, no agony of contrast between that society which once was and
this which now is, with its quality of wealth and of the uses to which
wealth is put to-day. If we must suffer the intolerable and clumsy
presence of accidental power--power got suddenly, got anyhow, got by
chance, untrained and unworthy--at least may we suffer such things in
their own surroundings, in huge conservatories, with loud music, with
an impression of partial drunkenness all around, and a certainty all
around of intellectual incompetence and of sprawling bodies and souls.
It is better to suffer these new things in such surroundings as may
easily let one believe that one is not in London at all, but on the
Riviera; and let the heat be excessive, and let there be a complete
ignorance of all wine except champagne, and let it be a place where
champagne is supposed to be one wine. Then the frame will suit the
picture, and there will at least be no desecration of material things
by human beings unworthy of the bricks and mortar. I say it is much
better when the old houses disappear, at least the old houses in which
we knew and loved the better people of a better time:--and yet the
youth or childhood in which so many of us saw the last of it is not
thirty years, is barely twenty years dead!




On Old Towns


Every man who has a civilised backing behind him, every man, that is,
born to a citizenship which has history to nourish it, knows, loves,
desires to inhabit, and returns to, the Old Towns; but the more one
thinks of it the more difficult one finds it to determine in what this
appetite consists.

The love of a village, of a manor, is one thing. You may stand in some
place where you were born or brought up, especially if it be some
place in which you passed those years in which the soul is formed to
the body, between, say, seven years of age and seventeen, and you may
look at the landscape of it from its height, but you will not be able
to determine how much in your strong affection is of man and how much
of God. True, nearly everything in a good European landscape has been
moulded, touched, coloured, and in a sense made by Christian men. It is
like a sort of tapestry which man has worked upon the stuff that God
gave him; but, still, any such landscape from the height of one of our
villages has surely more in it of God than of man. For one thing there
is the sky; and then it must be admitted that the lines of the hills
were there before man touched them, and though the definite outline
of the woods, the careful thinning of them which allows great trees
to grow, the noble choice and contrast of foliage, the sharp edge of
cultivated against forest land, the careful planting of the tallest
kinds of things, pine trees and elms, are all man’s work; and though
the sights of water in between are usually man’s work also, yet in the
air that clothes the scene and in all its major lines, man did not make
it at all: he has but used it and improved it under the inspiration of
That which made the whole.

But with the Old Towns it is not so. They please us in proportion to
their apparent intensity of effort; the more man has worked the more
can we embed ourselves within them. The more different is every stone
from another, and the more that difference is due to the curious spirit
of man the more are we pleased. We stand in little lanes where every
single thing about us, except the strip of sky overhead, is man’s
work, and the strip of sky overhead becomes what all skies are in all
pictures--something subordinate to man, an ornament.

One could make a list of the Old Towns and go on for ever: the
sea-light over the red brick of King’s Lynn from the east, and the
other sea-light from the south over that other King’s town, Lyme
Regis; the curious bunch of Rye; the hill of Poitiers all massed up
with history, and in whose uneven alleys all the armies go by, from
the armies of the Gauls to the army that makes a noise about them
to-day: the hill of Lincoln, where one looks up from the Roman Gate
to the towers completing the steep hill; the two hills of Cassel and
of Montreuil, similarly packed with all that men are, have been,
and remain; the quadrated towns, some surely Roman, some certainly
so; Chichester, Winchester, Horsham, Oxford, Chester, and a hundred
others--England is most fruitful in these; the towns that draw their
life from rivers and have high steep walls of stone or brick going
right down into the waters, Albi, Newcastle as it once was; in its own
small way Arundel as it still is; the towns of the great flats, where
men for some reason can best give rein to their fancy, Delft, Antwerp
(that part of it which counts), Bruges, Louvain; Ypres also where the
cooking is so vile.

One might continue for ever this futile list of towns--this is in
common to them all, that wherever men come across them in travel they
have a sense of home and the soul reposes.

Nowhere have I found this more than in the curious and to some the
disappointing town of Arles. Arles has about it, more than any other
town I know, the sentiment of protracted human experience. They dig
and find stone tools and weapons. They dig again and find marks of log
huts, bronze pins, and the arms of the Gauls. And then, apparent to
the eye and still living as it were, and still breathing, as it were,
the upper air which is also ours, not buried away like dead things,
but surviving, is Greece, is Rome, is the Dark Ages, is the Middle
Ages, is the Renaissance, is the religious quarrel, is the Eighteenth
Century, is the Revolution, is to-day. I have sometimes thought that
if a man should go to Arles with the desire deliberately to subject
himself at once to the illusion and to the reality of the past, here he
could do so. He could look curiously for a day at the map and see how
the Rhone had swept the place for thousands upon thousands of years,
making it a sort of corner at the head of its great estuary, and later
of its delta; then he might spend the day wondering at the flints and
the way they were chipped, and getting into the minds of the men that
made them. Then he should spend a day with bronze, and then a day with
the Gaulish iron. After that, for as many weeks as he chose, let him
study the stones which Greece and which Rome have still left in the
public places of the city; the half of the frontal of the great temple
built into his hotel; the amphitheatre upon which he suddenly comes as
he wanders up a narrow modern street; the Arenæ. The Dark Ages, which
have left so little in Europe, have here left massive towers in which
the echoes of the fighting linger, and huge rough stones which the Dark
Ages did not quarry but which they moved from the palaces of the Romans
to their own fortresses, and which by their very presence so removed
bring back to one the long generations in which Europe slept healthily
and survived.

St. Trophime is all the Middle Ages. You may walk quietly round its
cloister and see those ten generations of men, from the hugeness of
the Crusades to the last delicacies of the fifteenth century. The
capitals of the columns go in order, the very earliest touch on that
archaic grotesque which underlies every civilisation, the latest in
their exact realism and their refinement, prove the decline of a whole
period of the soul. Lest Arles should take up too much of this short
space, I would remind the reader only of this ironical and striking
thing: that on its gates as you go out of the city northward, you may
see sculptured in marble what the Revolution but--a century ago--took to
be a primal truth common to all mankind. It concerns the sanctity of
property. Consider that doctrine to-day!

But not Arles, though it is so particular an example, not Delft, not
the old English seaports which so perfectly enshrine our past, not
Coutances which everyone should know, alone explain what the Old Towns
are, but rather a knowledge of them all together explains it.

The Old Towns are ourselves; they are mankind. In their contortion, in
their ruined regularity, in their familiar oddities, and in their awful
corners of darkness, in their piled experience of the soul which has
soaked right into their stone and their brick and their lime, they are
the caskets of man. Note how the trees that grow by licence from the
crevices of their battlements are a sort of sacramental saving things,
exceptional to the fixed lines about them, and note how the grass
which grows between the setts of their paving stones comes up ashamedly
and yet universally, as good memories do in the oldness of the human
mind, and as purity does through the complexity of living.

Which reminds me: Once there was a band of men, foolish men, Bohemian
men, indebted men, who went down to paint in a silly manner, and chose
a town of this sort which looked to them very old and wonderful; and
there they squatted for a late summer month and talked the detestable
jargon of their trade. They talked of tones and of values and of the
Square Touch, and Heaven knows what nonsense, the meanwhile daubing
daub upon daub on to the canvas; praising Velasquez (which after all
was right) and ridiculing the Royal Academy. They ridiculed the Royal
Academy.

Well, now, these men were pleased to see in autumn grass growing
between the setts of the street, especially in one steep street where
they lived. It rejoiced their hearts; they said within themselves,
“This is indeed an Old Town!” But the Town Council of that town
had said among themselves, “What if it become publicly known that
grass grows in our streets? We shall be thought backward; the rich
will not come to visit us. We shall not make so much money, and our
brothers-in-law and others indebted to us will also grow impoverished.
Come! Let us pull up this grass.”

So they paid a poor man, who would otherwise have starved, the amount
of his food on the condition that he should painfully pull up all the
grass, which he did.

Then the artists, seeing him at work, paid him more not to pull it
up. Then the Town Council, finding out this, dismissed him from their
employ, and put upon the job a distant man from some outlandish county,
and had him watched, and he pulled up all the grass, every blade of it,
by night, but thoroughly. The next morning the artists saw what had
been done, and they went out by train to another town, and bought grass
seed and also a little garden soil, and the next night they scattered
the soil carefully between the stones and sowed the grass seed; and the
comedy is not yet ended.

There is a moral to this, but I will not write it down, for in the
first place it may not be a good moral, and in the second place I have
forgotten what it was.




A Crossing of the Hills


When it was nearly noon my companion said to me:

“By what sign or track do you propose to cross the mountains?” For
the mountains here seem higher than any of highest clouds: the valley
beneath them is broad and full of fields: beyond, a long day off,
stands in a huge white wall the Sierra del Cadi. Yet we must cross
these hills if ever we were to see the secluded and little-known
Andorrans. For the Andorrans live in a sort of cup fenced in on every
side by the Pyrenees; it was on this account that my companion asked me
how I would cross over to their land and by what sign I should find my
way.

When I had thought a little I answered:

“By none. I propose to go right up at them, and over unless I find some
accident by which I am debarred.”

“Why, then,” said he, “let us strike up at once, walking steeply until
we come into a new country.”

This advice was good, and so, though we had no longer any path, and
though a mist fell upon us, we began walking upwards, and it was like
going up a moor in the West Riding, except that it went on and on and
on, hour after hour, and was so steep that now and then one had to use
one’s hands.

The mist was all round us; it made a complete silence, and it drifted
in the oddest way, making wisps of vapour quite close to our faces. Nor
had we any guide except the steepness of the hill. For it is a rule
when you are caught in a storm or mist upon the hills, if you are going
up, to go the steepest way, and though in such a fog this often took us
over a knoll which we had to descend again, yet on the whole it proved
a very good rule. It was perhaps the middle of the afternoon, we had
been climbing some five hours, we had ascended some six thousand or
seven thousand feet, when to our vast astonishment we stumbled upon a
sort of road.

It must here be explained why we were astonished. The way we had come
led nowhere; there were no houses and no men. The Andorrans whom we
were about to visit have no communication northward with the outer
world except a thin wire leading over the hills, by which those who
wish to telephone to them can do so; and of all places in Europe,
Andorra is the place out of which men least desire to get and to
which men least desire to go. It is like that place beyond Death of
which people say that it gives complete satisfaction and from which
certainly no one makes any effort to escape, and yet to which no one is
very anxious to go. When, therefore, we came to this road, beginning
suddenly half way up a bare mountain and appearing unexplained through
the mist, we were astonished.

It was embanked and entrenched and levelled as would be any great
French military road near the frontier fortresses. There was a little
runnel running underneath the road, conveying a mountain stream; it was
arched with great care, and the arch was made of good hewn stone well
smoothed. But when we came right on to this road we found something
more astonishing still: we found that it was but the simulacrum or
ghost of a road. It was not metalled; it was but the plan or trace or
idea of a road. No horses had ever trod its soft earth, no wheels had
ever made a rut in it. It had not been used at all. Grass covered it.
The explanation of this astonishing sight we did not receive until
we had spoken in their own tongue the next day to the imperturbable
Andorrans.

It was as though a school of engineers had been turned on here for
fun, to practise the designing of a road in a place where land was
valueless, upon the very summit of the world.

We two men, however, reasoned thus (and reasoned rightly as it turned
out):

“The tall and silent Andorrans in a fit of energy must have begun this
road, though later in another fit they abandoned it. Therefore it will
lead towards their country.”

And as we were very tired of walking up a steep which had now lasted
for so many hours, we determined to follow the large zigzags of this
unknown and magic half-road, and so we did.

It was the oddest sensation in the world walking in the mist a mile
and more above the habitations of men, upon unmetalled, common earth
which yet had the exact shape of pavements, cuttings, and embankments
upon either side, with no sort of clue as to where it led or as to why
men began to make it, and still less of an argument as to why they had
ceased.

It went up and up in great long turns and z’s upon the face of the
mountain, until at last it grew less steep; the mist grew colder, and
after a long flat I thought the land began to fall a little, and I said
to my companion:

“We are over the watershed, and beneath us, miles beneath us, are the
Andorrans.”

When by the continuance of the fall of the land we were certain of
this we took off our hats, in spite of the fog which still hung round
us very wet and very cold and quite silent, and expected any moment a
revelation.

We were not disappointed. Indeed, this attitude of the mind is never
disappointed. Without a moment’s warning the air all round us turned
quite bright and warm, a strong gust blew through the whirling vapour,
and we saw through the veil of it the image of the sun. In a moment
his full disc and warmth was on us. The clouds were torn up above us;
the air was immediately quite clear, and we saw before us, stamped
suddenly upon the sight, a hundred miles of the Pyrenees.

They say that everything is in the mind. If that be true, then he and I
saw in that moment a country which was never yet on earth, for it was
a country which our minds had not yet conceived to be possible, and it
was as new as though we had seen it after the disembodiment of the soul.

The evening sun from over Spain shone warm and low, and every
conceivable colour of the purples and the browns filled up the mountain
tangle, so that the marvel appeared as though it had been painted
carefully in a minute way by a man’s hand; but the colours were filled
with light, and so to fill colour with light is what art can never do.
The main range ran out upon either side, and the foothills in long
series of peaks and ridges fell beneath it, until, beyond, in what
might have been sky or might have been earth, was the haze of the
plains of Ebro.

“It is no wonder,” said I to my companion, “that the Andorrans
jealously preserve their land and have refused to complete this road.”

When I had said that we went down the mountain side. The lower our
steps fell the more we found the wealth and the happiness of men. At
last walls and ploughed land appeared. The fields grew deep, the trees
more sturdy, and under the shelter of peaks with which we had just been
acquainted, but which after an hour or so of descent seemed hopelessly
above us, ran rivers which were already tamed and put to a use. One
could see mills standing upon them. So we went down and down.

There is no rejuvenescence like this entry into Andorra, and there is
no other experience of the same sort, not even the finding of spring
land after a month of winter sea: that vision of brilliant fields
coming down to meet one after the endless grey waste of the sea.

It was, I tell you again, a country completely new, and it might have
been of another world, much better than our own.

So we came at last to the level of the valley, and the first thing we
saw was a pig, and the second was a child, and the third was a woman.
The pig ran at us: for he was lean. The child at first smiled at us
because we were human beings, and then divining that we were fiends who
had violated his sacred home began to cry. The woman drove the pig from
us and took in the child, and in great loneliness and very sad to be so
received we went until we should find men and citizens, and these we
found of our own size, upstanding and very dignified, and recognised
them at once to be of the wealthy and reserved Andorrans. It was clear
by their faces that the _lingua franca_ was well known to them, so I
said to the first in this universal tongue:

“Sir, what is the name of this village?”

And he replied: “It is Saldeu.” But this he said in his own language,
which is somewhat more difficult to understand than the _lingua franca_.

“I take it, therefore,” said I, “that I am in the famous country of
Andorra.”

To which he replied: “You are not many miles from the very town itself:
you approach Andorra ‘the Old.’”

The meaning of this I did not at first exactly understand, but as we
went on, the sun having now set, I said to my companion: “Were not
those epithets right which we attached to the Andorrans in our fancy
before we attempted these enormous hills? Were we not right to call
them the smiling and the tall Andorrans?”

“You are right,” he answered to me, thinking carefully over every word
that he said. “To call them the secluded and the honourable Andorrans
is to describe them in a few words.”

We then continued our way down the darkening valley, whistling little
English songs.




The Barber


Humanity, my dear little human race, is at once more difficult to get
at and more generally present than you seem to know. You are yourselves
human beings, dear people. Yet how many have so fully understood their
fellows (that is, themselves) that they could exactly say how any man
will behave or why any man behaves as he does? But with that I am not
to-day concerned. I am concerned with another matter, which is the
impossibility of getting away from these brothers of ours, even if we
desire to do so.

Note you here, humans, that in reality you do not, even the richest of
you, try to get away from your brothers. You do not like solitudes; you
like sham, theatrical solitudes. You like the Highlands on condition
that you have driven away the people rooted there, but also on
condition that you may have there the wine called champagne. Now if you
had seen that wine made, the gathering of the apples in the orchards
of the Rhine and the Moselle, the adding of the sugar, the watching of
the fermentation, and the corking with a curious machine, you would
appreciate that if you insist upon champagne in the Highlands, then
you are certainly taking humanity with you. If you could follow the
thing farther and see them all passing the stuff on, each a little
afraid of being found out, then you would know that as you drank your
champagne in the most solitary valley you had done far from getting
rid of humanity. All the grotesque of man and all his jollity, all his
stupidity and all his sin, went with you into your hermitage and it
would have gone with you anyhow without the champagne. You cannot make
a desert except by staying away from it yourself. All of which leads me
to the Barber.

First, then, to give you the true framework of that astonishing man.
For exactly thirty-six hours there had been nothing at all in the way
of men; and if thirty-six hours seems but a short time to you as you
read it, it certainly was a mighty long time for me who am writing
this. Of those thirty-six hours the first few had been enlivened (that
is, from five in the morning till about noon) with the sight of a
properly made road, of worked stone, of mown grass, and of all that
my fellow beings are busily at throughout the world. For though I had
not seen a man, yet the marks of men were all around, and at last as I
went into the Uplands I bade farewell to my kind in the shape of an old
rusty pair of rails still united by little iron sleepers, one link of a
Decauville railway which a generation before had led to a now abandoned
mine.

My way over the mountains lay up a gulley which turned as unexpectedly
as might the street of a mediæval town; and which was quite as narrow
and as enwalled as the street of any city; but instead of houses there
were ugly rocks, and instead of people very probably viewless devils.
Still, though I hated to be away from men I went on because I desired
to cross the high ridge which separated me from a dear pastoral people,
of whom I had heard from poets and of whom I had read in old books.
They were a democracy simple and austere, though a little given to
thieving, and every man was a master of his house and a citizen within
the State. This curious little place I determined to see, though the
approach to it was difficult. There are many such in Europe, but this
one lies peculiarly alone, and is respected, and I might say in a sense
worshipped, by the powerful Government to which it is nominally subject.

Well, then, I went on up over the ridge and, by that common trick of
mountains, the great height and the very long way somehow missed me; it
grew dark before I was aware, and when I could have sworn I was about
four thousand feet up I was close upon eight thousand. I had hoped to
manage the Farther Valleys before nightfall, but when I found it was
impossible what I did was this: I scrambled down the first four or five
hundred feet of the far side before it was quite dark, until I came
to the beginnings of a stream that leapt from ledge to ledge. It was
not large enough to supply a cottage well, but it would do to camp
by, for all one needs is water, and there was a little brushwood to
burn. Next morning with the first of the light I went on my scramble
downwards--and it was the old story (which everyone who has wandered
in the great mountains of Europe knows so well), I was in the Wrong
Valley. I was used to that sort of thing, and I recognised the signs of
it at once. I made up my mind for a good day’s effort, which, when one
is by oneself, is an exasperating thing; I tried to guess from my map
what sort of error I had made (and failed). I knew that if I followed
running water I should come at last to men. At about three o’clock in
the afternoon I made a good meal of stale bread, wine, and my companion
the torrent, which had now grown to be a sort of river and made as much
noise as though it were a politician. Then I thought I would sleep
a little, and did so (you must excuse so many details, they are all
necessary). It was five when I rose and took up my journey again. I
shouldered the pack and stolidly determined that another night out in
these warmer lowlands would not hurt me, when I saw something which is
quite unmistakable upon the grass of those particular hills, a worn
patch, and another worn patch a yard or two ahead. That meant a road,
and a road means men--sooner or later.

Sure enough, within half a mile, the worn patches having become now
almost continuous, I rounded a big rock and there was a group of huts.

There were perhaps two dozen of them, perhaps more. Three-quarters were
built of great logs with large, very flat roofs over them held down by
stones; one quarter were built of the same rough stones, and there was
a tiny church of dirt colour, with two windows; and neither window had
glass in it. I had found men. And I had found something more.

For as I went down the main street of this Polity (they had “Main
Street” stuck up in their language at the corner of the only possible
mud alley of their town) I saw that blessed sight which sings to the
heart and is one of the thirteen signs of civilisation, a barber’s
pole. It was not very good; it was not planed or polished; the bark was
still upon the chestnut wood of it; but there was a spiral of red round
it in the orthodox fashion, at the end of it a tuft of red wool, and
underneath it in very faded rough letters upon a board the words, “Here
it is barbered.” More was to follow. I confess that I desired to draw,
for beyond the little huts the mountains, once dreadful, now, being
so far above me, compelled my attention. But just as I had sat down
upon a great stone to draw their outline, there appeared through the
disgusting little door under the barber’s pole one of those humans whom
I have mentioned so often in these lines.

He was about thirty, but he had never known care; his complexion
was pink and white, his eyes were lively, his brown hair was short,
curled, trimmed and oily, and some fifteen degrees from the middle of
his head to the eastward went a very clear white line which was the
parting of his hair. His two little moustaches curled upwards like
rams’ horns; his chin was square and firm, but very full and healthy.
He was looking out for customers. Oh, Humanity, my brothers, Divine
Object of the Positivists, Plaything of the Theologians, Food of the
God of War, Great of Destiny, Victim of Experience, Doubtful of Doom,
Foreknowing of Death, Humanity enslaved, exultant, always on the march,
never arriving, the only thing yet made that can laugh and can cry,
Humanity, in fine, which was generously designed as matter for poets,
hear! He was looking out for customers! Even to the railways of his own
land it was nearly a hundred miles; no one read print; beyond Latin no
foreign language perhaps was known. No vehicle on wheels had ever been
into that place, even the maps were wrong, no one therein had seen a
metalled road, a ship of any kind, nor perhaps one polished stone. But
he was looking out for customers.

He spotted me. He used no subterfuge; he smiled and beckoned with his
finger, and I went at once, as men do when the Figure appears at the
Doorway of the Feast and beckons some one of the revellers into the
darkness. I obeyed. He put a towel round my neck; he lathered my chin;
I gazed at the ceiling, and he began to shave.

On the ceiling was an advertisement in the English tongue. I am inured
by this time to the inconceivable stupidity of modern commerce, but (as
the Pwca said to the Acorn) “the like of this I never saw.” There most
certainly was not a man in the whole place who had ever heard of the
English language, nor, I will bet a boot, had anyone been there before
me who did, at any rate not since the pilgrimages stopped. Yet there
was this advertisement staring me in the face, and what it told me to
do was to buy a certain kind of bicycle. It gave no evidence in favour
of the thing. It asserted. It said that this bicycle was the best.
There was a picture of a young man riding on the bicycle, and under it
in very small letters in the language of the country an address where
such bicycles might be bought. The address was in a town as far away as
Bristol is from Hull, and between it was range upon range of mountains,
and never a road.

I watched this advertisement, and the Barber all the while talked to me
of the things of this world.

He would have it that I was a stranger. He mentioned the place--it
was about eighty miles away--from which I came. He said he knew it at
once by my accent and my hesitation over their tongue. He asked me
questions upon the politics of the place, and when I could not reply
he assured me that he meant no harm; he knew that politics were not
to be discussed among gentlemen. He recommended to me what barbers
always recommend, and I saw that his bottles were from the ends of the
earth--some French, some German, some American--at least their labels
were. Then when he had shaved me he very politely began to whistle a
tune.

It was a music-hall tune. I had heard it first eighteen months before
in Glasgow, but it had come there from New York. It was already
beginning to be stale in London--it did not seem very new to the
Barber, for he whistled it with thorough knowledge, and he added trills
and voluntary passages of merit and originality. I asked him how much
there was to pay. He named so considerable a sum that I looked at him
doubtfully, but he still smiled, and I paid him.

I asked him next how far it might be to the next village down the
valley. He said three hours. I went on, and found that he had spoken
the truth.

In that next village I slept, and I went forward all the next day and
half the next before I came to what you would call a town. But all the
while the Barber remained in my mind. There are people like this all
over the world, even on the edges of eternity. How can one ever be
lonely?




On High Places


All over the world every kind of man has had for the high places of
his country, or for the high places that he has seen in travel (though
these last have made upon him a lesser impression), a sentiment closely
allied to religion and difficult to fit in with common words. It is
upon such sites that sacrifice upon special occasion has been offered.
It is here that you will find rare, unvisited, but very holy shrines
to-day, and even in its last and most degraded form the men of our
modern societies, who are atrophied in such things, spur themselves to
a special emotion by distant voyages in which they can satisfy this
adoration of a summit over a plain. It is not capable of analysis; but
how marvellously it fills the mind. It is not difficult to understand
that monk of the Dark Ages--to be accurate, of the early eleventh
century--who, having doubtless seen Paris a hundred times from the
height of Montmartre, could not believe that the martyrdom of St. Denis
had taken place on the plain. Something primal in him demanded the
high and lonely place as the scene of the foundation of the Church of
Lutetia, and he would have it that St. Denis was martyred there. All
the popular stories were with him, and the legend arose. Up and down
Europe, wherever there are hills, you will find upon conspicuous crags
or little peaks, upon the loneliest ridges, a chapel. There is one such
on a hill near Remiremont; there is another at Roncesvalles; there is
another on the high platform at Portofino; there is another on the
very height called Holy Cross above Urgel. In its way, St. Martha’s
in Surrey is of that kind. There are hundreds everywhere throughout
Christendom, and they witness to this need of man for which, I say,
there is no name.

I have heard of a mountain in Ireland, in the west of that country, to
the summit of which upon a certain day of the year the people and the
priests will go together, and Mass will be said in the open air upon
that height. And so it is in several places of the Vosges and of the
Pyrenees, and in one or two, I believe, of the foothills of the Alps.
Everywhere men associate the exaltation of the high places with worship.

It is to be noticed that where men cannot satisfy this emotion by
the spectacle of distant hills, or by the presence of nearer ones
which they can climb upon occasion, they remedy the defect either in
their architecture or with their trees. The people of Northern France
lacked height in their landscape, and in their forests the trees were
neither of the sort nor stature which commonly satisfy the need of
which I speak. Their architecture supplies it. It has reached its most
tremendous expression in Beauvais, its most stately in Flanders. No
man well understands what height can be in architecture unless he
has watched one of the great Flemish steeples from a vantage point
upon another. They are sufficiently amazing when you see them, as they
were meant to be seen, from the flat pastures outside the city walls.
But where most you can appreciate the way in which they make up the
impression of the Netherlands is from a platform such as that of Delft,
halfway up the tower just below the bells. You look out to an horizon
which is that of a misty sea, land absolutely level, and here and there
the line between earth and sky is cut by these shafts of human effort
whose purpose it is--and they achieve it--to give high places to a
plain. So also Strasburg stands up in that great river plain of which
it is the centre, and so Salisbury towers above the central upland of
South England. And so Chichester over the deep loam of the sea plain
of Sussex. You will further note that as you approach the mountains
this attempt grows less in human effort, and is replaced by something
else. At Bordeaux on the great flat sweep of the river, with the level
vineyards all round about, you have a mighty spire, sprung probably
from English effort and looking down the river as a landmark and a
feature in the sky. But close against the Pyrenees, nay when, two days’
walking south of the city, you first begin to see those mountains,
height fails you in architecture. You have not got it at Dax, nor in
the splendid and deserted aisles of Auch, nor in the complicated detail
of St. Bertrand; nor is there any example of it in Perpignan; but at
Narbonne again, where what you have to look at are the flat approaches
of the sea, height comes in in a peculiar way; it is the height not
of towers, but of walls. It has been remarked by many that effect of
this kind is lacking in Italy; but in Italy, wherever you may be, you
have the mountains. South of the Sierra Guadarama there in no attempt
to diversify the line of the horizon in this fashion. There is nothing
in Madrid to which a man looks up in order to satisfy this need for
the high places, nor in the churches of the villages round about.
The millions spent upon the Escorial were spent with no such object;
but then, south of those mountains, the range stands up in a steep
escarpment and everywhere is master of the plain. To the North, where
they sink away more gradually and form no crest upon which the eye can
repose, at once man supplies for himself the uplifting of the face
which his soul must have, and the glorious vision of Segovia is proof
of it. The castle and the cathedral of that famous city are like a tall
ship riding out to sea; or they are like a man preaching from a rock
with uplifted hands; or they are like the miraculous appearance of some
divine messenger standing facing one above the steeps of the hill.

It is so in all the places I can remember; it is so in the Valley of
the Ebro, where Saragossa raises a tall nave and the tall columns of
the Pilar, whereas, if you go northward and begin to see the hills
this feature fails. It is not apparent in Huesca; Jaca, right under the
High Pyrenees, has none of it. I can remember exceptions; one place,
among the most famous in Europe, which was built for a mountain kingdom
and under the influence of mountaineers, though it stands in a plain.
And that is Brou, which seems to be made for mountains rather than
for the plain. And there are many modern errors in the matter due to
the copying of some style pedantically and to the absence of native
inspiration. The chief of these is Lourdes, whose hideous basilica
ought never to have attempted height in the midst of those solemn
hills. But the history of man when he is dealing with his shrines is a
history of perpetual betterment, and some day Lourdes will be replaced
by a much worthier thing. The crypt is already excellent, and many
good changes in European building have begun with the crypt. There
are errors, I say, of this sort due to the modern divorce between
personality and production, and there are accidents, though rare, like
that of Brou, where a mountain building is set in a plain, though
hardly ever a building of the plains in the mountains. But for the
most part, and taking Europe as a whole, the rule holds good. Consider
the church called L’Epine. It is not high, but every line of it is
designed to give the effect of height, and the farther you are from it
the more it seems to soar, and the greyer it gets the more finely is it
drawn upwards. It stands in the roll of those vast Catalaunian plains
where twice the fate of Europe has been decided; where first Attila
was rolled backwards, and where more than a thousand years after the
armies destined to destroy the Revolution failed. It is the mark and
the centre of that plain. But as you get towards the Mountain of Rheims
on the north, the Argonne upon the east, the note of height in stone is
withdrawn. The Argonne is low, the Mountain of Rheims, though high and
noble, is hardly a true mountain, but each uplifts the face.

Among the many misfortunes of men confined to this island, in the great
cities of it, it may be counted a good fortune that they have, more
than most men bound by modern industry, the opportunity of the high
places. Lancashire especially has them at its doors, and anyone who
will talk much to Lancashire folk will find how greatly the presence of
the moors still enters into their lives. Notably is this true of the
Peak just to the east of the great industrial plain, and the sense of
height and the satisfaction of it is perhaps nowhere more splendidly
met than by the spectacle of that plain beneath a winter sunset as one
sees it from the height of the road above Glossop, if it be a Sunday
evening when the smoke is not dense, because for twenty-four hours the
factories have been silent. The smoke then hangs in wreaths like light
clouds against the sunset and one perceives in a very marvellous and
sudden fashion beneath one the life of industrial England. It is an
aspect of the country not easily forgotten. And everywhere Englishmen
have presented to them this effect of height within a smaller compass
than the men of other European nations. For in the other nations men
are either of the mountains or of the plains. But here the isolated and
numerous masses of old rocks in Wales, in Cumberland, and just north
of the Midlands, and the sharp escarpments of the five ranges of the
chalk that radiate from Salisbury Plain, and the isolated ridge of the
Malverns, and the wall of the Cotswolds over the Vale of Severn, make
it so that nearly all those who live on this island, and especially
those who live in the busiest part of it, have their line of hills
before them. East Anglia and the Fens are an exception, and much of the
Valley of the Thames as well. And here comes in the lack of London.
London has no high places. It is the chief misfortune in the aspect
of the city. It was not always so. Popular instinct was very powerful
here. Since the Surrey hills had not their escarpment turned towards
the Thames, and since looking nowhere round could the Londoner get
height, he made it for himself, and the Gothic London of the Middle
Ages was a mass of spires, chief and glorious above which was the
highest spire in all Europe, higher than Strasburg and higher than
Cologne, old St. Paul’s. It stood up on its hill above the river, and
gave unity to all that scheme of spires below. Neglect began the ruin,
the Great Fire did the rest, and height in London has disappeared. The
tall houses and narrow gorges of streets that are the characteristic
of Paris and of Edinburgh are unknown to London. Here and there the
sense of which I speak is satisfied. Coming up Ludgate Hill, for
instance, and seeing the mass of St. Paul’s above it, or in one place
where, as you come out of a narrow Westminster street, the upshooting
of the repetitive lines of Victoria Tower suddenly strike you. But as
a whole height is lacking here. Nor in so vast a place, now fixed in
certain traditions, can it be supplied. It is a pity.




On Some Little Horses


All the upland was full of little horses, little ponies of the upland.
They looked with curious and interested eyes at man, but none of them
had known his command. When men passed them riding they saw that there
was some alliance between men and their brothers, and they asked news
of it. Then they bent their heads down again soberly, to graze on the
new pasture, and the wind blew through their manes and their tails;
they were happy beasts, thinking of nothing, and knowing nothing but
themselves, yet in their movements and the look of their eyes one could
see what the skies were round them, and what the world--they were so
much a part of it all.

In the hollows of the forest there were not many birds, not nearly as
many as one had heard in the Weald, but one great hawk circled up in
spirals against the wind. The wind was blowing splendidly through an
air quite blue and clear for many miles, and growing clearer as the
afternoon advanced in gladness. It was a sea wind that had been a gale
the day before, but during the night everything had changed in South
England, and the principal date of the year was passed, the date which
is the true beginning of the year. The mist of the morning had scudded
before thick Atlantic weather; by noon it was lifted into clouds, by
mid-afternoon those clouds were large, heralding clouds of Spring
against an unbounded capacity of sky. There was no longer any struggle
between them and the gale; they went together in procession over the
country and towards the east.

The ridges of the land, like great waves, rolled in also from the
westward; they were clearer and they were sharper with every hour,
until at last the points of white chalk pits upon hills a day’s ride
away showed clearly under the sunlight, and a man could see the trees
even upon the horizon line.

The water that one passed in the long ride seemed to grow clearer,
and the woods to have more echoes. Then, whatever in the mind turned
to memory, as the mind of all men does in Spring when they have done
with their own springtime, turned to memory transformed and was full
of visions; and whatever of the mind turned to the future, as most of
the mind must do in men of any age when the vigour of the Almighty is
abroad, looked at it through a veil which was magical.

It seemed as though under the growing sunlight the change that had
come, the touch, the spell, was a thing appreciable in moments of time
and growing as one watched. You would have said that all the forest
was wakening. The flowers you would have said, and especially the
daffodils, had just broken from the bud, and evergreens that had been
in leaf all winter you would have said had somehow put on a new green.
The movement of the wind in the branches of the beeches did not seem to
move them but to find a movement responding to its own, and the colour
of those branches against the blue sky and touched by the sun as it
grew low was full of vivid promise. If it be not too much to ascribe a
mood to all inanimate and animate things, there was a mood about one
which was a complete forgetfulness of decay, a sort of trampling upon
it, a rising out of it, and a using of it into life: a using of it up
into life.

Over three ridges of land to the southward lay the sea. When the sea is
in movement before a clear wind that is not a storm, and under a clear,
sharp sky, its movement may be perceived for miles and miles. No one
can see the waves, but the distant belt is shot with a pattern which
one feels so far as the eye commands it, and that belt is alive, and it
is a moving thing. Moreover, the high sea downs, the great chalk lifts
of that shore of the world, are different on such days from what they
are upon any others, and receive life from the sea that made them. All
that world upon that morning you would have said was not only receiving
gifts from the sea, but was itself apparently born from the sea, lived
by the air of it, and had been engendered in the depths of it before
ever men were on earth.

And of the sea also were the little horses.

When the Spring took them they would suddenly gallop forward without
any purpose beyond their wanton pleasure, and arch their necks towards
the ground, and bound as a wave bounds; or they would go together,
first one starting, then a comrade, then half a dozen of the herd, with
a short but easy gait which exactly recalled the movement of salt water
under the call of the wind: the movement of salt water where the deeps
are, following and following and following, before it rises to break
upon the shallows, or to turn back on its course along the eddies of
hidden streams.

Anyone seeing the little horses was ready to believe that they had come
from the Channel and not from the land at all, but that divine mares
had bred them which moved over the tops of the waves, and that their
sires flew invisibly along with the south-west wind. The heather bent
a little beneath their rapid raids, and when they swerved, halted, and
lifted up their heads to let the breeze blow out their manes, then they
became, even more thoroughly than before, things of the Channel and of
the bowling air. They were full of gladness.

The little horses did not know that they were owned by men; and if now
and then men gave them food in the cold weather, or now and then saw to
the housing of them, or now and then marked them with a mark, a short,
forgotten pain, all these things they took like any other brief and
passing accidents of fate. It was not man that had made their home,
nor man that ordered the things they saw and used. They had not in
anything about them that look which animals have when they have learned
that man is of all things upon earth the fullest of sorrow, nor that
which beasts have, when they have seen in man, without understanding
it, what a principal poet has called “the hideous secret of his
mirth”--though “hideous” is an unfair word, for the secret sorrow of
man is closely allied with something Divine in his destiny. Such beasts
as are continually the companions of our souls and of whom another
poet has said that they are “subject and dear to man,” take from him
invariably something of his foreknowledge of death. And you may see in
the patient oxen of the mountains and even in the herded sheep of the
Downs something of man’s burden as they take their lives along. But
most you will see what price is paid by those who accompany us when
you watch dogs and find that, apart from the body, they can suffer, as
we can suffer, and sometimes suffer to the death. So dogs that have
known men know loneliness also, and make, as men make, for distant
lights at night, and are not happy without living homes. Two things
only they have not, which are speech and laughter. And those animals
which men deal with continually come also into an easy or an uneasy
subservience to him, and you may note their hesitation where there is
an unaccustomed duty, and you may note their beginnings of panic when
men are not there to decide some difficult thing for them.

These little horses of which I write had as yet known none of these
things, and anyone who looked at them closely could see what it was
that the saints meant by “innocence in Nature.” There was no evil in
them at all, and the good that was in them was a simple good, of the
earth and of the place in which they lived. There, away northward, it
was the Downs; eastward and westward, the Forest; southward, under
the sunlight, the Sea. That was all the little horses knew; and the
man who in such a place and at that moment in the springtime could
remember nothing more was very much more blessed than any other of his
kind. But later he must remember Acheron; and what he will bear beyond
Acheron--the consequence of things done.

Not so the Little Horses.




On Streams and Rivers


There is a pass called the Bon Agua, and also Bon Aigo, which leads
from the heights of the Catalans to those other heights of Aragon,
or as some would say of Bearn, for the pass is from the south of the
mountains to the north; on the northern side one knows why it is called
Bon Agua, because one sees many thousands of feet below one the little
bracelet, the little chain, of the young Garonne.

Do not mistake me, there are two sources of the Garonne. That which is
most famous does the most famous thing; for it rises on the far side
of the mountains and it plunges into a pond, quite a little pond. Then
it cascades underground, through dark passages of which no one knows
anything, and comes out beyond the main chain of the hills to join its
other quieter sister from the Bon Agua. This startling source, I say,
is the most famous, because it does the most startling things, though
not more wonderful than what a Yorkshire river does, for there is a
Yorkshire river in the West Riding which runs into the pond called
Mallam Tarn and reappears afterwards beyond a rocky ridge; but this
Garonne of which I speak goes right under high and silent mountains
where there are no men, and this is a feat performed, I think, by no
other river, not even by the Rhone, which also is lost for the time
underground (though few people know it), nor by the River Mole, which
plays at being lost and never quite is, and certainly has not the
courage to attempt the tunnelling of any hill, though it is proud to be
called the “snouzling Mole,” which, by the way, it was first called in
the year 1903--but I digress, and I must return to the Bon Agua.

Well, then, there I say under the Bon Agua runs the quieter of the two
streams which unite in the Val D’Aran to form the Garonne, and there
it was that a companion of mine seeing that little stream looked at it
with profound sadness, and said--the things which shall be the text of
what I have to say here. For he said:

“Poor little Garonne! Innocent and lovely little Garonne! I have never
seen a stream so small, nor so pure, nor so young, nor so far from men.
But you are on your way to things you do not know. For first of all
you will join that boasting sister of yours which has come from under
the hills, and can talk of nothing else; and then you will go past the
King’s Bridge being no longer among kind and silent Spaniards, and you
will have entered the territory of the Republic which is fierce and
evil, and you will grow greater and wider and not more happy until you
will come to the perfectly detestable town of Toulouse.... Thence after
you will have no pleasure, but only a certain grandeur to be passing
through the Gascon fields, and all your desire will be for the sea in
which at last you shall merge and be lost. And so strong will be your
desire for that dissolution that you will be willing to mix your name
with another name, to marry the Dordogne, and then you will die and you
will be glad of it.”

This is the way my friend spoke to the Garonne when he saw it first
rising in the hills. He did not sing it as he might have sung it, the
song it best likes to hear, which is called, “Had the Garonne but
wished!” Nor did he try to console it with any flap-doodle about the
common lot of rivers, knowing well that some rivers were happier and
some less happy. But he spoke to the Garonne as to something that could
hear and know. Now this is what men have always done to rivers.

It is in this way that rivers have acquired names, not only among men
but among gods; and it is in this way that they convey a fate to the
countrysides of which they are the souls.

There is no country of which this is more true than it is true of
England. Englishmen of this time--or at least of the time just
past--perpetually and rightly complained that somehow or other they
missed themselves. Some took refuge in a dream of a sort of a mystical
England which was not there. Others reposed in the idea of an older
England which may once have been; others, more foolish, hoped to find
England again in something overseas. None of these would have suffered
their error had they learnt England down English waters, seeing the
great memories of England reflected in the English rivers, and meeting
them in the silence and the perfection of the streams. But our roads
first, and then our railways, our commerce which is from ports, and
which must go direct towards them, our life, which is now in vast
cities independent of streams, has made us neglect these things.

Consider such a list as this: Arundel when you see it as you come up
Arun on the full flood tide. Chichester as you see it on the flood tide
from Chichester harbour. Durham as you see it coming down under that
cliff with the Cathedral as massive as the rock. Chester as you see it,
sailing up the Dee with a light north wind from the sea. Gloucester
as you see it from the Severn. Or Winchester as you pull, if you can
pull, or paddle which is easier, against the clear and violent thrust
of the Itchin. Canterbury as you see it from above or from below, upon
the easy water of the Stour; and Lincoln as you see it from its little
ditch--and I wonder how many men now journey up in any fashion from
Boston! So Norwich from the Yare. So Bramber for that matter from a
place where the Adur grows narrow; and what a sight Bramber must have
been when the Castle stood whole upon the hill, physically blocking the
advance into the Weald.

There is only one stream left, the Thames, which we still know,
and we very rightly know it; but we love it only for giving us one
experience which we might, if we chose, repeat up and down England
everywhere. There is no country in the world like this for rivers. The
tide pushes up them to the very Midlands, from every sea. There is
nothing of the history of England but is on a river, and as England is
an island of birds, so is it more truly an island of rivers. Consider
the River Eden, which is so difficult to descend; the Wiltshire Avon
and the Hampshire Avon, and those little branch streams the Thame, the
Cherwell, and the Evenlode.

Best of all, I think, as a memory or an experience is the Ouse, which
runs from Bedford to the Wash, and has upon it the astonishing monument
of Ely. Here is a river which no one can descend without feeling as
he descends it the change of English provinces from the Midlands to
the sea. He should start at Bedford; then he will pass through fields
where tall elms give to the plains something more than could be given
them by distant hills. The river runs between banks of deep grass
in summer. It is contented everywhere; and as you go you are in the
middle of a thousand years. You pass villages that have not changed;
you carry your boat over weirs where there are mills, always shaded by
large trees. Once in a day, at the most, you find an unchanging town:
Huntingdon is such an one, or St. Ives, where I do believe the people
are kinder than in any other town. Then, as you still go on, the land
takes on another character. You begin to know that England is not only
rich and full of fields but also was made by the sea. For you come to
great flats--and that rather suddenly--where, as at sea, the sky is
your contemplation. You notice the light, the colour, and the shapes
of clouds. The birds that wheel and scream over these spaces seem to
be sea birds. You expect at any moment to hear beyond the dead line of
the horizon the sound of surf and to see the glint of live water. Above
such a waste rises, on what is called “an island,” and is in truth “an
island,” the superb strength of Ely.

No one has seen Ely who has not seen it from the Ouse. It is a hill
upon a hill, and now permanently present in the midst of loneliness. It
is something made with a framework all around of accidental marsh and
emptiness. Thenceafter the Ouse goes on. You get through and down the
deep step of a lock, and beyond it is the salt water and busy energy
that comes and goes from the sea. Very deep banks, alive with the salt
and the swirl of the tide, shut in the boat for miles, and there are
very high bridges uniting village to village above one, till at last
the whole thing broadens, and one sees under the sunlight the roofs and
the spars of King’s Lynn; and, if one has no misadventure, one ends the
journey at some narrow quay at a narrow lane of that delightful port
and town.

There is one English river out of at least thirty others. I wish that
all were known! That journey down the Ouse is three days’ journey--but
it is such a slice of time and character and history as teaches you
most you need know upon this Island. Only I warn anyone attempting it,
let the boat be light and let it be shallow, and be ready to sleep in
it; it is only thus that you can know an English river, and if you can
draw, why it will be a greater pleasure. It is very cheap.




On Two Manuals


Flaubert, I believe, designed once to publish a Dictionary of Errors,
and would actually have set about it had he not found the subject
growing much too vast for any human pen. He also designed a reference
book, or rather anthology, of follies, stupidities, rash judgments, and
absurdities, but never lived to complete this great task. Now, reading
this, I have wondered whether two little books might not be written
which should prove useful severally to the undergraduate and to the
politician. I do not say to the schoolboy, for no book yet written
ever was or ever will be useful to him. But for the undergraduate a
useful book might be written which I shall presently describe, and
which would make a sort of foundation for all his studies. So also for
the politician a second book might be written which should be of the
greatest service. Let me now describe these two books. Perhaps among
those who read this there will be so many men of leisure and learning
as can in combination give the world the volumes I imagine.

The first book should be called “Modern Thought,” and in this, without
praise or blame and without any wandering into metaphysics or religion,
the young fellow should be plainly taught to distinguish the certain
from the uncertain. I know of nothing in which academic training just
now is more at fault. That training seems to consist in two branches.
First, the setting down of a very great number of things each equally
certain with the last and all forming together one huge amorphic body
or lump of assertion; second, a whole sheaf of theories, the whole fun
of which consists in the fact that no one of them can positively be
proved but that all are guesswork. These theories change from year to
year, and while they are defended with a passion astonishing to those
who live in a larger world, there is no pretence that they are true.
The whole business of them is quite obviously a game. Consider, for
instance, history. A lad is taught that William the Conqueror won at
Hastings in 1066; that the opinion of the English people was behind
the little wealthy clique that put an end to the Stuarts; that London
heartily sympathised with the seven Bishops; that all Parliamentary
institutions grew up on the soil of this island in the thirteenth
century from Saxon origins; and that four people called Hengist, and
Horsa, and Aella, and Cerdic led a great number of Germans to various
points of this Island, killed the people living there and put the
Germans in their stead. Now of these assertions, all of which he is to
receive with equal certitude, all dogmatically affirmed, all taught to
him as brute bits of truth--some, as that about Hastings, are rigidly
true; some, such as the attitude of London towards the seven Bishops,
are morally certain (though hardly capable of definite proof); some,
as the weight of public opinion behind the Whigs, debatable though
probable; some, like the Hengist and Horsa business, almost certainly
mere legends--and so forth. It is to be noted that, if you are to teach
at all, you must always have in your teaching some admixture of this
error. No one can exactly balance the degree of probability attaching
to each separate statement; there is no time to array all the evidence,
and if there were, the mind of the student could not carry it. Each
teacher, moreover, will have a scheme of values somewhat different from
his neighbour’s; but even if some admixture of the error I speak of be
necessary, at least let the student be warned that it exists. For if he
is not so warned one of two things will happen: either he will believe
all he is told, with the most appalling results to himself, and, should
he later become powerful, to the whole nation (we are seeing something
of that in economics to-day), or he will (as the cleverer undergraduate
usually does) become sceptical of all he hears; he will begin to
wonder, having once found his teacher out in, let us say, the absurdity
of pretending that Parliamentary institutions were peculiar to Britain,
whether the Battle of Hastings were really fought in 1066 or no.
When he has discovered, as any boy of education, travel, and common
sense will discover, that the Normans were not Scandinavians, but
Frenchmen, he will be led to reason that perhaps William the Conqueror
never existed at all. This mood of universal scepticism is even more
dangerous than that of bovine assurance, more dangerous to character,
that is, and more dissolving of national strength.

As with the assertions so with the theories. There was a theory, for
instance, that a tenure of land existed in ancient England by which
this land was the common property of all, and was called the land
of the “folk.” Then this theory burst, and another theory swelled,
which was that the “folk land” meant the land held by customary
right as distinguished from land held by charter. Again, there was a
theory that an original Saxon tendency to breed large landowners had
gradually prevailed over feudal tenure. This theory burst, and another
theory swelled, which was that the large units of land grew up by an
accidental interpretation of Roman law.

In the book I propose all these theories could be very simply dealt
with. The student should be warned that they are theories, and theories
only, that their whole point and value is that they are not susceptible
to positive proof; that what makes them amusing and interesting is the
certitude that one can go on having a good quarrel about them, and the
inner faith that when one is tired of them one can drop them without
regret. Older men know this, but young men often do not, and they will
take a theory in the Academies and make a friend of it, and at last, as
it were, another self, and clasp it close to their souls and intertwine
themselves with it, only to find towards thirty that they have been
hugging a shade.

So much, then, for this first book. It would not need to be more than
a little pocket volume of fifty or sixty pages, and a young man should
have it to refer to at any moment of his studies. One of its maxims
would be to look up the original evidence upon which anything he was
told was based. Another rule he would find in it would be to underline
all such words as “seems,” “probably,” and so forth, and watch in his
books the way in which they gradually turn, as the argument proceeds,
into “is” and “certainly.” He would also be warned before reading the
work of any authority to remember that that authority was a human
being, to look up his biography, if possible to meet him personally,
to find out what general knowledge he had and what impression he made
upon the casual man that met him. How many men have written histories
of a campaign and yet have been proved at a dinner-table ignorant of
the range of artillery during their period! How many men have learnedly
criticised the style of Rousseau upon a knowledge of French very much
inferior to that of most governesses! I at Oxford knew a don who
exposed and ridiculed the legend of the Girondins, but throughout his
remarks pronounced their title with a hard _g_.

As for the politicians, their little guide-book through life should
be of another sort. In this the first and most valuable part would
deal with political judgment and prophecy. The utmost care would be
taken by the author to show how valueless is any determination of the
future, and how crass the mind which predicts with confidence. Since so
very few men happen to have made lucky shots, it would be the peculiar
care of the author in a loving manner to collect all the follies and
misjudgments which these same men had made upon other grave matters.
And, in general, the reader would be left very certain that every
pompous prophecy he heard was a piece of folly. Next in the book would
come examples of all that political men have said and done which they
most particularly desired to have forgotten. This would serve a twofold
purpose, for first it would amuse and instruct the politician as he
read it, since the misfortunes of others are delightful to human kind,
and, secondly, it would show him that he could not himself trust to
the effect of time, and that his natural desire to turn his coat or to
pretend to some policy he did not understand would at last be judged as
it deserved. In the third and final portion of the book the politician
would be given a list of interesting truths, with regard to the matter
of his trade. It would be proved to him in a few sentences that his
decisions depend upon various difficult branches of study, and by a few
suggested questions he would be convinced of his ignorance therein. The
shortness of human life would be insisted upon, with examples showing
how a man having painfully reached power was stricken with paralysis
or died in torment. The ludicrous miscarriage of great plans would be
laid before him, and, better still, the proof that the most successful
adventures had proceeded almost entirely from chance, and surprised no
one more than their authors.

At the end of the book would be a certain number of coupons permitting
the reader to travel to many places which politicians commonly ignore,
and there would be a list of the sights that he should see. As, for
instance, the troops of such and such a nation upon the march, the
artillery of such another at firing practice, and the opinion expressed
by the populace in taverns in such and such a town. Then at the end
would come a number of common phrases such as _cui bono_, _persona
grata_, _toujours perdrix_, _double entendre_, _sturm und drang_, etc.,
with their English equivalents, if any, and their approximate meaning,
when they possess a meaning. Upon the last page would be a list of
the duties of a Christian man and a short guide to general conduct in
conversation with the rich.

Armed with these manuals, the youth and manhood of a nation would at
once and vastly change. You would find young men recently proceeded
from the University filled with laudable doubts arising from the
vastness of God’s scheme, and yet modestly secure in certain essential
truths such as their own existence and that of an objective universe,
the voice of conscience, and the difference between right and wrong.
While among those of more mature years, who were controlling the
energies of the State, there would appear an exact observance of real
things, an admitted inability to know what would happen fifty or even
twenty years hence, and a habit of using plain language which they and
their audience could easily understand; of using such language tersely,
and occasionally with conviction.

But this revolution will not take place. The two books of which I speak
will not be written. And if anyone doubts this, let him sit down and
try to frame the scheme of one, and he will soon see that it is beyond
any man’s power.




On Fantastic Books


There has fallen upon criticism since perhaps a century ago, and with
increasing weight, a sort of gravity which is in great danger of
becoming tomfoolery at last: as all gravity is in danger of becoming.

No one dares to discuss all that lighter thing which is the penumbra
of letters, and, what is more, no man of letters dares to whisper
that letters themselves are not often much more than a pastime to the
reader, and are only very rarely upon a level with good and serious
speculation: never upon a level with philosophy: still less upon a
level with religion. It is perhaps even a mark of the eclipse of
religion when any department of mere intellectual effort can raise
itself as high as literature has raised itself in its own eyes; and
since all expression now (or nearly all) is through the pen literature
thus suffering from pride can impose its pride upon the world.

Two things alone correct this pride: first, that those who practise
the trade of literature starve if they are austere or run into debt if
they are not; secondly, that now and then one of the inner circle gives
the thing away--for instance, Mr. Andrew Lang in his excellent and
never-to-be-forgotten remarks delivered only last year at the dinner of
the Royal Literary Fund. This Member of our Union said (with how much
truth!) that the writers of stories should remember they were writers
of stories and not teachers and preachers. And the same might be said
to others of the Craft. If a man has had granted to him by the Higher
Powers a jolly little lyric, why, that is a jolly little lyric. He
should bow and scrape to those who gave it to him and hand it on to
his fellow-men for a dollar. But it does not make him a god, and if it
gives him so much as a swelled head it makes him intolerably wearisome.
More tolerable are the victors of campaigns discussing at table their
successes in the field than poets who forget their Muse: for to their
Muse alone, or to those who sent her, do they owe what they are, as
may very clearly be seen in the case of those whose Muse has deserted
them and flown again up to her native heaven; nor is any case more
distressing than that of ----.

All of which leads me to the Fantastic Books. One, two, a dozen at the
most, in all the history of the world have ranked with the greatest.
Rabelais is upon the summit, and the _Sentimental Journey_ will live
for some hundreds of years, but how many others are there which men
remember? There is a sort of conspiracy against them led by the few
intelligent vicious in league with the numerous and virtuous fools;
and thus the salt of the Fantastic Books, which is as good as the salt
of the sea, is lost to the most of mankind.

Men sit in front of the writers of Fantastic Books fair and squarely
with their hands on their knees, their eyes set, their mouths glum,
their souls determined, and say:

“Come now, Fantastic Book, are you serious or are you not serious?”

And when the Fantastic Book answers “I am both.”

Then the man gets up with a sigh and concludes that it is neither. Yet
the Fantastic Book was right, and if people were only wise they would
salt all their libraries with Fantastic Books.

Note that the Fantastic Books are not of necessity jocose books or
ribald books, nor even extravagant books. If I had meant to write about
extravagant books, _quâ_ extravagant, you may be certain I should have
chosen that word. Rabelais is extravagant and so is Sterne, but not
on account of their extravagance are they fantastic. The note of the
Fantastic Book is an easy escape from the world. It is not imagination,
though imagination is a necessary spring to it: it is that faculty by
which the mind travels, as it reads, whether through space or through
time or through _quality_. A book is a Fantastic Book, though time and
space be commonplace enough, though the time be to-day and the place
Camberwell, if only the mind perpetually travels, seeing one after
another unexpected things in the consequence of human action or in the
juxtaposition of emotions.

There is a category of Fantastic Books most delightful, and never to
my thinking overdone, which deals with journeys to worlds beyond the
earth. I confess that I care nothing whether they are well written
or ill written; so long as they are written in any language that I
can understand I will read them; and to day as I write I have before
me a notable collection of such, every one of which I have read over
and over again. I remember one called the _Anglo-Saxon Conquest of
the Solar System_ or words to that effect; another of a noble kind,
called _Thuka of the Moon_. I only mention the two together by way
of contrast; and I remember one in which somebody or other went to
Mars and went mad, but I forget the title. Be they as well written
as the _First Men in the Moon_, which is or will be a classic, or as
ill written as a book which I may not mention because there is a law
forbidding any one to tell unpleasant truths, so long as they concern
voyages to the Planets they are worth reading.

Then, also, there is the future. The _Time Machine_ is, perhaps, the
chief of them; but writers who travel into the future, good or bad, are
all delightful.

You may say that they are also always a little boring because they
always try to teach a lesson or to prophesy. That is true, but when
you have comforted yourself with the firm conviction that prophecies
of this kind are invariably and wildly wrong the disturbance which
they cause in your mind will disappear. I have among my most treasured
books one of the early nineteenth century, called _Revelations of the
Dead Alive_, in which the end of our age and its opinions upon _that_
age are presented, and it is all wrong! But it is very entertaining
all the same. Most ridiculous but not least entertaining of such books
are the Socialist books, the books showing humanity in the future all
Socialist and going on like sticks. There is, indeed, another type of
mournful Socialist book much more real and much more troubling, in
which Socialism has failed, and the mass of men go on like slaves; but
no matter. A prophecy (when it is scientific) is always and invariably
absolutely and totally wrong:--and a great comfort it is to remember
_that_!

Yet another sort of Fantastic Book is your Journey to Hell or to
Heaven. There is one I have read and re-read. It is called _The Outer
Darkness_. I shall never cease to read it. It is a journey to a sort
of Hell, and these are as a rule more entertaining than the Heavenly
journey, though why I cannot tell. Does the same hold true of Dante?

Lastly, and much the most rare and much the most valued of all are the
books which are fantastic, though they cling to the present and to
things known. In these I would include imaginary people in the Islands
and in the Arctic, and even those which introduce half-rational beasts,
for such books depend for their character not upon the matter of the
fantasy, but upon the manner. There is a book called _Ninety North_,
for instance, which is all about a race of people at the North Pole,
but the power of the book resides not in the distance of the scene, but
in the vision of the writer and in the little irony that trickles down
every page.

Who collects them or preserves them--the Fantastic Books? No one, I
think. They are not catalogued under a separate Heading. They puzzle
the writers of Indices; they bewilder Librarians. They must be grouted
out of the mass of rubbish as Pigs in the Perigord grout out truffles.
There is no other way.

Also, in the Perigord, truffles are hunted with Hounds.




The Unfortunate Man


To all those who doubt the power of chance in human affairs; to all
Stoics, Empiricists, Monists, Determinists, and all men whatsoever that
terminate in this fashion, Greeting: Read what follows:

There was a man I used to know whose business it was to succeed in
life, and who had made a profession of this from the age of nineteen.
His father had left him a fortune of about £600 a year, which he still
possesses, but, with that exception, he has been made by the gods a
sort of puffball for their amusement, the sort of thing they throw
about the room. It was before his father’s death that a determination
was taken to make him the land agent at the house of a cousin, who
would give him a good salary, and it was arranged, as is the custom in
that trade, that he should do nothing in return but dine, smoke, and
ride about. The next step was easy. He would be put into Parliament,
and then, by quiet, effective speaking and continual voting, he would
become a statesman, and so grow more and more famous, and succeed more
and more, and marry into the fringes of one of the great families, and
then die.

To this happy prospect was his future turned when he set out, not upon
the old mare but upon the new Arab which his father had foolishly
bought as an experiment, to visit his cousin’s home and to make
the last arrangements. And note in what follows that every step in
the success-business came off, and yet somehow the sum total was
disappointing, and at the present moment one can very definitely say
that he has not succeeded.

He set out, I say, upon the new Arab, going gently along the sunken
road that leads to the Downs, when a man carrying a faggot at the end
of a pitchfork seemed to that stupid beast a preternatural apparition,
and it shied forward and sideways like a knight’s move, so that the
Unfortunate Man fell off heavily and hurt himself dreadfully. When the
Arab had done this it stood with its beautiful tail arched out, and
its beautiful neck arched also, looking most pitifully at its fallen
rider, and with a sadness in its eye like that of the horse in the
Heliodorus. The Unfortunate Man got on again, feeling but a slight pain
in the right shoulder. But what I would particularly have you know is
this: that the pain has never wholly disappeared, and is perhaps a
little worse now after twenty years than it has been at any previous
time. Moreover, he has spent quite £350 in trying to have it cured, and
he has gone to foreign watering-places, and has learnt all manner of
names, how that according to one man it is rheumatism, and according
to another it is suppressed gout, and according to another a lesion.
But the point to him is the pain, and this endures.

Well, then, he rode over the Down and came out through the Combe to his
cousin’s house. The gate out of the field into the park was shut, and
as he leaned over to open it he dropped his crop. I am ashamed to say
that--it was the only act of the kind in his career, but men who desire
to succeed ought not to act in this fashion--he did not get down to
pick it up because he was afraid that if he did he might not be able to
get on to the horse again. With infinite trouble, leaning right down
over the horse’s neck, he managed to open the gate with his hands, but
in doing so he burst his collar, and he had to keep it more or less in
place by putting down his chin in a ridiculous and affected attitude.
His hopes of making a fine entry at a pretty ambling trot, that perhaps
his cousin would be watching from the window, were already sufficiently
spoilt by the necessity he was under of keeping his collar thus, when
the accursed animal bolted, and with the speed of lightning passed
directly in front of a little lawn where his cousin, his cousin’s wife,
and their little child were seated admiring the summer’s day. It was
not until the horse had taken him nearly half a mile away that he got
him right again, and so returned hot, dishevelled, and very miserable.

But they received him kindly, and his cousin’s wife, who was a most
motherly woman, put him as best she could at his ease. She even got him
another collar, knowing how terrible is the state of the soul when the
collar is burst in company. And he sat down with them to make friends
and discuss the future. He had always heard that among the chief
avenues to success is to play with and be kind to the children of the
Great, so he smiled in a winning manner at his cousin’s little boy,
and stretching out his arms took the child playfully by the hand. A
piercing scream and a sharp kick upon the shin simultaneously informed
him that he had fallen into yet another misfortune, and the boy’s
mother, though she was kindness itself, was startled into speaking
to him very sharply, and telling him that the poor lad suffered from
a deeply cut finger which was then but slowly healing. He made his
apologies in a nervous but sincere manner, and in doing so was awkward
enough to upset the little table which they had carried out upon the
lawn, and upon which had been set the cups and saucers for tea. The
whole thing was exceedingly annoying.

In this way did the Unfortunate Man enter the great arena of modern
political life.

You must not imagine that he failed to obtain the sinecure which his
father had sent him to secure. As I have already said, the failure of
the Unfortunate Man was not a failure in major plans but in details.
There may have been some to whom his career appeared enviable or
even glorious, but Fate always watched him in a merry mood, and he
was destined to suffer an interior misery which never failed to be
sharpened and enlivened by the innumerable accidents of life.

He obtained for his cousin from the North of Scotland a man of sterling
capacity, whose methods of agriculture had more than doubled the income
of a previous employer; but as luck would have it this fellow, whose
knowledge of farming was quite amazing, was not honest, and after
some few months he had absconded with a considerable sum of money. A
well which he had advised to be dug failed to find water for some two
hundred feet, and then after all that expense fell in. He lamed one of
his cousin’s best horses by no fault of his own; the animal trod upon
a hidden spike of wood and had to be shot; and in doing his duty by
upbraiding a very frousty old man who was plunging about recklessly
just where a lot of she (or hen) pheasants were sitting on their eggs
he mortally offended the chief landowner of the neighbourhood, who
was none other than the frousty old man himself, and who was tramping
across the brushwood to see his cousin upon most important matters.
It was therefore in a condition of despair that his cousin finally
financed him for Parliament. The constituency which he bought after
some negotiations was a corrupt seaport upon the coast of Rutlandshire
(here is no libel!). He was at first assured that there would be no
opposition, and acting upon this assurance took the one brief holiday
which he had allowed himself for five years. The doctor, who was
anxious about his nerves, recommended a sea voyage of a week upon a
ship without wireless apparatus. He landed in Jamaica to receive a
telegram which informed him that a local gentleman of vast influence,
eccentric, and the chief landowner in the constituency, had determined
to run against him, and which implored him to cable a considerable sum
of money, though no such sum was at his disposal.

In the earthquake the next day he luckily escaped from bodily injury,
but his nerves were terribly shaken. Thenceforward he suffered from
little tricks of grimace which were to him infinitely painful, but to
others always a source of secret, sometimes of open, merriment. He
returned and fought the election. He was elected by a majority of 231,
but not until he had been twice blackmailed, and had upon at least
three occasions given money to men who afterwards turned out to have no
vote. I may say, to put the matter briefly, that he retained the seat
uninterruptedly until the last election, but always by tiny majorities
at the expense of infinite energy, sweating blood, as it were, with
anxiety at every poll, and this although he was opposed by the most
various people. It was Fate!

He spoke frequently in the House of Commons, and always unsuccessfully,
until one day a quite unexpected accident of war in a foreign country
gave him his opportunity. It so happened that the Unfortunate Man knew
all about this country; he had read every book published upon it; it
was the one thing upon which he was an authority. And ridiculous as
had been his numerous efforts to engage the attention of the august
assembly, upon this matter at least his judgment was eagerly expected.
The greatest courtesy was shown him, the Government arranged that he
should speak at the most telling time of the debate, and when he rose
it was before a full House, strained to an eager attention.

He struck an attitude at once impressive and refined, stretched forth
his hand in a manner that gave promise of much to come, and was
suddenly seized with an immoderate fit of coughing. An aged gentleman,
a wool merchant by profession, who sat immediately behind him, thought
to do a kindly thing by slapping him upon the back, being ignorant of
that Shoulder Trouble with which the jolly reader is acquainted. And
the Unfortunate Man, in the midst of his paroxysm of coughing, could
not restrain a loud cry of anguish. Confused interruptions, rising
to a roar of protest, prevented him from going further, and he was
so imprudent, or rather so wretchedly unlucky, as to be stung into a
violent expression of opinion directed towards another member sitting
upon his immediate left, a moneylender by trade and very sensitive.
This fellow alone had heard the highly objectionable word which the
Unfortunate Man had let drop. It is a word very commonly used by
gentlemen in privacy, but rare, indeed, or rather wholly unused on
the public occasions of our dignified political life. In vain did
those about the moneylender pull at his skirts and implore him not to
rise. He was white with passion. He rose and appealed to the Chair. He
reiterated the offensive expression in the clearest and most articulate
fashion, apologising to the horrified assembly for having to sully
the air it breathed by the necessary repetition of so abominable an
epithet, and he demanded the correction of the monster in human form
who had descended to use it. The reprimand which the Unfortunate Man
received from the Chair was lengthy and severe, and from that day
forward he determined that the many omens of ill-fortune which had
marked his life had reached their turn. He was too proud to resign,
but his caucus, in spite of further considerable gifts of money,
indignantly repudiated their Member, and when the election came he had
not the courage to face it.

He is now living, broken and prematurely aged, in a brick house
which he has built for himself in a charming part of the County of
Surrey. He has recently discovered that the title to his freehold
is insecure: an action is pending. Meanwhile, a spring of water has
broken out under the foundations of the building, and some quarter of
a mile before its windows, obscuring the view of the Weald in which he
particularly delighted, a very large factory with four tall chimneys
is in process of erection. These things have depressed him almost to
the verge of despair, and he can only forget his miseries in motoring.
He is continually fined for excessive speed, though by nature the most
cautious of men, and terrified by high speeds, and I learn only to-day
that as he was getting ready to go into Guildford to dispute a further
fine before the Bench a backfire has put his wrist out of joint, and he
suffers intolerable pain. _Militia est Vita Hominis!_




The Contented Man


Lucifer, for some time a bishop in Southern Italy (you did not know
that, but it is true nevertheless, and you will find his name in the
writings of Duchesne, and he took part in councils; nay, there was a
time when I knew the very See of which he was bishop, but the passage
of years effaces all these things)--Lucifer, I say, laid it down in
his System of Morals that contentment was a virtue, and said that it
could be aimed at and acquired positively, just as any other virtue
can. Then there are others who have said that it was but a frame of
mind and the result of several virtues; but these are the thinkers. The
great mass of people are willing to say that contentment is strictly
in proportion to the amount of money one may have, and they are wrong.
I remember now there was a Sultan, or some such dignitary, in Spain,
who counted the days of his life which had been filled with content,
and found that they were seventeen. He was lucky; there are not many
of us who can say the same. Then once a man told me this story about
contentment, which seemed to me full of a profound meaning. It seems
there was once an old gentleman who was possessed of something over
half a million pounds, a banker, and this old gentleman every night of
his life would go through certain little private books of his, compare
them with the current list of prices, and estimate to a penny what he
was worth before he slept. It was always a great pleasure to him to
note the figures growing larger, and a great pain to him to note the
rare occasions when they had shrunk a little in twenty-four hours. It
so happened that this old gentleman lost a considerable sum of money
which he had imprudently lent to a distant and foreign country too much
praised in the newspapers, and he worried so much over the loss that
he became ill and could not go to his office. His sons kept on the
business for him, and every succeeding week they lost more and more
of the money. But such was their filial piety that every night they
gave the old gentleman false information, and that in some detail, so
that he could put down his little rows of figures and see them growing
larger night after night. You see, it was not the wealth that he
desired, it was the increase in the little rows of figures; the wealth
he consumed was the same; he wore the same clothes, he ate the same
food, he lived in the same house as before, and he had for a companion
eternally one or another of the two nurses provided by the doctor. The
figures increasing regularly as they did filled him with a greater and
a greater joy. After two years of this business he came to die, but
his passing was a very happy one: he blessed his sons fervently and
told them that nothing had more comforted his old age than their sober
business sense; they had nearly doubled the family fortune during their
short administration of it; he congratulated them and was now ready to
go to his God in peace. Which he did, and two weeks after the petition
in bankruptcy was presented by the young people themselves, always the
more decent way of doing it: but the old man had died content.

Which parable leads up to the point at which I should have begun all
this, which is, that once in my life, in the year 1901, during a
heavy fog in the early morning of the month of November, in London,
I met a perfectly contented man. He was the conductor of an omnibus.
These vehicles depended in those days entirely on the traction of
horses. They were therefore slow, and as the night, or rather the
early morning, was foggy (it was a little after one) people going
Westward--journalists for instance, who are compelled to be up at
such hours--did not choose to travel in this way. There was no one in
the ’bus but myself. I sat next the door as it rumbled along; there
was one of those little faint oil lamps above it which are unique in
Christendom for the small amount of light they give. It was impossible
to read, but by the slight glimmer of it I saw suddenly revealed like
a vision the face of that really happy man. It was a round face,
framed in a somewhat slovenly hat and coat collar, but not slovenly in
feature, though not severe. And as its owner clung to the rail and
swung with the movements of the ’bus he whistled softly to himself a
genial little air. It was not I but he that began the conversation.
He told me that few things were a greater blessing in life than gas
fires, especially if one could regulate the amount of gas by a penny in
the slot. He pointed out to me that in this way there were never any
disputes as to the amount of gas used, and he also said that it kept a
man from the curse of credit, which was the ruin of so many. I told him
that in my house there was no gas, but that his description almost made
me wish there was. And so it did, for he went on to tell me how you
could cook any mortal thing with any degree of heat and at any speed by
the simple regulation of a tap.

It may be imagined how anxious I was on meeting so rare a being to go
more deeply into the matter and to find out on what such happiness
reposed; but I did not know where to begin, because there are always
some questions which men do not like asked, and unless one knows all
about a man’s life one does not know what those questions are. Luckily
for me, he volunteered. He told me that he was married and had eight
children. He told me his wages, which were astonishingly low, his hours
of labour, which were incredibly long, and he further told me that on
reaching the yard that night he would have to walk a mile to his home.
He said he liked this, because it made him sleep, and he added that
in his profession the great difficulty was to get enough exercise. He
told me how often a day off was allowed him and how greatly he enjoyed
it. He told me the rent which he paid for his two rooms, which appeared
to be one-third of his income, and congratulated himself upon the
cheapness and commodity of the place; and so he went on talking as we
rumbled down the King’s Road, going farther and farther and farther
West. My day would end in a few hundred yards; his not for a mile or
two more. Yet his content was far the greater, and it affected me, I am
sorry to say, with wonder rather than with a similar emotion of repose
and pleasure.

The next part of his conversation discovered what you will often
find in the conversation of contented men (or, rather, of partially
contented men, for no other absolutely contented man have I ever met
except this one), that is, a certain good-humoured contempt for those
who grumble. He told me that the drivers of ’buses were never happy;
they had all that life can give: high wages, fresh open-air work, the
dignity of controlling horses, and, what is perhaps more important,
ceaseless companionship, for not only had they the companionship of
chance people who would come and sit on the front seats of the ’bus
outside, but they could and did make appointments with friends who
would come and ride some part of the way and talk to them. Then,
again, as their work was more skilled, their tenure of it was more
secure, nor were they constrained to shout “Liverpool Street” at the
top of their voices for hours on end, nor to say “Benk, Benk, Benk” in
imitation of the pom-pom. Nevertheless they grumbled. He was careful to
tell me that they were not really unhappy. What he condemned in them
was rather the habit and, as it were, the fashion of grumbling. It
seemed as though no weather pleased them; it was always either too hot
or too cold; they took no pleasure in the healthy English rain beating
upon their faces, and warm spring days seemed to put them in a worse
humour than ever. He condemned all this in drivers.

When we had come to the corner of my street in Chelsea as I got out I
offered him a cigar which I had upon me. He told me he did not smoke.
He was going on to tell me that he did not drink, and would, I had no
doubt, if he had had further leisure, have told me his religion, his
politics, and much more about himself; but though the ’buses in those
days would wait very long at street corners they would not wait for
ever, and that particular ’bus rumbled and bumped away. I looked after
it a little wistfully, for fear that I might never see a happy man
again. And I walked down my street towards my home more slowly than
usual, thinking upon the thing that I had just experienced.

I confess I found it a very difficult matter. That experience not
only challenged all that I had heard of happiness, but also re-awoke
the insistent and imperative question which men put to their gods and
which never receives an answer. Ecstasy is independent of all material
conditions whatsoever. That great sense of rectitude which so often
embitters men but permits them to support pain is independent of
material conditions also. But these are not contented moods: oblivion
is ready to every man’s hand, and even the most unfortunate secure a
little sleep, and even the most tortured slaves know that at last, for
all the rules and fines and regulations of the workshop, they cannot
be forbidden to die; but such a prospect is not equivalent to content.
Further, there is a philosophy, rarely achieved but conspicuous in
every rank of fortune, which so steadily regards all external accident
as to remain indifferent to the strain of living and even to be,
to some extent, master of physical pain. But that philosophy, that
mournful philosophy which I have heard called “the permanent religion
of mankind,” is not content: on the contrary, it is very close indeed
to despair. It is the philosophy of which the Roman Empire perished. It
is the philosophy which, just because it utterly failed to satisfy the
heart of man, powerfully accelerated the triumph of the Church, as the
weight and pressure of water powerfully accelerate the rise of a man’s
body through it, to the sunlight and the air above, which are native
and necessary to him. No, it was not the philosophy of the Stoics
which had laid a foundation for the ’bus-conductor’s soul.

I could not explain that content of his in any way save upon the
hypothesis that he was mad.




The Missioner


In one of those great halls which the winter darkens and which are
proper to the North, there sat a group of men, kindly and full of the
winter night and of their food and drink, upon which for many hours
they had regaled together, and not only full of song, but satiated
with it, so long and so loudly had they sung. They all claimed descent
from the Gods, but in varying degrees, and their Chief was descended
from the father of the Gods, by no doubtful lineage, for it was his
granfer’s mother to whom a witch in the woods had told the story of her
birth.

In the midst of them as they so sat, a large fire smouldered, but
having been long lit, sent up so strong a shaft of rising air as drew
all smoke with it, towering to a sort of open cage upon the high roof
tree of that hall whence it could escape to heaven.

I say they were tired of song and filled with many good things, but
chiefly with companionship. They had landed but recently from the sea;
the noise of the sea was in their ears as they so sat round the fire,
still talking low, and a Priest who was among them refused to interpret
the sound; but he said in a manner that some mocked doubtfully, others
heard with awe, that the sea never sounded save upon nights when the
Gods were abroad. He was the Priest of a lesser God, but he was known
throughout the fleet of those pirate fishermen for his great skill in
the interpretation of dreams, and he could tell by the surface of the
water in the nightless midsummer where the shoals were to be found.

He said that on that night the Gods were abroad, and, indeed, the
quality of the wind as it came down the gulf of the fjord provoked such
a fancy, for it rose and fell as though by a volition, and sometimes
one would have said that it was a quiet night, and, again, a moment
after, one heard a noise like a voice round the corners of the great
beams, and the wind pitied or appealed or called. Then a man who was a
serf, but very skilled in woodwork, lying among the serfs in the outer
ring beyond the fire in the straw, called up and said: “Lords, he is
right; the Gods have come down from the Dovrefield; they are abroad.
Let us bless our doors.”

It was when he had so spoken that upon the main gate of that Hall (a
large double engine of foot-thick pine swung upon hinges wrought many
generations ago by the sons of the Gods) came a little knocking. It was
a little tapping like the tapping of a bird. It rang musically of metal
and of hollow metal; it moved them curiously, and a very young man who
was of the blood said to his father: “Perhaps a God would warn us.”

The keeper of the door was a huge and kindly man, foolish but good
for lifting, with whom by daylight children played, and who upon such
evenings lay silent and contented enough to hear his wittier fellows.
This serf rose from the straw and went to unbar. But the Chief put his
hand forward, and bade him stay that they might still hear that little
tapping. Then he lowered his hand and the gate was swung open.

Cold came with it for a moment, and the night air; light, and as though
blown before that draught, drifted into the hall a tall man, very
young, who bowed to them with a gesture they did not know, and first
asked in a tongue they could not tell, whether any man might interpret
for him.

Then one old man who was their pilot and who had often run down into
the vineyard lands, sometimes for barter, sometimes for war, always
for a wage, said two words or three in that new tongue, hesitatingly.
His face was wrinkled and hard; he had very bright but very pale grey
eyes that were full of humility. He said three words of greeting which
he had painfully learned twenty years before, from a priest, upon the
rocks of Brittany, who had also given him smooth stones wherewith to
pray; and with these smooth stones the old Pilot continually prayed
sometimes to the greater and sometimes to the lesser Gods. His wife
had died during the first war between Hrolf and the Twin Brothers; he
had come home to find her dead and sanctified, and, being Northern, he
had since been also a silent man. This Pilot, I say, quoted the words
of greeting in the strange tongue. Then the tall young stranger man
advanced into the circle of the firelight and made a sign upon his head
and his breast and his shoulders, which was like the sign of the Hammer
of Thor, and yet which was not the sign of the Hammer of Thor. When he
had done this, the Pilot attempted that same sign, but he failed at
it, for it was many years since he had been taught it upon the Breton
coast. He knew it to be magical and beneficent, and he was ashamed to
fail.

The Chief of those who were descended from the Gods and were seated
round the fire, turned to the Priest and said: “Is this a guest, a
stranger sent, or is he a man come as an enemy who should be led out
again into the night? Have you any divination?”

“I have no divination,” said the Priest. “I cannot tell one thing or
the other, nor each from the other in the case of this young man. But
perhaps he is one of the Gods seeking shelter among men, or perhaps he
is a fancy thing, warlock, but not doing evil. Or perhaps he is from
the demons; or perhaps he is a man like ourselves, and seeking shelter
during some long wandering.”

When the Chief heard this he asked the Pilot, not as a man possessing
divine knowledge, but as one who had travelled and knew the sea,
whether he knew this Stranger and whence he came. To which the Pilot
answered:

“Captain, I do not know this young man nor whence he comes, nor any
of his tribe, nor have I seen any like him save once three slaves who
stood in a market-place of the Romans in a town that was subject to
a great lord who was a Frank and not a Breton, and who was hated by
the people of his town so that later they slew him. Then these three
slaves were loosened, and they came to the house of the Priest of the
Gods of that country, and they told me the name of the people whence
they sprang. But I have forgotten it. Only I know that it is among the
vineyard lands. There the day and the night are equally divided all the
year long, and if the snow falls it falls gently and for a very little
while, and there are all manner of birds, and those people are very
rich, and they have great houses of stone. Now I believe this Stranger
to be a man like ourselves, born of a woman, and coming northward upon
some purpose which we do not know. It may be for merchandise, or it may
be for the love of singing and of telling stories to men.”

When he had said this they all looked at the Stranger and they saw that
he had with him a little instrument that was not known to them, for it
was a flute of metal. It was of silver, as they could see, long drawn
and very delicately made, and with this had he summoned at the gate.

The Chief then brought out with his own hands a carven chair, on which
he seated the Stranger, and he put into his right hand a gold cup taken
from the Romans in a city of the Franks, upon which was faintly carved
a cross, and round the rim of which were four precious stones, an
emerald, a ruby, an amethyst, and a diamond; and going to a skin which
he had taken in a Gascon raid, he poured out wine into that chalice and
went down upon one knee as is proper to strangers when they are to be
entertained, and put a cloth over his arms and bade him drink. But when
the young man saw the cross faintly carved upon the cup and the four
precious stones at the corners of it, he shuddered a little and put it
aside as though it were a sacred thing, at which they all marvelled.
Yet he longed for the wine. And they, understanding that in some way
this ornament was sacred to his Gods, gently took it from him and
through courtesy put it aside upon a separate place which was reserved
for honourable vessels, and poured him other wine into a wooden stoop;
and this he drank, holding it out now to one and now to another, but
last and chiefly to their Captain; and as he drank it he drank it with
signs of amity.

Then by way of payment for so much kindness he took his silver flute
and blew upon it shrill notes, all very sweet, and the sweeter for
their choice and distance one from another, until they listened,
listening every man with those beside him like one man, for they had
never heard such a sound; and as he played one man saw one thing in his
mind and one another thing; for one man saw the long and easy summer
seas that roll after a prosperous boat filled with spoil, whether of
fishes or of booty, when the square sail is taken aft by a warm wind
in the summer season, and the high mountains of home first show beyond
the line of the sea. And another man saw a little valley, narrow, with
deep pasture, wherein he had been bred and had learned to plow the
land with horses before ever he had come to the handling of a tiller
or the bursting of water upon the bows. And another saw no distinct
and certain thing, but vague and pleasurable hopes fulfilled, and the
advent of great peace. And another saw those heights of the hills to
which he ever desired to return.

But the old Pilot, straining with wonder in his eyes as the music rose,
thought confusedly of all that he had seen and known; of the twirling
tides upon the Breton coast and of the great stone towns, of the
bright vestments of the ordered armies in the market-places and of the
vineyard land.

When the Stranger had ceased so to play upon his instrument they
applauded, as their custom was, by cries, some striking the armour upon
the ground so that it rang, and by gesture and voice they begged him
play again.

The second time he played all those men heard one thing: which was a
dance of young men and women together in some country where there was
little fear. The tune went softly, and was softly repeated, full of the
lilt of feet, and when it was ended they knew that the dance was done.

This time they were so pleased that they waited a little before they
would applaud, but the old Pilot, remembering more strongly than ever
the vineyard land, moved his right hand back and forward with delight
as in some way he would play music with it, and thus by a communication
of heart to heart stirred in that Stranger a new song; and taking up
his flute for the third time he blew upon it a different strain, at
which some were confused, others hungry in their hearts, though they
could not have told you why, but the old Pilot saw great and gracious
figures moving over a land subject to blessedness; he saw that in
the faces of these figures (which were those of the Immortals) stood
present at once a complete satisfaction and a joyous energy and a
solution of every ill. “These,” he said to himself in the last passion
of the music, “these are true Gods.” But suddenly the music ceased, and
with it the vision also.

For the great pleasure which the Flute Player had given them they
desired to keep him in their company, and so they did for three full
years. That is, the winter long, the seed time, and the time of
harvest; and the next harvest also, and another harvest more, during
which time he played them many tunes, and learnt their tongue.

Now, his Gods were his own, but he pined for the lack of their worship
and for Priests of his own sort, and when he would explain these in
his own manner some believed him, but some did not believe him. And to
those who believed him he brought a man from the South, from beyond
the Dovrefield, who baptised them with water: as for those who would
not have this they looked on, and kept to their own decree: but there
was as yet no division among them. A little while after the third
harvest, hearing that the fleet, which was of twelve boats, would make
for Roman land, he begged to go with it, for he was sick for his own,
but first he made them take an oath that they would molest none, nor
even barter with any, until they had landed him in his own land. The
Chief took this oath for them, and though his oath was worth the oath
of twelve men, twelve other men swore with him. In this way the oath
was done. So they took the Flute Player for three days over the sea
before the wind called Eager, which is the north-east wind, and blows
at the beginning of the open season; they took him at the beginning of
the fourth year since his coming among them, and they landed him in a
little boat in a seaport of the Franks, on Roman land....

The Faith went over the world as very light seed goes upon the wind,
and no one knows the drift on which it blew; it came to one place and
to another, and to each in a different way. It came, not to many men,
but always to one heart, till all men had hold of it.




The Dream


The experience I am about to set down was perhaps the result, and at
any rate it was the sequel, of a conversation engaged between three men
in London in the year 1903.

Of these three men one was returned but recently from South Africa,
where he had seen all too much of the war; another was a kindly,
wealthy, sober sort of man, young, virtuous, and full of inquiry; the
third was a hack.

It was about the season of Easter and of spring, when actually and
physically one can feel and handle the force of life about one, all
ready to break bounds; but these young men (for no one of them was
yet of middle age) preferred to talk of things more shadowy and less
certain than the air and the life and the English spring all around.
Things more shadowy and less certain, but to the mind of youth, being
a vigorous mind things fixed and absorbing; destiny, for instance, and
the nature of man.

Not one of these three, however, affirmed in this conversation (which
I so well remember!) any definite scheme. They spoke in terms of
violent opinion, of argument, and of analogy, but none of the three
came forward with a faith or even with a philosophy from which one
felt he could not be shaken. The more remarkable was it, therefore,
that one of them on his return in the early morning to his rooms,
after this young and long conversation of a mixed sort, such as men
entering upon life will often indulge, should have suffered and should
have remembered an exact and even terrible vision. It would indeed be
inexplicable that he should have suffered such a thing as a consequence
of his waking thoughts, though, if there be influences upon minds other
than the influences they themselves can bring--if there be influences
from without, and other wills determining our dreams--then what next
followed is less difficult to comprehend. For, when he had fallen
asleep, it seemed to him at once that he was in the midst of a very
gay and pleasant company in a sort of palace whereof the vast room in
which he stood was one out of very many that opened one into the other
in sequence. The crowd, and he with it, went forward slowly towards
a banquet which he heard was prepared. He did not see among those he
spoke to, and who spoke to him, any face with which he was familiar or
to which he could attach a name; and yet he seemed to know them all,
in that curious inconsequence of dreams, and one in especial, at some
distance from him, which seemed to have been lost once, and now to be
seen again through the crowd, was a face the sight of which moved in
him a very passionate memory: yet it was no early memory.

So they went forward, and soon they were all seated at a table of
enormous length, so long that its length seemed to have some purpose
about it; and at the farther end of this table was a door leading out
of that hall. It was a door not very large for so magnificent a space;
such a door as a man or woman could easily open with a common gesture,
and pass through and shut behind them quickly.

Now, for the first time, when they were eating and drinking, it seemed
to him that the conversation took on meaning, and a more consecutive
meaning than is usual in dreams; when, just as that new phase of his
dream had begun, one of the guests, a little to the left of the place
opposite to him, a woman of middle age who had been somewhat silent,
rose without apology, and without warning left her place he hardly knew
how, and passed out of the room through the door that he had noticed.
It shut behind her. No one mentioned or noticed her going, but in a
little while another and another had risen and had gone. And still as
each guest departed, some in the midst of a sentence, some during a
silence in the talk, there increased upon him an appalling sense of
unusual things; it was appalling to him that no one said good-bye, that
none of the fellows of those who so departed turned to them or noticed
their going, and that none of those who so departed returned or made
any promise to return. Next he noticed with an increasing ill-ease, by
some inconsequence of his dream, that when he watched the departure of
a guest (as the others did not) he saw the empty chair and the gap left
in the ranks; but when he looked again after speaking to some other to
the right or left the gap was somehow less defined, and when he looked
yet again it was no longer to be noticed or perceived; though it could
not be said that the chair was filled or was removed, but in some way
the absence of the man or woman who had been there ceased to be marked,
and it was as though they had never been present at all. It was not
often that he cared to look for more than a moment at one or another
of these risings from the feast; yet in the moment’s observation he
could see very different things. Some rose as though in terror; some as
though in weariness; some startled, as at a sudden command which they
alone could hear; some in a natural manner as though at an appointed
moment. But there was no order or method in their going: only all went
through that door.

His mind was now oppressed by the change which comes in dreams, and
turns them sometimes from phantasy to horror. There sat opposite
him a man somewhat older than himself, with a face vigorous and yet
despairing, not without energy, and trained in self-command. And this
man answered his thoughts at once, as thoughts are answered in dreams.
He said that it was of no use wondering why any guest left that feast,
nor what there was, if there was anything, beyond the door through
which this inconsequential passage was made. Even as he was saying
this he himself, suddenly looking towards it with an expression of
extreme sadness and abandonment, rose abruptly, bowed to no one, and
went out. At his departure the dreamer heard a little sigh, and he
who had sighed said that doors of their nature led from one place to
another, and then he tittered a little as though he had said a clever
thing. Then another, a large happy man, laughed somewhat too loudly,
and said that only fools discussed what none could know. A third, still
upon that same theme, said in fixed, contented manner, that, in the
nature of things, nothing was beyond the door. At which, the first
who had spoken tittered again, and said doors of their nature led
somewhere. Even as he said it his eyes filled with tears, and he also
rose and went out.

For the first time during this increasing pressure of mystery and
disaster (for so the dreamer felt it) he watched the figure of that
guest; none of his companions about him dared or chose to do so; but
the dreamer fixedly watched, and he saw the figure going down the long
perspective of the hall very rapidly and very directly. It did not
hesitate nor look back for one moment, it passed through--it was gone.

The dreamer suddenly felt the wine of that feast, the words spoken
round him, more full of meaning and of novelty; the noise of speech,
though more confused, was more pleasing and louder; the candles were
far more bright. He had forgotten, or was just forgetting, all that
other mood of his dream, when it seemed to him that in a sense all
that converse was struck dumb. He heard no sound; he was cut off.
Their hands still moved, their eyes and lips framed words and repeated
glances, but around him, and for him, there was silence. The candles
burned bright through the length of the room, and brightest, as in a
guiding manner, towards the end of it where was the Door. He felt a
thrill pass from his face. He rose and walked directly--no one speaking
to him or noticing him at all--down the long, narrow space behind their
chairs. It took him but a moment, innumerable as were those whom he
must pass. His hand was upon the latch; with his head bent forward
somewhat, and downwards, in the attitude of a man hurrying, he passed
through. And, not knowing what he did, but doing it as though by habit,
he shut the door between him and the feast, and immediately he was in a
complete and utterly silent darkness. But he still was.




The Silence of the Battlefields


Whoever has had occasion, whether for study or for curiosity, to
visit many of the battlefields of Europe, must have been especially
struck by their silence. There are many things combining to produce
this impression, but when all have been accounted for, something over
remains. Thus it is true that in any countryside the contrast between
the noise of the great fight that fills one’s mind and the natural
calm of woods and of fields must penetrate the mind; and, again, it
is evident that any piece of land which one closely examines, noting
all its details for the purposes of history, must seem more lonely and
deserted than those general views in which the eye comprehends so much
of the work of man; because all this special watching of particular
corners, noting of ranges and the rest, make one’s progress slow, keep
one’s eyes close fixed to things more or less near, and thus allow one
to appreciate how far between men are save in the towns. But there
is more than this. It can be proved that there is more. For the same
sense of complete loneliness does not take a man in other similar
work. He does not feel it when he is surveying for a map nor when he
is searching for an historic site other than that of battle. But the
battlefields are lonely.

Some few, especially in this crowded island, are not lonely. Life has
overtaken them, spreading outwards from the towns. By what a curious
irony, for instance, the racecourse at Lewes, with a shouting throng
of men as the horses go by, corresponds precisely to the place where
must have been the thickest of the advance on Montfort’s right as he
led them to attack the King. Evesham is not lonely. Battle is full of
houses and of villas, and the chief centre of the fight is in a garden.

But for the most part the great battlefields are lonely; and their
loneliness is unnatural and oppressive. In some way they repel men.
Trasimene is the lonely shore of a marsh. One would imagine that a
place so famous would be in some way visited. One of the great sewers
of cosmopolitan travel runs close by; one would imagine that the
historic interest of the place would bring men from that railway to
the shore upon which so very nearly the Orientals destroyed us. There
is no such publicity. Sitting at evening near those reeds, where the
great fight was fought, one has a feeling, rare in Italy, commoner in
the north, of complete isolation. There is nothing but water and the
evening sky, and it is so mournful that one might imagine it a place to
which things doomed would come to die.

Roncesvalles, which means so little in the military history of Europe
and so much in her literature, is a profound gorge, cleft right into
the earth 3000 feet, and clothed with such mighty beech woods that
for these alone, apart from its history, one might imagine it to be
perpetually visited. It is not visited. No house is near it, save the
huddled huts round the gloomy place of pilgrimage upon the farther
side of the pass. A silence more profound, a sense of recession more
complete, is not to be discovered upon any of the great roads of
Europe--for one of the great roads goes by the place where Roland died,
but very few travel along it.

Toulouse is popular and noisy; surrounded by so many small market
gardens and so busy and humming a Southern life (detestable to quiet
men!) that you might think no site near it was touched with loneliness.
But there is such a site. It is the crest beyond the city where
Wellington’s victory was won. More curious still, Waterloo, at the very
gates of Brussels, within a stone’s throw, one may say, of building
sites for suburbs, is the only lonely place in its neighbourhood. That
valley, or rather that little dip which is so great in military history
and yet which did so little to change the general movement of the
world, is the one deserted set of fields that you can find for a long
way round. And the soil of Belgium, a gridiron of railways, stuffed
with industry, a place where one short walk takes you from a town to
a town anywhere throughout the little State, is still remarkable for
the way in which its battlefields seem to fend off the presence of
man. The plateau of Fleurus, the marshy banks of Jemappes, the roll of
Neerwinden, all illustrate what I mean.

If one considers in what two places since Christendom was Christendom
most was done to save Christendom from destruction, one will fix upon
the Catalaunian Fields and upon that low tableland in the fork of the
two rivers between Poitiers and Tours. In the first Attila was broken,
Asia from the East; in the second the Mohammedan, Asia from the South.
The Catalaunian Fields have a bleakness amazing to the traveller.
Nothing perhaps so near so much wealth is so utterly alone. Great folds
of empty land that will grow little, that only lately were planted
with stunted pine trees that they might at least grow something,
weary the eye. One dead straight road, Roman in origin, Gallic in its
continuance, drives right across the waste. It is there that the Huns
were broken. It is from that point that their sullen retreat eastward
was permitted, as was permitted in 1792 the retreat eastward of the
Royal Armies from their check in that same plain at Valmy; and Valmy
also is intensely lonely, a bare ridge despoiled to-day even of its
mill, and the little chapel raised to the soul of Kellerman hides
itself away so that you do not see it until you are close upon the
place.

Poitiers has the same loneliness. The Mohammedan had ridden up from the
Pyrenees, ricochetted from the walls of Toulouse, but poured on like
a flood into the centre of Gaul. Charles the Hammer broke him in the
fields beyond Vouneuil. The district is populous and the Valley of the
Clain is full of pastures and among the tenderest of European valleys,
but as you drift down stream and approach this place the plateau upon
the right above you grows bare, and it was there, so far as modern
scholarship can be certain, that the last effort of the Arabs was
forced back.

That other battle of Poitiers among the vineyards, the Black Prince’s
battle, one would imagine, could not seem lonely, for it was fought in
the midst of tilled land full of vineyards and right above the great
high road which leads south-east from the town. But lonely it is, and
if you will go up the little gully where the head of the French column
advanced against the English archers upon the high land above, you will
not find a man to tell you the memories of the place.

Creçy was fought close to a county town; but the same trick of
landscape or of influence is also played there. The town hides itself
in a little hollow upon the farther flank of a hill, and though the
right of Edward’s line reposed upon it, and though it was within a
bowshot of the houses that the boy his son was pressed so hard, yet
Creçy hides away from the battlefield. And as you come in by the
eastern road, which takes you all along the crest of the English
position, there is nothing before you but a naked and a silent land,
falling in a dip to where the first of the French charge failed, and
rising in long empty lengths of fallow and of grass to where you can
see, a single mark for the eye in so much loneliness, the rude cross
standing on the place where the blind King of Bohemia fell.

Loneliest of all, with a loneliness which perpetually haunts me
whenever I write of it, is that battlefield which I know best and have
most closely studied. It is the battlefield on which, as I believe,
more was done to affect both military and general history than on any
other--the battlefield of Wattignies. Here the Revolution certainly
stood, to go under with the fall of Maubeuge, which was at the last
gasp for food, or, with the raising of that siege, to go forward. By
the success at Wattignies the siege was raised. In military history
also it is of great account, for at Wattignies for the first time the
great mind of Carnot, the darting, aquiline mind of that man whose
school of tactics produced Napoleon, first dealt with an army. At
Wattignies for the first time the concentration at the fullest expense
of fatigue, of overwhelming force upon one point of the objective,
came into play and was successful. Such tactics needed the Infantry
which as a fact were used in their development. Still, they were new.
Now, Wattignies, where so much was done to change the art of war and
to transform Europe, is as lonely as anything on earth. Lines of high
trees, a wood almost uncultivated (a rare thing in France), a swept,
wintry upland without a house or a barn, a little huddled group of poor
steadings round a tiny church, and against it all the while rain and
hard weather driving from the French plains below: that is Wattignies.
Up through those sunken ways by which Duquesnoy’s division charged
you will not meet a single human being, and that heath over which the
emigrant nobles countercharged for the last time under the white flag
is similarly bereft of men. Nowhere do you more feel the unnatural
loneliness of those haunted places of honour than in this which I
believe to be the chief one of all the European fields.




Novissima Hora


Time, which is to the mind a function of the mind, stretches and
contracts, as all men know, when the mind impelled by forces not its
own demands the expansion or the lessening of time. Thus in a moment,
as the foolish physicists can prove, long experiences of dreams are
held; and thus hours upon hours of other men’s lives are lost to us
for ever when we lie in profound sleep; and I knew a man who, sleeping
through a morning upon the grassy side of a hill many years ago, slept
through news that seemed to have ruined him and his, and slept on to a
later moment when the news proved false and the threat of disaster was
lifted; during those hours of agony there had been for him no time.

They say that with men approaching dissolution some trick of time is
played, or at least that when death is very near indeed the whole scale
and structure of thought changes, just as some have imagined (and it is
a reasonable suspicion) that the common laws governing matter do not
apply to it in some last stage of tenuity, so the ordered sequence of
the mind takes on something fantastic and moves during such moments in
a void.

So must it have been with that which I will now describe.

A man lay upon a bed of a common sort in a room which was bare of
ornament. But he had forgotten the room. He was a man of middle age,
corpulent, and one whose flesh and the skin of whose flesh had sagged
under disease. His eyes were closed, his mouth, which was very fine,
delicate, and firm, alone of his features preserved its rigour. Those
features had been square and massive, their squareness and their
strength the more emphasised by the high forehead with its one wisp of
hair. But though the strength of character remained behind the face,
the muscular strength had left it, for that body had suffered agony.

The man so lying was conscious of little; the external world was
already beyond his reach. He knew that somehow he was not suffering
pain, and the mortal fatigue that oppressed him had, in that unexpected
absence of pain, some opportunity for repose. Neither his room nor what
was left of companionship round him, nor the voices that he knew and
loved, nor those others that he knew too well and despised, reached his
senses. For many years the air in which he had lived and in which he
was now perishing had been to him in his captivity a mournful delight.
It was a tropical air, but enlivened by the freshness of the sea and
continually impelled in great sea winds above him. Now he felt that
air no longer, and might have been so many thousand miles away in
the place where he had been born, or many thousand miles more, in the
snows of a great campaign, or under the violent desert sun of certain
remembered battles; it was all one to him, for he only held to life by
one thread within, and outer things had already left him.

Within, however, his mind in that last weakness still busily turned;
no longer considering as it had considered during the activity of a
marvellous life what answers the great questions propounded to the soul
of man should receive, still less noting practical and immediate needs
or considering set problems. His mind for once, almost for the first
time, was this last time seeing things go by.

First he saw dull pageantries which had been the common stuff of his
life, and he was confused by half-remembered, half-restored, faint
cheers of distant crowds, colours, and gold, and the twin flashes
of gems and of steel. And through it now and then strains of solemn
music, and now and then the tearing cry of bronze: the bugles. All
these sensations, confused and blurred, re-arose, and as they re-arose,
welling up into him like a mist, there re-arose those permanent
concomitants of such things. He felt again the nervous dread of folly
and mishap, wondered upon the correctness of his conduct, whether he
had not given offence somewhere to someone ... whether he had not been
the subject of criticism by some tongue he feared. And as all that part
of his great life returned to him, his face even in that extremity
showed some faint traces of concern such as it had borne when in truth
and in the body he had moved in the midst of a Court.

Next, like shadows disappearing, all that ghostly hubbub passed, but
before he could be alone another picture succeeded, and he thought to
feel beneath him the rolling of the sea. He was a young man looking
for land, with others standing behind upon the deck, watching him
in envy because of the miracles he was to do with armed men when he
should touch the shore. And yet he was not a young man. He was a man
already weighted with disappointment and with loss of love, and with
some confused conception of breaking under an immense strain; and those
who were on the deck behind him watching him, watched him with awe and
with pity, and with a sort of dread that did not relieve his spirit.
So young and old in the same moment, he felt in the brain the swinging
of a ship’s deck. So he strained for land, a land where he should
conquer, and at the same time it was a land where he should be utterly
alone, and utterly forget, and be filled with nothing but defeat. The
contradiction held him altogether.

Then this movement also steadied and changed, and he had the sensation
of a man walking up some steep hill, some hill too steep. He was
leading a horse and the horse stumbled. It was bitterly cold, but he
did not feel the cold: the roaring and the driving round him in the
snow. Next he was in the saddle; there was a little eminence from
which he saw a plain. Slight as the beast was his seat galled him. He
sat his mount badly, and he dreaded lest it should start with him as it
had started the day before. But even as he so worried himself on his
bad horsemanship, all his mind changed at quite another sight.

For in the plain below that little height the great battalions went
forward, rank upon rank upon rank; it was a review and it was a
battle and it was a campaign. Mad imagery! the uniforms were the
uniforms of gala, the drum-majors went before the companies of the
Guard, gigantic, twirling their gigantic staves; the lifted trumpets
of the Cuirassiers sounded as though upon some great stage, for the
mere glory of the sound. And mass upon mass, regular, instinct with
purpose, innumerable, the army passed below. There was no end to it.
He knew, he was certain, as he strained his eyes, that it would never
end. It was afoot, and it would march for ever. Far off, beyond the
line, upon the flank of it, distant and terrible went the packed mass
of the guns, and you could hear faintly amid the other noises of the
advance the clatter-clank-clank of the limber. And from so far off he
saw the leading sabres of commanders saluting him from his old arm.
Here again was a mixture for him of things that do not mix in the true
world: Glory and Despair. This endless army was his, and yet would go
on beyond him. It was his and not his. There was room upon the colours
for a million names of victories, but every victory in some way carried
the stamp of defeat. And yet seeing all that pageant as the precursor
of failure, he saw it also as something constructive. He thought of
wood that burns and is consumed, but is the fuel of a flame of fire and
all that fire can do.

As he so thought, like a wind and a spirit blowing through the whole
came some vast conception of a God. And once again the mixed, the
dual feeling seized him, more greatly than before. It was a God that
drove them all, and him. And that God was in his childhood, and he
remembered his childhood very clearly. It was something of which he had
been convinced in childhood, a security of good.... Look how the army
moved!...

And now it had halted.

Here his mind failed, and he had died. It was Napoleon.




On Rest


There was a priest once who preached a sermon to the text of “Abba,
Father.” On that text one might preach anything, but the matter that he
chose was “Rest.” He was not yet in middle age, and those who heard him
were not yet even young. They could not understand at all the moment
of his ardent speech, and even the older men, seeing him to be but in
the central part of life, wondered that he should speak so. His eyes
were illuminated by the vision of something distant; his heart was not
ill at ease, but, as it were, fixedly expectant, and he preached from
his little pulpit in that little chapel of the Downs, with rising and
deeper powers of the voice, so that he shook the air; yet all this
energy was but the praise or the demand for the surcease of energy, and
all this sound was but the demand for silence.

It is a thing, I say, incomprehensible to the young, but gradually
comprehended as the years go droning by, that in all things (and in
proportion to the intensity of the life of each) there comes this
appetite for dissolution and for repose: I do not mean that repose
beyond which further effort is demanded, but something final and
supreme.

This priest, a year or so after he had appealed with his sermon before
that little country audience in the emptiness of the Downs, died. He
had that which he desired, Rest. But what is it? What is the nature of
this thing?

Note you how great soldiers, when their long campaigns are done, are
indifferent to further wars, and look largely upon the nature of
fighting men, their objects, their failures, their victories, their
rallying, their momentary cheers. Not that they grow indifferent to
that great trade which is the chief business of a State, the defence or
the extension of the common weal; but that after so much expense of all
the senses our God gave them, a sort of charity and justice fills their
minds. I have often remarked how men who had most lost and won, even in
arms, would turn the leisured part of their lives to the study of the
details of struggle, and seemed equally content to be describing the
noble fortunes of an army, whether it were upon the crest of advancing
victory, or in the agony of a surrender. This was because the writers
had found Rest. And throughout the history of Letters--of Civilisation,
and of contemporary friends, one may say that in proportion to the
largeness of their action is this largeness and security of vision at
the end.

Now, note another thing: that, when we speak of an end, by that very
word we mean two things. For first we mean the cessation of Form, and
perhaps of Idea; but also we mean a goal, or object, to which the
Form and the Idea perpetually tended, without which they would have
had neither meaning nor existence, and in which they were at last
fulfilled. Aristotle could give no summing up but this to all his
philosophy, that there was a nature, not only of all, but of each,
and that the end determined what that nature might be; which is also
what we Christians mean when we say that God made the world; and
great Rabelais, when his great books were ending, could but conclude
that all things tended to their end. Tennyson also, before he died,
having written for so many years a poetry which one must be excused in
believing considerable, felt, as how many have felt it, the thrumming
of the ebb tide when the sea calls back the feudal allegiance of the
rivers. I know it upon Arun bar. The Flood, when the sea heaves up
and pours itself into the inland channels, bears itself creatively,
and is like the manhood of a man--first tentative, then gathering
itself for action, then sweeping suddenly at the charge. It carries
with it the wind from the open horizon, it determines suddenly, it
spurs, and sweeps, and is victorious; the current races; the harbour is
immediately full.

But the ebb tide is of another kind. With a long, slow power, whose
motive is at once downward steadily towards its authority and its
obedience and desire, it pushes as with shoulders, home; and for many
hours the stream goes darkly, swiftly, and steadily. It is intent,
direct, and level. It is a thing for evenings, and it is under an
evening when there is little wind, that you may best observe the symbol
thus presented by material things. For everything in nature has in
it something sacramental, teaching the soul of man; and nothing more
possesses that high quality than the motion of a river when it meets
the sea. The water at last hangs dully, the work is done; and those
who have permitted the lesson to instruct their minds are aware of
consummation.

Men living in cities have often wondered how it was that the men in the
open who knew horses and the earth or ships and the salt water risk so
much--and for what reward? It is an error in the very question they
ask, rather than in the logical puzzle they approach, which falsifies
their wonder. There is no reward. To die in battle, to break one’s
neck at a hedge, to sink or to be swamped are not rewards. But action
demands an end; there is a fruit to things; and everything we do (here
at least, and within the bonds of time) may not exceed the little
limits of a nature which it neither made nor acquired for itself, but
was granted.

Some say that old men fear death. It is the theme of the debased and
the vulgar. It is not true. Those who have imperfectly served are ready
enough; those who have served more perfectly are glad--as though there
stood before them a natural transition and a condition of their being.

So it says in a book “all good endings are but shining transitions.”
And, again, there is a sonnet which says:

  We will not whisper: we have found the place
    Of silence and the ancient halls of sleep,
    And that which breathes alone throughout the deep
  The end and the beginning; and the face
  Between the level brows of whose blind eyes
    Lie plenary contentment, full surcease
    Of violence, and the ultimate great peace
  Wherein we lose our human lullabies.

  Look up and tell the immeasurable height
    Between the vault of the world and your dear head;
  That’s Death, my little sister, and the Night
    That was our Mother beckons us to bed:
  Where large oblivion in her house is laid
  For us tired children now our games are played.

Indeed, one might quote the poets (who are the teachers of mankind)
indefinitely in this regard. They are all agreed. What did Sleep and
Death to the body of Sarpedon? They took it home. And every one who
dies in all the Epics is better for the dying. Some complain of it
afterwards I will admit; but they are hard to please. Roland took it as
the end of battle; and there was a Scandinavian fellow caught on the
north-east coast, I think, who in dying thanked God for all the joy he
had had in his life--as you may have heard before. And St. Anthony of
Assisi (not of Padua) said, “Welcome, little sister Death!” as was his
way. And one who stands right up above most men who write or speak said
it was the only port after the tide-streams and bar-handling of this
journey.

So it is; let us be off to the hills. The silence and the immensity
that inhabit them are the simulacra of such things.




  WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD.
  PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH




FOOTNOTE:


[1] Mr. H. Abrahims, of Eastcheap and The Firs, Guildford, Surrey.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.






End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of On Everything, by Hilaire Belloc

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