Such a habit transcends altogether, in its power of filling one's life, the merely artistic and literary habit. For, after all, painting, architecture, music, poetry, are things which touch us in a very intermittent way. I would compare this historic habit rather to the capacity of deriving pleasure from nature, not merely through the eye, but through all the senses; and largely, doubtless, through those obscure perceptions which make certain kinds of weather, air, &c., an actual tonic, nay food, for the body. To this alone would I place my historical habit in the second rank. For, as the sensitiveness to nature means supplementing our physical life by the life of the air and the sun, the clouds and waters, so does this historic habit mean supplementing our present life by a life in the past; a life larger, richer than our own, multiplying our emotions by those of the dead....
I am no longer speaking of our passions for Joan of Arc and Marie Antoinette, which disappear with our childhood; I am speaking of a peculiar sense, ineffable, indescribable, but which every one knows again who has once had it, and which to many of us has grown into a cherished habit—the sense of being companioned by the past, of being in a place warmed for our living by the lives of others. To me, as I started with saying, the reverse of this is almost painful; and I know few things more odious than the chilly, draughty emptiness of a place without a history. For this reason America, save what may remain of Hawthorne's New England and Irving's New York, never tempts my vagabond fancy. Nature can scarcely afford beauty wherewith to compensate for living in block-tin shanties or brand new palaces. How different if we find ourselves in some city, nay village, rendered habitable for our soul by the previous dwelling therein of others, of souls! Here the streets are never empty; and, surrounded by that faceless crowd of ghosts, one feels a right to walk about, being invited by them, instead of rushing along on one's errands among a throng of other wretched living creatures who are blocked by us and block us in their turn.
How convey this sense? I do not mean that if I walk through old Paris or through Rome my thoughts revolve on Louis XI. or Julius Cæsar. Nothing could be further from the fact. Indeed the charm of the thing is that one feels oneself accompanied not by this or that magnifico of the past (whom of course one would never have been introduced to), but by a crowd of nameless creatures; the daily life, common joy, suffering, heroism of the past. Nay, there is something more subtle than this: the whole place (how shall I explain it?) becomes a sort of living something. Thus, when I hurry (for one must needs hurry through Venetian narrowness) between the pink and lilac houses, with faded shutters and here and there a shred of tracery; now turning a sharp corner before the locksmith's or the chestnut-roaster's; now hearing my steps lonely between high walls broken by a Gothic doorway; now crossing some smooth-paved little square with its sculptured well and balconied palaces, I feel, I say, walking day after day through these streets, that I am in contact with a whole living, breathing thing, full of habits of life, of suppressed words; a sort of odd, mysterious, mythical, but very real creature; as if, in the dark, I stretched out my hand and met something (but without any fear), something absolutely indefinable in shape and kind, but warm, alive. This changes solitude in unknown places into the reverse of solitude and strangeness. I remember walking thus along the bastions under the bishop's palace at Laon, the great stone cows peering down from the belfry above, with a sense of inexpressible familiarity and peace. And, strange to say, this historic habit makes us familiar also with places where we have never been. How well, for instance, do I not know Dinant and Bouvines, rival cities on the Meuse (topography and detail equally fantastic); and how I sometimes long, as with homesickness, for a scramble among the stones and grass and chandelier-like asphodels of Agrigentum, Veii, Collatium! Why, to one minded like myself, a map, and even the names of stations in a time-table, are full of possible delight.
And sometimes it rises to rapture. This time, eight years ago, I was fretting my soul away, ill, exiled away from home, forbidden all work, in the south of Spain. At Granada for three dreary weeks it rained without ceasing, till the hill of the Alhambra became filled with the babbling of streams, and the town was almost cut off by a sea of mud. Between the showers one rushed up into the damp gardens of the Generalife, or into the Alhambra, to be imprisoned for hours in its desolate halls, while the rain splashed down into the courts. My sitting-room had five doors, four of glass; and the snow lay thick on the mountains. My few books had been read long ago; there remained to spell through a Spanish tome on the rebellion of the Alpujarras, whose Moorish leader, having committed every crime, finally went to heaven for spitting on the Koran on his death-bed. Letters from home were perpetually lost, or took a week to come. It seemed as if the world had quite unlearned every single trick that had ever given me pleasure. Yet, in these dreary weeks, there was one happy morning.
It was the anniversary, worse luck to it, of the Conquest of Granada from the Moors. We got seats in the chapel of the Catholic kings, and watched a gentleman in a high hat (which he kept on in church) and swallow tails, carry the banner of Castile and Aragon, in the presence of the archbishop and chapter, some mediæval pages, two trumpeters with pigtails, and an array of soldiers. A paltry ceremony enough. But before it began, and while mass was still going on, there came to me for a few brief moments that happiness unknown for so many, many months, that beloved historic emotion.
My eyes were wandering round the chapel, up the sheaves of the pilasters to the gilded spandrils, round the altars covered with gibbering sculpture, and down again among the crowd kneeling on the matted floor—women in veils, men with scarlet cloak-lining over the shoulder, here and there the shaven head and pigtail of the bull-ring. In the middle of it all, on their marble beds, lay the effigies of Ferdinand and Isabella, with folded hands and rigid feet, four crimson banners of the Moors overhead. The crowd was pouring in from the cathedral, and bevies of priests, and scarlet choir-boys led by their fiddler. The organ, above the chants, was running through vague mazes. I felt it approaching and stealing over me, that curious emotion felt before in such different places: walking up and down, one day, in the church of Lamballe in Brittany; seated, another time, in the porch at Ely. And then it possessed me completely, raising one into a sort of beatitude. This kind of rapture is not easy to describe. No rare feeling is. But I would warn you from thinking that in such solemn moments there sweeps across the brain a paltry pageant, a Lord Mayor's Show of bygone things, like the cavalcades of future heroes who descend from frescoed or sculptured wall at the bidding of Ariosto's wizards and Spenser's fairies. This is something infinitely more potent and subtle; and like all strong intellectual emotions, it is compounded of many and various elements, and has its origin far down in mysterious depths of our nature; and it arises overwhelmingly from many springs, filling us with the throb of vague passions welling from our most vital parts. There is in it no possession of any definite portion of bygone times; but a yearning expectancy, a sense of the near presence, as it were, of the past; or, rather, of a sudden capacity in ourselves of apprehending the past which looms all round.
For a few moments thus, in that chapel before the tombs of the Catholic kings; in the churches of Bruges and Innsbruck at the same time (for such emotion gives strange possibilities of simultaneous presence in various places); with the gold pomegranate flower of the badges, and the crimson tassels of the Moorish standards before my eyes; also the iron knights who watch round Maximilian's grave—for a moment while the priests were chanting and the organs quavering, the life of to-day seemed to reel and vanish, and my mind to be swept along the dark and gleaming whirlpools of the past....
III
Catholic kings, Moorish banners, wrought-iron statues of paladins; these are great things, and not at all what I had intended to speak of when I set out to explain why old houses, which give my Yorkshire friend the creeps, seem to my feelings so far more peaceful and familiar.
Yes, it is just because the past is somehow more companionable, warmer, more full of flavour, than the present, that I love all old houses; but best of all such as are solitary in the country, isolated both from new surroundings, and from such alterations as contact with the world's hurry almost always brings. It certainly is no question of beauty. The houses along Chelsea embankment are more beautiful, and some of them a great deal more picturesque than that Worcestershire rectory to which I always long to return: the long brick house on its terraced river-bank, the overladen plum-trees on one side, and the funereally prosperous churchyard yews on the other; and with corridors and staircases hung with stained, frameless Bolognese nakedness, Judgments of Paris, Venuses, Carità Romanas, shipped over cheap by some bear-leading parson-tutor of the eighteenth century. Nor are they architectural, those brick and timber cottages all round, sinking (one might think) into the rich, damp soil. But they have a mellowness corresponding to that of the warm, wet, fruitful land, and due to the untroubled, warm brooding over by the past. And what is architecture to that? As to these Italian ones, which my soul loveth most, they have even less of what you would call beauty; at most such grace of projecting window-grating or buttressed side as the South gives its buildings; and such colour, or rather discolouring, as a comparatively small number of years will bring.