The Project Gutenberg eBook, On Anything, by Hilaire Belloc

ON ANYTHING

[These Essays, with one exception, first appeared in the Morning Post and Morning Leader, by courtesy of the Editors of which they are here reprinted.]

ON ANYTHING

BY

H. BELLOC

LONDON
CONSTABLE & CO. Ltd.
1910

Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
bread street hill, e.c., and
bungay, suffolk.

TO
GEORGE MACDONALD LEMMI

CONTENTS

ON ANYTHING

ON BUILDING CASTLES IN SPAIN

One day in the town of Perpignan I was poking about to see where I could best get something to eat, when I saw a door open into a charming garden; and in the hope of finding it to be the garden of an inn, and at any rate of seeing the garden during the process of asking whether it were an inn, I walked in, but I found everything deserted.

There was a little house at the end with everything shut against the blinding sun, but the main door of it wide open. I walked in there too and heard no noise of men, and my curiosity took me up the stairs until I came out quite unexpectedly upon another little garden built on the flat roof of this dwelling and on its shady side. And there I saw a man sitting and looking dreamily towards the mountains.

He did not ask me how I came there, but I desired to tell him, for it was evidently his roof.

We spoke a little together until I asked him why he watched the mountains and why his gaze was towards Spain; then at great length he spoke to me, but dreamily still.

"Long before I knew that the speech of men was misused by them and that they lied in the hearing of the gods perpetually—in those early days through which all men have passed, during which one believes what one is told, an old and crusty woman of great wealth, to whom I was describing what I intended to do with life (which in those days seemed to me of infinite duration), said to me, 'You are building castles in Spain.' I was too much in awe of this woman—not on account of the wealth, but on account of the crust—to go further into the matter, but it seemed to me a very foolish thing to say, for I had never been to Spain, and I had nothing wherewith to build a castle—and indeed such a project had never passed through my head.

"For many years I returned to this phrase. I heard it upon several occasions. And in those years through which a man approaches maturity it still remained in my mind, possessing a singular fascination. Though I had found long since that phrases mean at the best something different from their words, and often something exactly opposite to them, yet this phrase kept about it something mystical and sincere; and I never read of Spain nor saw a map of Spain without thinking of the castles in that land, and wondering whether, as that ancient sybil had prophesied to me, I should come to build them there or no.

"It so happened that the feeling grew upon me until, in my thirtieth year, I determined to travel in that country, and I did so, arriving at one of the Spanish ports by sea; and the first thing I did when I had landed was to ask in my own tongue whether there were any castles in the neighbourhood, and especially whether any of them were at that moment in process of being built. Hearing which, the gentleman whom I had addressed bade me stay a moment where I was, upon the quay, and returned with a policeman who wore a helmet in the English manner, but whose face betrayed him. This official beckoned me to follow him; I was closely interrogated by a member of the superior or educated classes who was also a magistrate, and after some deliberation as to whether I should not be imprisoned, I was escorted to the frontier between two armed men. Nor in the course of my journey, which was hot and uncomfortable, did I see any one building castles, so I returned as wise as I had come, but, I am glad to say, not any the poorer, for the Spanish State had taken charge of me and had paid for all that part of my journey which had taken place upon Spanish soil.

"Coming, therefore, into the Roussillon by way of the pass in the mountains, I went very sadly, but a free man, in by the Gypsies' Gate at Perpignan, and ate by myself at the Red Lion. Then, saying nothing to any one, I went over the mountains in another manner, with nothing to carry but a sack, and determined to trust only to a considerable sum of money which I carried in my pocket. So I came down into Aragon, and when I got there I found it very unsuitable for the building of castles. For you must know that Aragon is almost completely composed of mud, so that any very large building, at least in the northern part, would very probably sink. Moreover, those rare rocks on which anything enduring can be founded are already occupied in that country by the priests, who have for ages forbidden the building of castles in any form, and that under the most dreadful penalties. But I found a man in Huesca who told me that, though he himself had never seen such a thing, I would no doubt find it in Saragossa, which was a capital city of enormous dimensions, and one that contained every human thing. So then I went on down the valley of the river Gallego (which was full of mud, as everything is in that district), and at last I saw before me the towers and the spires of Saragossa. But before I went into the town I thought I would first ask for information, and save myself the trouble of further walking. There was sitting with his back against a very dirty and ancient wall a man much dirtier than the wall and almost as old. Round his head was a handkerchief, and in his eyes was the stern pride of Aragon, which, though it be made out of mud, is full of courage, and breeds men who will kill you for nothing. Remembering this, and knowing that in their contempt for wealth the Aragonese will often unite good blood with poverty, I took off my hat and swept it about, and asked him whether his family motto were not 'Prince ne daigne,' to which he replied only by shaking his head in a decisive way. I then asked him whether I should find them building a castle in Saragossa, to which he said very sharply, 'No!' for the Aragonese are as terse as they are courageous. Then I said to him, 'Days, knight!' (for in this manner does one take leave in Aragon), and he replied, 'Go with God,' which is their common salutation, even to duns.

"When I had gone a little way on to the bridge which here crosses the muddy Ebro, whether there is water in the river or not, I saw a man riding on a mule who seemed to me more promising, for he was singing a song in quarter notes, which is the Spanish way. I asked him whether they were building castles in Saragossa, at which he laughed heartily, and said, 'No. Believe me, if we have any (which I doubt) it is more in our line to let them fall down than to build them.' And with these words he spoke affectionately to his mule and went his way, and I, knowing I should get no luck after such an omen, turned back and took the train into my own country."

"Did you not then," said I, "ever see building a castle in Spain?"

"Yes," said he very sadly; "it was in this way: there are parts of Spain which are included by mistake upon our side of the mountains, so that they have French water and forests, and one can live decently there; and going in to one of these valleys upon business one day, I saw before me a very hideous thing—but there was no mistaking it: it was a castle! It was built—or rather building—of very glaring white stone; it had four turrets with very staring red tiles, half a hundred false Gothic windows, and at least twenty gargoyles, each one of which exactly resembled its neighbour, and all of which had been done by contract in Toulouse. Two statues of an offensive kind guarded the entrance to the place, and the main door of it was one of those that turn round like a turnstile so as to keep out the air; and in front of this thing was a lawn with a net. There were two trees just planted and looking as though they would rather die than live, and a little further off the workmen were digging for a fountain. It was a very saddening sight. I went up to the foreman, who by his dress seemed to be a countryman of my own, and I said, 'This is a castle that you are building, is it not?' He stared at me and said yes, wondering why I asked. 'And I think,' I went on, 'that I am in Spain, am I not?' 'Yes,' said he, wondering still more, 'the frontier lies there'—and he pointed to a little stream in the grounds. 'I thought as much,' I said, sighing profoundly. 'At last I have come upon a man building a castle in Spain.'

"Since then I have seen no other such sight, nor do I wish to see one. And ever since then I have made it my business, when I had need to build castles in Spain (the appetite for which comes upon me at least twice a week), to come up here on to this roof and survey the Roussillon, the Canigou and the Mediterranean Sea, and build castles in my head, for I have discovered realities to be appalling."

With these words he begged me to leave him.

ON CLAY

Let us be Antean: let us touch earth. Let us look at the pit out of which we were digged: let there be no false shame; let us talk of clay: of all the things in which the modern world has gone wrong there is nothing in which it has gone wrong more than in the point of clay. Our fathers before us, who were great men and wise—they knew what the thing was. When they had robbed a monastery or killed a king, or in some other way acquired an estate in land, what did they? They said to the steward or to the fathers of the village: "Is there no clay about?" And when they heard there was, there did they found their house. And in this way it has come about that all great Englishmen, or very nearly all great Englishmen have been born and brought up on clay.

That noble and regal city, the City of London, the second city of the West, the city which was founded by Brutus himself, the city which is directly descended from ancient Ilion and bears its glories—London, I say, could not be built save upon clay. For though at first, in their folly, the builders of London put up their wretched wattled huts on gravel, yet when the spirit took them that they would grow, and they determined to make a town of it, on to the clay they went.

Then again, the clay bred the wheat that used to grow in England, and it grew the barley also, and man, who was made of clay, lived on the clay, drank out of the burnt clay, and ate the fruit of the clay; nor is this all that clay has done for us (and what have we done for clay!), for when I speak of drinking out of the burnt clay it recalls to me another function of this admirable ungotten mineral—at least it is for the greater part ungotten. But for clay where should we be for pipkins, pannikins, porcelain of all kinds, and but for clay what should we do for the olla, for the cream jug, and for those large flat basins in which people pour milk that the cream may rise on top of it? At least the wise people, who go by the old fashions and will not use a separator—for if you know anything of the matter you will know that no pig will thrive upon skim milk unless the cream has risen from it in the old manner: and there I make an end of this digression.

You may think I have exhausted the matter of clay, but you are wrong. Clay has a further quality: it is a mystery. Any one can see how granite came about. And as for chalk, it was made by a vast number of little fishes. Sand is a thing a tom-fool can understand; limestone is self-evident; and I never knew any one yet who was puzzled by alluvial soil; but clay is a harder nut to crack. How was it made? Those who were there when the foundations of the earth were laid and who pretend that they know everything, those whose god is matter and whose infallible authority is printer's ink, boast like Lucifer their father, and will explain everything to you on their eight fingers and two thumbs—but they confess that they cannot explain clay. It is all very well to say that clay is full of alumina; that it is the breaking up of granite rocks, but no one can tell you how all this came about, nor why it is so pasty. "It is not known" (says my Encyclopædia) "why certain specimens of granite are rapidly corroded and crumbled down, while others have resisted for ages the same causes of decay." No! No, by heaven! it is not known. And it is a great day in modern times when one can get one of the scientists to admit that he is not possessed of universal knowledge. No man living knows how clay came to be. I repeat it is a mystery and is crammed with the virtue of all mysterious things. And should it not be mysterious, seeing what are its powers?

For remember that all this does but touch upon the edge and fringe of the greatness of clay. Records were first kept in clay, and but for clay would never have survived. They were scratched on clay tablets and burnt, and they have come down to our own time. Bricks have to be made from clay, and with bricks did men first learn to build small and reasonable houses, for before they thought of bricks the rich man could live in stone, but the poor man had to do as best he could in wood and wattles. But the moment they thought of clay and of making bricks, reasonable houses for the middle-class appeared; and with the middle-class there came also public opinion, common-sense, good manners, verse, sculpture, and the art of living.

You may very reasonably prove, and to the satisfaction of most men, that without clay there could be no middle-class; nor does this great service which the clay has done us by any means exhaust the debt we owe to clay. There would be no dew ponds on the chalk heights of England had not our ancestors long before history carefully puddled clay. And very probably there would be no statues in the world had it not been for clay, for it is clay that suggests the statue. So whenever you see a good statue (of which there are so many in this world, as for instance: the Madonna over the south porch of Rheims; the Mary Magdalen at Brou; the statue of Our Lady of Paris in Notre Dame; the Venus of Milo, which is by no means the first-comer among statues; the headless Victory with wings, which is a first-rate statue and looks as if it was going to fly down the steps of the Louvre; the statue of the archer in that same gallery; the statue of St. John the Baptist in South Kensington, which is a copy of the one in the Luxembourg—or indeed of any other statue)—I say, when you see a statue that is good and pleases you, remember clay. But for clay that statue could never have been.

Do you think that with this we have come to the end of what clay has done? Why, we have not, so to speak, begun the first page of the volume!

But for clay there would be no smoking: clay made pipes. And but for clay we should not be able to drain our fields. From clay also comes aluminium, which has some purpose or other, I forget what; and clay made the Sologne. For that great heath and desert, which so few men know, owes its very life to clay. It is the clay holding the water which has turned it into the forest it is, full of little pools and cram full of wild boars and other ingenious beasts.

Roses adore the clay—they are as native to clay as salt is to the sea; and there is another thing we owe to clay, for if we had no clay we should have no roses; and talking of that, the oak is a clay tree. All that gnarled, hard, native stuff which you clap your hand on when you strike an oak beam is nourished and made strong by clay. An oak may be called the living son of the dead clay; it is a sort of clay turned vegetable, a slow, a fundamental, and an enduring thing.

Now by way of ending! Being a modern man you will grumble and say, "Yes, but it is bad to live on." You are wrong. It is the best soil of any to live on. True, if you are a town man you find that your feet get wet on it; you cannot walk about after a shower as you can in London; therefore you prefer to be upon gravel or sand. That is because you are artificial and a snob. You were intended, my lamb, to plunge about in mud when the weather is muddy—it is an excellent discipline for the soul. And all that love of sand and gravel goes with rhododendrons, copper beeches, and villas of red brick, and the death of the soul. You will then object that the house built upon clay goes up and down, heaving, as it were, with the weather. Why not? All things that live and are worthy have in themselves the principle of motion. Would you inhabit something dead? Aristotle has said it, that death, the absence of life, is essentially rigidity, the absence of motion. Give thanks then that your house should shift, and that the water that you must drink on clay is of a muddy kind; it is better for your health than that sparkling stuff which gives men goitre in the high hills.

In a word, there is nothing human nor anything about man which is not the better for clay. He was made of clay, he should live on clay, his wood must be the fruit of clay, and so must his food, and so must his drink, and so must the flowers that are his ornament. And when he dies the very best soil in which you can bury him is clay.

ON NO BOOK

AND ITS ADVANTAGES AS A COMPANION TO TRAVEL

I know very well that there are men going about who will pretend that when a thing is not there it may be neglected, and that existence is the only thing that counts, but these are ignorant and common men who have not read the philosophers of North Germany, and in particular the divine Hegel. For to us who live upon the summit of human thought it is manifest that there is no such thing as nothing, and that the absence of a thing or the nonexistence of a thing is but another aspect of its presence or its existence. So Bergmann (I translate him into Latin, for German is a difficult tongue) "esse antequam non esse esse satis constat." So also Biggs, his greatest living pupil at Oxford, "The moment we grant potentiality to entity——" Hold!

What I am driving at, good people, is that a man who takes no book upon a holiday forms very worthily one of the series of men who do, and I will confess that this No Book is the book I invariably take with me, in every distant journey which those who meet me upon them may think holidays, but which I myself have always considered to be occupation and life.

Its many advantages!... Up in Bigorre, branching northward from the main Roman Road across the Pyrenees, runs a torrent which falls in perhaps a thousand falls from the height and the mountains, and whose valley forms a very difficult approach to Spain. Now if a man be cut off by this torrent, rising after fresh rain and threatening his life, and if he attempts to ford it, what book do you think would survive? So the Peña Blanca; it is not a rock for mountaineers, but for true travelling men. Your mountaineer, your Alpine Club mountaineer, travels with a bath, a tent, and in general a baggage train; he can carry books if he likes; he climbs with a weight on his back or compels a servant to do so, but no man can get down the Peña Blanca or up it on the steep side with a Liddell and Scott or a London Directory on his back. There are places on Peña Blanca where everything you brought with you, including your boots, you wish were away, and these places are places where the body is in the shape of an X, the right foot, the left foot, the right hand and the left hand each trying to persuade itself that it has a hold, and the co-ordinating spirit within also asserting by sheer faith that the surface of the rock does not lean outwards. What would a man do with a book in such a place as this?—I mean with a book in its aspect of existence? No Book is worth more than a whole library to a man so placed and so thinking.

Consider the sea. There is only room to cook forward on condition the hatch is up; aft, the other men are playing cards. Then again, it is either calm or rough. If it is calm the boat sways intolerably and everything reminds you of oil. What book can suit that mood? And when, contrariwise, the boat is taking it green every few seconds, and your eyes are bleared trying to see through the spindrift and the snow, what would you do with a book—is there any book in the world that would help you to drive her through? Are there oilskins for books?

The horse also: for whether a rich man has lent you one, or whether it is your own, or whether it is one you have hired (and this sort go lame), the horse enters into every bit of travel. Who will read a book where a horse is concerned? Indeed I have often considered that men who will learn everything from books and go into court or throw the family fortune into chancery on the strength of "The Pocket Lawyer"; all men who will build a boat after instructions printed upon paper and then wonder where they have failed; all men who consider life from printed things, would be the better for receiving, closely reading, annotating and thoroughly mastering a volume called "The Horse and How to Ride Him." It is a large flat book with diagrams, something like an atlas in shape and weight. This, I say, when they have mastered it, let them take under the right arm, holding it as a bird would hold a thing under its wing, and so accoutred let them climb upon a mustang, and digging those enormous Mexican spurs which are the glory of the West deep and hard into the brute's hide, they will discover as in a lightning flash of revelation the value of books in the large concerns of life. No Book is the book for all the plains between the Sangre de Cristo and the Sierras.

The same is true of the desert, though why I cannot tell, unless it be that by day it is too hot, and by night there is nothing to read by. Soldiers—real soldiers I mean—carry no books until they have reached the grade of general officer; and what books do you think were regretfully laid down when the Brunswick went into action on the first of June, 1794?

I can indeed consider no active occupation for a man in which No Book is not a true companion, and that book shall be my companion in future, as it has been in the past, all over the world.

ON IRONY

Irony is that form of jest in which we ridicule a second person in the presence of a third. It is most complete when the second person is most ignorant of our intention, the third person most alive to it. Irony exists and is full even when the second person thus attacked is alone in suffering the attack, and irony exists and is full when the third person is restricted to our own expectant selves or even to God who made us and in whom is mirrored the universal truth of things. Irony enjoys an exuberant life, whether the second person so attacked is universal and the third as restricted as can be; or whether the second person so attacked is particular and singular, and the third person, the onlooker and the audience, comprehends the whole world.

It is in the intention of irony that it should do good, because it is of the nature of irony that it should avenge the truth. I say "avenge" because irony would not be irony were it not destined to inflict a fatal, or at least a grievous, wound. There is not in irony any measure of pity for the enemy, though irony could not exist without some vast motive of pity for a victim in whose defence it was aroused. Irony is a sword, and must be used as a sword. It has this quality about it, that, like some faery sword, it cannot be used with any propriety save in God's purpose; and those who have been the most expert swordsmen, when they take a wrong reward for their service, or use that weapon for an unworthy end, find it fail in their hands. Nay, like any faery sword, in hands that use it unworthily it will disappear. And the history of Letters is full of men who, tempted by this or by that, by money or by ease, or by random friendship, or by some appetite lower than the hunger and thirst after justice, have found their old strong irony grow limp and fruitless after they had sold their souls.

Irony, therefore, is unknown in those societies where the love of ease dominates all men. It is most powerful in those societies which are by their temper military. You will find irony treated angrily, as though it were an acid or a poison, where men love ease. And you will find it merely ignored when men have wholly lost the sense of justice. In such societies it retires from the realm of letters to that more powerful sphere in which divine vengeance and divine necessity have their action over things; and many such a society no longer capable of producing or of appreciating irony when it proceeds from the mouth or the pen of a man, learn it most dreadfully in the catastrophes of war.

To the young, the pure, and the ingenuous, irony must always appear to have in it a quality of something evil, and so it has, for, as I have said, it is a sword to wound. It is so directly the product or reflex of evil that, though it can never be used, nay, can hardly exist, save in the chastisement of evil, yet irony always carries with it some reflections of the bad spirit against which it was directed. How false it is to say that vengeance and the hatred of the evil men are in themselves evil, all human history can prove. Nay, but for irony in the last times of a decline no breath of health would remain to man. Nevertheless, as it is called into being by evil things, it works in an evil light. It suggests most powerfully the evil against which it is directed, and those innocent of evil shun so terrible an instrument.

Alone of the powers of expression possessed by the human spirit wherewith to defend right against wrong, irony is invulnerable, and alone of those powers it can always strike. Nor is anything invulnerable against it save that death of the intelligence which comes so shortly before the death of the society suffering it, that there is no need in the interval to attack the evil of that society or to attempt to remedy it; for when stupidity comes upon a State all is over.

A happy world, such as the world of children, or any society of men who have still preserved the general health of the soul, such a society as may be found in many mountain valleys, needs none of this salt for the curing and the preservation of morals. But even where men have so protected primal virtue, old men, old proverbs, dim records of past misfortunes leave some savour of irony in the traditions of the tribe. And irony is proved native to the scheme of things and not of its own self unnatural or rebellious by the manner in which the mere course of human happenings is perpetually filled with it. A dreadful irony is present when a man, having heard of the death of a friend, receives later his living letter posted from far off before that death. There is irony when, every defence having been made against some natural accident, that accident yet enters by another gate unsuspected to man. There is an irony in every unfulfilled prophecy and in every lengthy and worthless calculation. No man having purchased an honour defends unpurchased honour without the spirit of irony surrounding all his words. No man praises courage being himself but a rhetorician, or praises justice being himself a lawyer or a magistrate, without some savour of irony in the air of his audience, and it may be presumed without too much phantasy that spirits equal and undisturbed and of a high intelligence can see in every action of human life save the most holy an irony as strong as that which inhabits the tragedies of the great poets.

There is a last use for irony, or rather a last aspect of it which this general irony of Nature, and of Nature's God, suggests: I mean that irony which can only appear in the letters of a country when corruption has gone so far that the mere truth is vivid with ironical power.

For there comes a time—it is brief, as must be all final moments of decay—but there comes a time in the moral disruption of a State when the mere utterance of a plain truth laboriously concealed by hypocrisy, denied by contemporary falsehood, and forgotten in the moral lethargy of the populace, takes upon itself an ironical quality more powerful than any elaboration of special ironies could have taken in the past. Some truth too widely put aside and quietly thrust forward, a detail in general conversation about a powerful man strikes, in such societies, exactly like the point of a spear. Blood flows: and the blood is drawn by irony. Yet was here no act nor any fabric of words. Mere testimony to the truth was enough: and this should prove that irony is in touch with the divine and is a minister to truth. In such awful moments in the history of a State that which makes the dreadful jest is not the jester, but the eternal principle of truth itself. That which is jested at is the whole texture of the universal society upon which the truth falls, and for the audience, for the third person who shall see the jest at the second person's expense, there is present nothing less than the power by which truth is of such effect among men.

No man possessed of irony and using it has lived happily; nor has any man possessing it and using it died without having done great good to his fellows and secured a singular advantage to his own soul.

ON THE SIMPLICITY OF WORDS

That is simple which, when you have long looked at it, and when you have carefully considered it, you cannot justly discover to be built up of other unities. That is simple which, when we will divide it, divides into things like itself, and which, when we divide it, divides, not of its own nature, but violently and unnaturally by our volition. The acute mind will divide what is simple as freely as it will divide what is complex, but the just mind recognises simplicity and will not attempt its division. For in all analysis it is the business of the analyser to get at the ultimate unities; when he has reached the ultimate unities it is also his business to respect them: further division will show acuteness, but it will not show judgment.

The simplest thing we know is the soul of man, for it has about it a quality as it were crystalline and one. So that the more fundamentally it does a thing the more that thing is one. The powers of the soul, its instruments, and therefore the parts of its machinery, are innumerable and perhaps infinite (for we are said to be made in the image of the Infinite); but the thing itself is utterly simple.

Now the soul of man impresses, receives and expresses certain things: for instance, it impresses its unity upon things outside of it, it talks of "London," "mankind," "this landscape." It receives and it says of a colour, "This is such and such a colour"; of a tone, "This is such and such a tone"; of a truth hitherto unheard, "This is true—this is consonant with my nature, and with my making (for I was made); this has Authority, for Authority is authorship."

The soul of man impresses, receives and expresses. And, note you, in this business the soul of man has designed an instrument, and this instrument is the Word. Those who question whether the soul of man so acts, can only question from one of two causes: either they have not considered how we think and do, or else, like many men in our modern diliquescence, they believe all knowledge to be equally futile, and they despair equally of all kinds of careful view, whether of things that can be handled or of immaterial things.

The soul of man impresses, receives and expresses, and its instrument is the Word. It impresses its unity upon this mass of houses and people ("houses" and "people" are themselves words), and it stamps that impression as a word: "London." The soul of man receives. A certain physical impression (which a modern theory would have depend upon proportionate undulation—but this, like most physical hypotheses, is not proved) stirs in the mind a sentiment of colour and of a certain colour; and the mind records its reception in a word: blue. The soul of man expresses. It is cognisant and, in its own manner, sure of existence, secure in existence. To express this, to put forward its certainty exteriorly, out of itself, its instrument is again a word. It says, "I am."

Well then, the Word is all-important, for without the Word the soul of man would live within itself, and therefore stand imprisoned and null, a sort of death. And the Word is all-important in a second way, for by the Word the soul of man not only lives but also communicates. It is by the Word that soul and soul recognise, fertilise and enrich among themselves, each all its fellows. But there is a third character of dignity attaching to the Word, which is this: that the Word reflects and carries on, inherits, shows forth in little, presents, that great origin the soul of man, whence it proceeded; and here it is that I come to the kernel of my subject.

For it is my business to argue here that there is a mystical quality—that is, a quality not contradictory of reason but superior to it—inhabiting the right use of Words. I would say more: I would say that upon the exactitude of that quality in use depended the magic of the poets.

Very certainly men at random, any men, may experience the unexpressed emotion, but the function of the poet—in which he is a sort of splendid servant—is to bring words to his master, his fellow-man, the innumerable, and to untie his tongue.

Two things are most noticeable in this character of the poet: first, that he has the capacity to put these words before his fellow-men for their use, and of the right sort and in the right order; and secondly, that neither does he know how he does it nor can mortal man in any place or under any influence explain how it is done. Consider these three lines—

Πἑμπε δε μιν πομροἱσιν ἁμα κραιπνοἱσι φἑρεσθαι

Ὑπνω καἱ Θανἁτω διδυμἁοσιν; ὁἱ ῥἁ μεν ωκα

Κἁτθεσαν ἑν Λυκἱης εὑρεἱης πἱονι δἡμω

[Greek: Pempe de min pompoisin hama kraipnoisi pheresthai

Hypnô kai Thanatô didymaosin; hoi rha men ôka

Katthesan en Lykiês eureiês pioni dêmô.]

Let us suppose this translated by some man who would put an English word for nearly every Greek word, not considering that such mere transformation was by no means a resurrection of the dead. It is from the Iliad, where the body of Sarpedon is ordered by a god to be taken to Lycia—to which place he belonged. This god orders the body of Sarpedon, fallen in battle, to be taken to his native place; and this is how the poet speaks of his transference from the place where he died to his own land, if you put word for word—

"He gave him to be borne at once by swift companions, the twins Sleep and Death, who swiftly laid him in the rich land of Lycia the full."

Now a man caring more for resurrection than for a mechanical transference might put it in many ways—I suggest this—

"And he gave Sarpedon dead to be borne by swift companions, the twin-Gods Sleep and Death, who bore him to his own land of Lycia, a pleasant land."

I care not how it is translated, for whoever translates it, unless he is inspired (that is, ordered from outside mankind by a spirit), he will translate it wrong. But the nearer we get to the violent truth of those famous words the more we see what the Word is to the Soul, the more we see how the simplicity of the Word reflects and, to our eyes (and our ears), in some way enhances the simplicity of the Soul.

These toppling things which a man can neither escape nor avoid reside (it would seem from such a passage) not only in the inmost soul but also in Words. These words once written, the soul that put them forth has done its work for ever. Yet no man can say that common counters have been used, that a mere currency of expression has here done its work.

What could be more worn, what for all time more common, than these considerations, a dead man, companions, home, death, sleep and a fertile valley? But in some way it is possible to make of these things what was there made when the man who so wrote them wrote them; and there is no one who will not feel that a son of the gods, of the high gods, was taken by lesser but divine servants, Death and Sleep, who brought him back dead to where his mother had borne him, the land of Lycia, a pleasant land; and he was so borne out of battle, and he rested when the fight was done.

Now how is that purpose of words achieved? No man knows. No man can explain: it is the power of the Word, it is the magic power of the Word. There are some (poor fools!) who try to analyse the connotation of the Word; they will show how such and such a Word involving (in such and such a civilisation) such memories and such associations plays a trick with the mind and deceives it. They will show how Elizabethan English stirs us by modern experiences which the words used by the Elizabethans recall. But the whole of their philosophy is upset at once by the consideration of such a passage as this which I have quoted; for here are only the simplest of things, as simple, I say, as the human soul, and at once overwhelming.

There is more to be said than the mere praise of so amazing a success; the right choice of words in this example, or (to speak more accurately) the right acceptation of them—for poets do not choose—does much more than merely say that thing which such words should say. It does much more than only tell what the singer was inspired to tell. It expands, and embranches and conceives. And out of the right acceptation of words there grows a sacred and a further explanation of their meaning: they illumine not only what we are but what we might be and what we will be. And, above all, they raise echoes: they raise echoes from beyond the world.

Thus in that little bit of Homer quoted, do you not see what it means beyond its bare poetic statement? Not only did Death and Sleep take the body of Sarpedon back to Lycia, but the bodies of all of us are in such hands: for (if you will think of it closely) in what way do men recover their innocence, their childhood and the place where they were born? In what way do they pierce through time? By sleep, in dreams, and possibly, in a more final manner, by death.

ON SECLUDED PLACES

It is a commonplace, and a true one, that the modern world is full of illusions, or rather that the things which we interest ourselves about to-day are nearly all of them matters upon which we have no direct knowledge. The climate of Jamaica, a foreign trial, a war between two nations neither of which we have visited, come to entertain us far more than things upon which we have immediate and personal experience. After a little while we come also to judge these things as though we knew them.

I say that the whole modern world (with the exception of the peasants) suffers heavily from this disease, and no one more than politicians and their electorate. Of a politician upon whose judgment may depend the happiness of the country, most of those who admire or hate him have an impression drawn from caricatures. Of the electorate whom they are supposed to serve politicians have a vague conception, drawn from the hurried aspect of vast crowds of poor men seen by gaslight after dinner in huge halls, and in the course of all the distractions of a speech.

This fantastic ignorance which modern conditions have bred in the great towns seems to some to be wholly evil in its effect. It is not so; for among its effects are to be discovered a number of joyful surprises. Many things which we had imagined to be such and such and which we had deplored, turned out upon examination to be very different, and much better than our newspaper picture had conceived. Among these joyful surprises is the discovery that the earth is not full, that travel has not overspread it, and that there is perfect loneliness within the reach of all. No popular conception of the modern world is more firmly held, especially by educated, and therefore by jaded, men. There is none which it is more useful to explode. Two things have come side by side: first, an immense increase in the ease of communications; secondly, a positive delight in the crowd to associate with the crowd; and these two facts, the one economic and the other social, have more than counteracted all the expansion in numbers of those who travel about and defile the earth with their presence. In between the tracks of their travel, a few miles upon the centres in which they herd, pig and pen, there is an isolation which our forefathers never knew. A hundred years ago the Land's End and St. Davids were both places far removed from London; to-day the end of Cornwall is familiar to many thousands of men who are not native to it, but what about St. Davids? How many men who read this can say where it is or have visited it? A hundred years ago Midhurst, Petworth, Pulborough, Horsham, East Grinstead, Crowborough Top, Haywards Heath, Heathfield, Burwash, were places upon the map of Sussex intimately known to the men of that county, and visited but rarely by men from beyond the weald. But though they were visited rarely they were visited equally, and if a man said he knew the county then he knew those places. Compare their fate to-day. Crowborough, Haywards Heath, and Heathfield are suburbs of London, and right through the heart of the county a long bridge—pure London all the way—unites London with its suburb of Brighton. Do you imagine upon that account that the isolation of Sussex is lost? Very far from it. It is considerably increased. Nay, the loneliness of that vast proportion of the county which lines of travel do not touch is, if anything, too great—it is in excess even of what the greatest lover of contemplation can desire. And you may within a mile of the Brighton road lie in a wood and watch small beasts behaving with a freedom and an ignorance of human intercourse which perhaps they never had when village life was really strong, when the great estates were not mortgaged to cosmopolitan finance, when the old families lived in their houses and made the county town five miles away their resort for purchase and even for amusement.

It is equally true of the North; the whole chain of the Pennines between the two main lines of travel to the east and to the west of them is utterly deserted. A man may walk thirty times in a year from Hawes to Ribble Head and in not half those walks meet or speak to a man. This is true of the great high road across the chain, of the summits it is far truer. Go from Appleby over Cross Fell up Wild Boar Scar and down the water to Alston, and you will be as completely cut off from men the whole day long as you could be in the West of Canada. The same is true of the dales of Cheviot. From where Chevy Chase was fought all the way up Rededale is a fine great road that was once the highway to Scotland over Carter Fell. If a man goes lame upon the English side of it he cannot count upon getting a lift to Jedburgh; he must limp it all the way. And speaking of that road reminds one that not only has this novel isolation come upon a great part of Britain, but that as one watches it with a sense that is not wholly pleasurable (especially on winter evenings, after a day bereft of human intercourse) one has often around one evidences of a recent time when the activities of the country were more evenly spread. Upon this same great road from Carter Fell there is upon the Scotch side of the path a house which once paid a high rental and did great trade with the traffic. It is in ruins. Upon that same Cross Fell which is now completely alone, you come perpetually upon abandoned workings, upon bits of hardened road, now half sunk into the bog, and even upon the remains of broken bridges over streams.

In the quadrilateral which is formed by the railways in the south-west of Scotland there is a great area of silence, and in that belt of Wales which separates the northern from the southern dialects, a belt which is again served by a fine high road, and which has been throughout English history the scene of the western advance from across the Marches into the Principality, there is silence also. Plinlimmon, the mountain which dominates this central part, is unknown, and the reason is easy enough to discover. Plinlimmon is not an abrupt mountain, astonishing in outline or difficult of ascent. It is, upon the contrary, a great rounded hill, but there is perhaps no height in the island more solemn nor commanding a more awful and spacious scene, and those few who would still take the trouble to reach it may find the north a chasm more wonderful, I think, than any in the range of Snowdon or in the neighbourhood of Cader Idris. All this is true of that little narrow space which lies between the North Sea and St. George's Channel, and when one considers the neighbouring countries of the Continent the instances that arise are innumerable. Within two days of London, and to be reached at about an expense of £2, there is a little democracy in which no man has ever been put to death, in which no wheeled vehicles have ever been seen, of which the few laws are made, or rather the ancient and honourable customs maintained, by the heads of families meeting for discussion. You can from the little village in its centre telephone to Paris if you wish, and yet who has been to that place? Or who knows the way there from London? Probably not a dozen men. There is on one of the main railways of Europe a chain of mountains abrupt, intensely blue, comparable only to the background of certain mediæval illuminations, and, with their astonishing, unworldly aspect, making one understand how the active mediæval imagination could see, remember, and use things that we pass by. I know of no artist who has drawn that range nor of any traveller who has described it. You cannot see it from the train; it runs along a narrow and profound valley. You must leave the railway at a little roadside station, you must climb two thousand feet on to the plateau above, and from there, when you have turned a corner of the road, there breaks upon you this unearthly vision of the range.

Now consider that example—and it will not be difficult to discover how and why these places remain, or rather increasingly become, isolated from the modern world. For what must you do to obtain a view of what I have spoken? You must abandon the express, with its speed and luxury, to which you are accustomed; you must get into a little slow and dingy local train, you must climb a high hill in spite of weather. You may do it once from curiosity, but you are not compelled to the open air and the road as were your fathers, and for one man that will rarely be at the pains to go about to visit and to understand the world there are a thousand who would rather delude themselves into a simulacrum of the emotions of travel by reading of them in some book, and that book will probably have been written by some one who has no more followed the road than themselves. For a man to know the world he must not sleep now and again in the open, or now and again for a freak in some dirty inn where there is bad cooking and bad wine; he must so sleep continually day after day. He must not have only an object before him in his journey, such as the visiting of a famous shrine; he must also have an object all the way along, to note whatever he may pass; and he must so draw his itinerary that it shall be something out of the common, that is, something exposing one always to discomfort and often to peril. There are few men who care to pay the price, and, after all, the effect of their hesitation is excellent, for they run off to vulgarise the New World and the Far East, and they leave England and Europe to the intimacy of those who love them best.

ON PEOPLE IN BOOKS

It is a matter for the curious to examine (but not the wisest will determine it) why people in books are so extraordinarily different from real people. You might imagine that the people in biographies at least would be more or less like human beings—but they never are. A man may say that the reason of this is that biography to-day is always a sort of modern, pale, conventional, and hypocritical affair—that the biographer dare not print nine-tenths of his material under our modern tyranny of suppression, and that he has necessarily to make a puppet of his man. But there are others besides modern biographies, and it is true of them all that the people inside are not human. You have biographies of politicians acting upon principle; biographies of men who have accumulated vast fortunes without a hint of their main passion; biographies of men of lineage in which you are given to understand that their distinction was due to some individual worth and force. Biographies of the frankest and most brutal periods, biographies of men long dead, biographies written by enemies, all have this in common, that the person inside the book does not go on like a human being. Autobiographies give one a better chance, but even there, though you get something much more vivid, you never get a real man. It seems as though the writing of an autobiography or confession always went with a twist, either morbid or megalomaniac. Take the very best one of all, Rousseau's; it can be proved, and research has proved it, that he is perpetually maligning himself. As for St. Augustine's (oh, how dull!) he tells us so little, and his purpose is so far from being autobiographical that it does not come under the same criticism; and as for Borrow, those who have read him assure me that he is perpetually performing marvellous feats of intelligence and courage to which there is no witness at all but himself. Hagiographers are appalling. They do not attempt to present a living figure, though I will make an exception for one account of the death of St. Thomas of Canterbury; I forget which, but it is full of realities. Your stock hagiographer, as, for instance, he of the Carolingian period, postulates three things: the noble birth of his hero, his boldly standing up to somebody else (usually a layman), and his performing a number of actions precisely similar to those which others of the type have performed; it is almost mechanical; it is like the leader in a party newspaper describing a party speech by a party man.

People in histories also are not human beings. The moment you try to make them human in writing your history a demon enters and makes you make a great quantity of little mistakes. For instance, you are writing about a man with one eye, and you are determined to make him human; you find out all you can about that eye, whether the other one was of glass, or was just left screwed up in the old-fashioned style. You get right about the date of the time when he lost his eye, the effect which his one eye had on other people, and all the rest of it. You make the man live again before you, and the moment you begin writing about him you will make his left eye his right eye. It is the knowledge of this, and the fear of the powerful Demon who works it, that makes historians shun the human being and stuff their books full of ghosts paler than any that wander by Acheron.

This is especially true of historians of war. The people they write about occupy "strategic" points (a phrase which is blankly meaningless to the writer as to the reader), they "grasp" the situation at a glance, they "master detail," they are (when the author is against them), "in spite of all their faults, not devoid of physical courage," or (if the author is in favour of them) "acting with that quiet decision which is characteristic of them" (and of bad actors in problem plays, too, by the way), but they never live.

Now and then you get flashes; the eyes glance, the tones take on reality, there is a human voice and gesture, but it dies again. Perhaps the most vivid and most fascinating of such histories in our tongue is Napier's. You will continually find such flashes in it—but they are not permanently connected. It is odd that the most living of histories are the exceedingly simple and bald relations set down under primitive conditions of society when a man merely desired to chronicle dates and facts. How it is so no one can tell, but a plain statement of some not very interesting thing with just a verb and a substantive will do the trick. For instance, where Eginhard says of Charlemagne that everything about him was virile "except his voice, which was high," or again, where Fulcher of Chartres (I think it is) says of a spy on the crusading march that he was "short in the nose and in every virtue." But even the early historians build up no continuously living figure.

When it comes to novelists the matter is notorious. The people in novels not only do not go on like real people, but they do things sometimes physically, always morally, impossible to real people. I have often wished to know a professional novelist in order to ask him why his people went on like that. To take quite small points. A lover and his lady in a novel will often hunt the fox. So far so good. There is nothing impossible about that. When they have done running after the animal they go home together, and their horses walk side by side. How is that done? Except horses in cavalry regiments or in circuses, or horses constrained and tied by leather thongs in front of wheeled vehicles, when were two horses ever seen that walked the same pace side by side? The novelist may say that it is necessary to the convention of his novel. It would spoil a love scene if he showed one of the two horses dragging further and further behind the other (as one of them always does), and then having to canter or trot every three minutes to catch up his neighbour, and it would also spoil his love scene if he made one of the horses walking slowly and the other dancing, which in real life is one of the ways in which people attempt to keep two horses abreast. But there are many things in your novel which have no such excuse, and which are equally out of Nature. For instance, people sit down suddenly and write enormous cheques at a moment's notice. Now even the richest man cannot do that. He has his money invested, he does not waste it by letting it lie idle in gigantic balances of a current account. Then again, the things they do with their mouths. "'No,' she laughed." How on earth could that be done? If you try to laugh and say "No" at the same time it sounds like neighing—yet people are perpetually doing it in novels. If they did it in real life they would be locked up. Another thing that people do in novels on all sides is to make immensely long speeches. Sometimes the whole of the author's views upon some big matter, like the fate of the soul for instance, comes pouring out in a solid page and a half of spoken stuff. In real life the only people who do this are politicians, and even they only do it on stated and ritual occasions; they do not do it in private houses. Sometimes they try, but they are interrupted.

Yet again, consider the vast number of titles which people have in novels. I cannot call to mind one single novel without a title—I mean no novel of the modern kind. Of course there must be such, but they are certainly rare. Now in real life things are not thus. All the ordinary people of this country go about day after day without meeting lords and ladies, but in novels something like half the characters come in quite casually with titles, and I have been told that it is a matter of professional pride with some novelists to be able to get the complicated system of English titles exactly right, and that they will even fabricate difficult problems for the pleasure of solving them, as do men who play chess. They will take the younger son of an earl, make him a Colonial Cabinet Minister, and then triumphantly settle for you which of the two "honourables" he is; or again, they will marry the heiress of a marquisate inheritable in the female line to the eldest son of a man who comes into a barony later on in the book—and get it absolute. But people in real life do not care much about these things.

Conversely, a very large number of things that do happen in real life and are interesting never seem to get into novels. For instance, repetitions. Your hero will fall off a horse and break something, but he does not do it twenty times as he would if he were a living being. A man comes late to dinner, but he is not always coming late to dinner as he would if he were human: and, what is worse, a score of highly interesting real types never get between covers at all.

Take, for instance, that immoderately common type, among the most common of God's creatures, which I will call "the Silent Fool," the man who hardly ever talks, and when he does says something so overwhelmingly silly that one remembers it all one's life. I can recollect but one Silent Fool in modern letters, but he comes in a book which is one of the half-dozen immortal achievements of our time, a book like a decisive battle, or like the statue of John the Baptist at South Kensington, a glory for us all. I mean The Diary of a Nobody. In that you will find the silent Mr. Padge, who says "That's right"—and nothing more.

One might go on for ever piling up instances of this divorce between the supposed pictures of our modern life and the truths of it. I will end with what is to me, perhaps, the most glaring of all: the attitude of fiction towards what is called "success." No matter who the author is, no matter what his knowledge of the world, he simply cannot draw "successful men" as they are, that is, in a diversity as great as any to be discovered in the human race. Men who have "got on," that is, who are at once well to do and well known, are as different as men with the toothache or as men with warts on their chins. Some are kind, some brutal, some clever, some stupid, some got their money by luck, some by inheritance, some by theft, some few by being able to make or do something better than their fellows, but at any rate in real life, when you are about to meet someone who is known to you as "successful," you never have the slightest idea what you are going to meet, your last experience of the sort is no guide to the next, and the "successful" chap may turn out to be anything at all. But in novels your wealthy and well-known man is invariably powerful in character. It never fails. He may be good or bad, English or foreign, young or old, but he always has in him something of what you see in a very good sergeant-major at a few shillings a week, an experienced head master at a few hundreds a year, or a capable engineer on a passenger ship. He displays qualities which have no more to do with what is called "success" now-a-days than red hair or brown boots have. In a word, your successful man is a type in the novel. In real life he is not a type at all—he is any one. And another thing you never get in a novel is a well-mannered man or a bad-mannered man. I cannot recollect one character who interrupts at the top of his voice, nor one who joins the conversation of others in an easy way.... But suppose one filled a novel with real people, what escape would there be from daily life?

ON THE EFFECT OF TIME

Of all contrasts the most ironical and the most profound is the contrast between the Tag and the Truth of the Tag. A couple of lines are chosen by humanity from the work of a great poet, and are usually so chosen not only because they are beautiful, but because they are true. When they have been repeated a certain number of times they become a tag. A proverb or a mere popular statement puts into the shortest possible form some extremely simple, and perhaps extremely obvious, at any rate (this is quite certain) some extremely important, truth. Every one sees it is a truth, everybody repeats it, and it becomes a tag.

Now note the next phase in the life of the said tag. It is criticised and it is ridiculed; it becomes a solid butt for the archery of human wit. That phase lasts, perhaps, the lifetime of a man.

Now note the third phase, for it will teach you the most that can be learnt about mankind, and it is endless. It is the consummation of the tag and the test of humanity afforded by the tag. The tag is now taken for granted and is eternal, and the following things happen to it: children are taught it like the alphabet; they are compelled to learn it. Hobbledehoys, great wits, and leaders of thought avoid it because it is commonplace. They can be seen waggling from one side of the road to the other in their grotesque efforts to avoid the tag. The whole world knows that the tag is there. Lastly—most wonderful of all!—the tag ceases to bite: it ceases to affect men; men are saturated with it. Men are acclimatised to it. They are vaccinated with it; and the tag has now arrived at the exercise of its eternal function, which is to wake in individuals, here in one man, there in another, an overwhelming sense of its truth (or beauty). It begins its career of converting individual men. Let it be mentioned where three are gathered together, and it will be fled from as an out-used thing, but two can make confidences each to the other about it, and one can feel it like a thorn or like a gem in his heart.

"Who goes a-borrowing goes a-sorrowing" has gone through all these phases; so has "Waste not want not." So has "For who to dull forgetfulness a prey," etc. So has "Felix qui potuit," etc. And so have the three or four thousand others that are the stock of a proper mind.

All these set me thinking of yet another tag, and as it is that which most sharply tests humility and, through humility, intelligence, and as, therefore, in this not very humble and not intelligent time it is grossly neglected, there is a pleasure in dwelling upon it. It is to this effect: "The future is veiled from man."

Good Lord! To read the Press and to hear the speeches! Why, one would think that the future had a map to it! One can hardly hear one's self think for prophecies; and, what is perhaps the most terrible thing of all, as a symptom of our modern state of mind, the prophecies have a dogmatic quality (using the word "dogmatic" as it is popularly used of transcendental affirmations), for men prophesy in great herds and all together, and to question their prophecies, simply to say that possibly "the future is veiled from man," creates something now-a-days of the astonishment, ridicule, or anger which the denial of a religious dogma does in a society with a fixed religion. Thus, men in England to-day confidently regard the future of the earth for, let us say, the next hundred years in a certain light. Certain countries (especially new countries) are to increase in a regular manner in value and population and property. Certain other countries are to continue their decline. Certain forms of mechanical perfection are to increase, certain speculations as to the nature of the soul are to decline in interest. But more than any particular set of opinions, there is a general colour stamped upon the future in the modern mind, and how securely it is stamped one can best prove by the amusement or surprise that is caused if one suggests (but does not affirm) that there may be (not that there must be) some totally new philosophy, new religion, or new development within three generations.

A book recently published suggests to me the permanent and ironical value of that old tag "The future is veiled from man." It is a study of two somewhat obscure individuals who were members of the Revolutionary Tribunal. It is a very detailed study in which one feels in every page the things that were taken for granted in that place and time—in the Paris of the Revolution. What of all that has come to pass? What of all the fixed certitudes as to the future—nay, the fixed certitudes upon the very nature of man from which, as of necessity, the future was deduced, has remained? The author has done all the better in his study of Vilate and Trinchard from the fact that his position in the Archives has permitted him to look into the ultimate details of the period. But not so much the high historical value of the work as its permanent human lesson strikes me as I read.

Vilate was twenty-four when the great war of the Revolution against the Kings was within a month of breaking out, and when he set out for Paris from the lovely rocky pasturage of his province, up beyond Limoges. And this was what he had in his mind: that the revolutionary movement, to use his own words, "must give to the whole world a spur of insurrection against the oppressors of men." This pathetic certitude was nothing peculiar to the very commonplace young fellow who was leaving his professorship in the Indre for Paris. To him they then seemed as much a commonplace as would seem to some young fellow in a similar position to-day in Birmingham some phase about the development of the West of Canada, or some certain prophecy that nations would enrich themselves in proportion to the amount of coal and iron discovered upon their territories.

When Vilate hears a speech in the Revolutionary Parliament he says: "Truth has now appeared and is fixed for ever. It can now call to its tribunal every abuse, every vice, and every crime." Has truth done that in the last hundred years? Yet to Vilate the prophecy of what the Revolution was about to do seemed—and not only to him, but to millions of his contemporaries—as simple as some prophecy of ours about the future of communications; and he was as easily persuaded that what he said was true as we are that the North temperate climate (and especially that part of Europe which is insular and lies between parallels 50 and 60) is the natural climatic seat of human energy.

Consider again this, which is not from Vilate's own pen, but which occurs in the study before me and is of the first interest: Vilate was in the jury on that day. It was the 9th of February, 1794. Seven Carmelite nuns had refused to take the civic oath to the Republic. The judge made a very commonplace and, as it seemed then, a very sensible speech, pointing out that they were perfectly free to observe the vows they had taken, that nothing had disappeared in their lives except the particular convent with which they were associated; that none of their prejudices would be offended. And he pointed out that in the society in which he believed they would have the sense to live, all men would now be permanently free. The nuns refused; they refused because the oath would involve them in schism. How many men at that time surrounding Vilate had the slightest conception of what the renascence of religion was to be in the city of Paris? These women, members or servants of the little reactionary aristocratic clique into which the monastic institution had declined, seemed mere fanatics not only to Vilate but to the whole of his society. Could you suddenly have shown Vilate how Europe would still be raging upon those ultimate questions of religion more than three generations later; could you have presented him with the sight of a whole society divided upon so simple and, as it was then thought, so irrational a point—what would he have thought? I can tell you what he would have thought. No matter what your credentials as a prophet, he would have thought your prophecy mad. Though you should have carried him into our very time and given every proof of the reality of his vision, he would have woken up to believe it an illusion and a silly dream.

The state of mind of Trinchard is even more impressive, because Trinchard was an even smaller, more commonplace, and therefore more typical, man. He sat side by side with Vilate in the jury of the Revolutionary Tribunal. Trinchard was a carpenter. He was somewhat over thirty years of age at the period of the Revolution. His brother was a gunner, fighting against the Vendéans, just at that moment when Valenciennes had fallen, and when all seemed over with the Republic; and his brother used to write from the armies, signing "Your brother, a true Republican." Two months later he was judging Marie Antoinette. He wrote to his brother a letter immediately after the trial. M. Dunoyer publishes in his book (Deux Jurés du Tribunal Révolutionnaire) a facsimile of that letter, and wonderful reading it makes. One might put its bad spelling and street language into modern English something like this: "I'm learning you, brother, that I was one of them jurymen as judged the wilbeast what was wolfing a gurt part of the empire." And so forth. But the man is doing nothing exceptional. He no more thinks of himself as exceptional than does any leader-writer to-day writing upon the virtues or vices of a contemporary politician in more moderate language. And note you, as a hundred years can make men more temperate, so they can make men more violent, and our modern absence of emphasis may astound our great-grandchildren quite as much as that revolutionary violence astounds us.

A friend writes to him in that spring of 1794 (when Danton died, and when every man was occupied in the defence or in the destruction of the Republic). He is a very ordinary friend, his name is Ploton, a Southerner, as Trinchard was. He corresponds more or less in that society to, let us say, a young village shopkeeper in our own, full of a simple patriotism, and especially full of what the Press tells him. And he heads his letter thus: "Second of Germinal, the second year of the Republic—which is as imperishable as the world." What rhetoric! Nay, to us reading such stuff to-day, what lunacy! But do not be too sure. Go to the British Museum when you can find an idle afternoon and look up your newspapers of September, 1899, and you will read some amusing phrases.

The truth is that men pass under strong influences of time that fill them more than with wine, rather with an entirety of life. The time in which a man lives may be an exalted time or a weary one, but it fills him altogether, whether it is on fire or drowned. He can conceive, as a rule, nothing in the future different from the temper of his time, though there is all the past to teach him his folly. If he makes a picture of the future, that picture is a mere extension of his own tiny and ephemeral experience, and the more confidently certain he is of that future the more rigidly is it seen by the critical onlooker to be a puppet dressed up in the clothes of the present.

All these things Dunoyer's careful book upon two men of the Revolutionary Tribunal, a monograph characteristic of that ceaseless and immense research which dignifies the modern French School of History, has suggested to my mind.

Now, whenever I read of the Revolution, in general or in particular, while that lesson of the folly of prophecy perpetually returns to me, yet something else rises from the page. In a certain sense, almost in a mystical sense, the periods of profound faith in a particular future were right. Not because the picture that they saw was true, but because those things outside time upon which they relied were and are true. And even to-day in the sheer anarchy and welter of the time we suffer there is a method of thought which has anchoring ground in the permanent fate of mankind. But what that method may be there is no space to discuss here.

ON A POET

The days in which Swinburne died, it was remarked by all, were days peculiar to the air and to the landscape which had inspired his verse. One riding in those days upon the high ridges of the New Forest saw before him in the distant hills of Dorset and of Wilts, in the very clear line of the Island, in the belt of sea, and in the great billows of oak woods and of beech that lift up from the hollows, in the clear wind and the new large clouds of spring before it, everything which his poetry meant to those who were of one tongue with him, and all that part of it which, though not incommunicable to foreigners, made him the least translatable of modern writers. Nowhere was it easier to understand what influences had made, or rather driven, his form of expression than on those heights looking towards those hills, and under such a sky, feeling that wind come right from off the English sea.

For it is the chief characteristic of Swinburne's work, and the one which will be noted of him throughout whatever changes the future may bring to our taste, that his motive (if one may use this metaphor) was the landscape and the air of England—especially of South England and of that very roll of land from the chalk to the chalk, from the northern Avon of Wiltshire to the cliffs of the Island which a man surveys from the ridges of which I speak.

Let it not be forgotten that revolutions in taste are among the most certain as they are among the most mysterious proofs of the power of rapid change combined with unity which is peculiar to Europe, and which has been discovered in no other civilisations than that of the Europeans. Only some very few have escaped the chastening of that reflection. There are indeed some classics—one might count them upon the fingers of both hands—which no transition of taste much raises or much diminishes, and chief among these is the sovereignty of Homer. But almost all the others do suffer violent neglects, nay, may be for a generation and more violently despised; or again, violently adored. And so rapid are these fluctuations of opinion—and so sincere while they remain—that we must always approach with extreme care the criticism of a contemporary. The fluctuations of opinion will at last decide an average. Truth will be plotted out, a clear and intellectual thing, from the welter of mere stimulus. Criticism will acquire, and with every new critic acquire further, certitudes and fixed points of judgment; and the reputation of a great poet is moulded and informed by the process of time, as all other worthy things are moulded and informed by the process of time. Let us attempt then to stand apart from the feeling of the moment and to ask ourselves what certainly was present in the work of the great writer who died in this uprush of new weather, and this invitation to life that was sweeping over his own land. It is by qualities which, whether we approve them or disapprove, are certainly present in a writer that his reputation with posterity will be made, not by the emotions of the moment which those qualities arouse; nor is any great writer (nor any small one, for that matter) to be judged in general terms, but in particular—since writing is like a man's voice, and always has in it, no matter who produces it, if it be closely examined, characters not general but individual. A man who should have resisted the wave of enthusiasm for Lord Byron, but who should carefully have noted what at any rate he was, what his verse was and what it was not, who should have distinguished between what he certainly did easily and what he as certainly could not do, might have praised too much or too little, but that which his analysis had distinguished would enable him to know more or less what kind of posterity would judge Byron, and how. He would have been able to guess, for instance, that a time of youth and of largesse would have drunk him in great draughts, a time of age and of exactitude would have found in him a mere looseness of words; he would have been able to see why foreigners especially could discover his greatness; why the reading of him was proper to a time of active and physical combat against oppression, was improper to any nation which a long peace had corrupted, or to any class which the opportunity for every licence and the power through wealth to approach every enjoyment had satiated and cloyed.

If we so examine Swinburne we shall, as I have said, first notice that in all his work the mere nature of South England drives him. It is the expression often uncontrolled, always spontaneous, of an intense communion with that air, those colours, such hills and such a sea. In this Swinburne, wholly novel as was his medium of expression, was peculiarly and rigidly national. Whoever best knows that landscape and that sky best feels him. Whoever in the future most neglects it or knows it least will least fully appreciate or will perhaps even neglect his work. In whatever times the inspiration of that belt of land weakens in the men who inhabit it (it weakened in the Eighteenth Century, for instance), in such a time the influence of Swinburne's work will weaken too.

Next there must be noted that in him much more than in any other writer of the language, or, at any rate, much more than in any other modern writer of prominence, words followed rhythm, and the poem, though an organised and constructed thing, went bowling before the general music of its metre as a ship over-canvased goes bowling before the general gale. That music underlies all lyrical expression, and for that matter poetry of every other kind as well, all critics have always known. But it is modern to make of it, as it were, the necessary and conscious substructure of the work, and Verlaine, who put it in his Poetic Art as the chief rule to consider "Music and always Music," was, in laying down such a law, the extreme expression of his time. Sense is not sacrificed wholly in any place, it is but rarely imperilled even by this motive in Swinburne. But one feels that reason has in the construction no divine place, but is subsidiary—as it is subsidiary in unworded tunes, as it is subsidiary in great and vivid dreams, as it is subsidiary (since one should be just even in judging extravagance) in all the major emotions of the human soul: in love, in combat, in despair. And in this necessary service of rhythm, this bondage to music, is to be discovered the source of another characteristic in the work: the perpetual repetition. Two men, both sedulous and scholarly admirers, will be equally struck by the apparently contradictory judgments that Swinburne was unequalled in the range of his vocabulary, and that Swinburne was, quite beyond parallel, repetitive. Each judgment would strike one of the two types of admirer as a paradox or a truism. Yet both are true, and both have an illuminating meaning when his work is considered. That vast vocabulary (and if you will be at the pains to note word upon word or to make a short concordance you will see that the word "vast" is just)—that vast vocabulary, I say, proceeded from the necessity of satisfying the ear. An exact shade of length and emphasis were needed; they must be exactly filled, and some one word out of the thousands upon thousands which the numerically richest language of our time possesses must be hit upon to do the work. This surely was the source of that wide range. So also was it the source of the repetition.

Repetition is discovered in literature under two aspects. It is deliberate and admiringly designed, or it is involuntary and an odious symptom of fatigue. The repetitions of Catullus in their way, the repetitions of the Hebrew poets in theirs, were meant to be; or rather (for their voluntary quality is obvious) they were exactly designed to produce a particular effect, and did produce it; the repetition of those who fail, involuntary and symptomatic of fatigue, may be neglected. Swinburne's repetitions were neither of the one kind nor of the other; they were the recurrence of a set of words or of single words which suited the sound in his head. And just as to fit exactly a void of known form one word exactly fitting must be found (fitting not reason but the ear) so those which had been found to fit particular rhythms must be used again to fit those rhythms when they recurred, as naturally and as necessarily as a man picks up this tool and that to do some particular bit of carving which he has found it apt for in the past. The word in Swinburne was subordinate.

It is a commonplace, and a true one—to pass to another matter—that the English writers of the later Nineteenth Century (and not the writers alone) reposed upon the Jacobean translation of the Old Testament. That unique and fundamental piece of work, the monumental characters in which appear more largely with every process of retreat from it, whether in time or in conviction, has so formed that generation that it was itself almost unconscious of the enormous effect. Swinburne is as full of it as Kipling; the ready-made phrases of weary political discussion are full of it. The whole national life, in so far as modes of expression are concerned, was filled with it. Many of Swinburne's rhythms were the rhythms of the English Psaltry, and perpetually you will find some sounding final phrase, especially if it ends in an interrogation, to be a phrase of biblical character or even a biblical transcription. Herein, again, as in that effect of landscape and of air, he is national in every particle of his poetic being; and one may remark that this note is the note of unity in him, and that a recognition of it explains what has confused so many critics of his life and of his opinion. The man who in youth was ardent for a liberty which leant much nearer to anarchy than to the republic, who ranged, as the fashion was over all Europe, to find subjects for that mood, in age perpetually sounded a note which had in it something exaggerated of fury and of protest against whatever might be thought to be weakening the very old and fixed boundaries of the national life. Yet it was the same man whose extreme facility poured out in either field; the passionate protest of the first years was a protest drawn from the untrammelled nature about him which ran through him and made him write. The convinced and extreme political insistence of his later verse was drawn from the same source. It was still the surroundings of his own land that compelled him.

There is one last thing to be said: the work has been called pagan. It is the commonest praise or blame attached to the achievement. Those who attach it, whether in praise or blame, have not clearly seen the pagan world. By pagan we mean that long, long manhood of Europe (a thousand years long to our knowledge—how much longer we know not) in which the mind certainly reposed and was certainly in tune with the nature of the Mediterranean. Swinburne's great love of that mood was the love of a foreigner, of a much belated man, and of a man of the North. The sea of the Atalanta in Calydon is an English sea. All that attitude in him was reaction and a protest. It was full of yearning: now pagan paganism was not full of this. The very earliest moment in which a protest of that kind is to be found is the Fourth Century. For the transformation between the old and the new lay in this, that there came upon our race in the first four centuries of the Roman Empire a yearning which must be satisfied, and men since then have accepted an assuagement of it or have passionately protested against that assuagement, or have cynically ridiculed it, but they have never remained other than profoundly influenced by it. What is called "paganism" since that change came is not of marble and is not calm: it is a product, not of the old time, but of the new.

ON A PROPHET

Years ago in the county of Kent a gentleman of means, culture and lineage begged me to make the acquaintance of a certain neighbour of his who dwelt in a little cottage called (by the wrath of God) "The Hollies"—and, indeed, a holly-tree of no small size, but one only, grew beside his door. This cottage was cubical in formation with the exception of the roof, which was a pyramid, and it was built of brick with the exception of the roof, which was of slate. Its name, "The Hollies," was painted outside upon the gate. This is all I have to say about the cottage.

The man who dwelt within it came that very evening to dine at the Squire's, and was what you will call obviously a gentleman. He was not a gentleman in any cryptic or mystical sense; he was not the Adumbration of a gentleman; he was not the Platonic Idea of a gentleman; he was not the Gentleman used loosely as a term for a good man; he was not rich; he spoke perfectly; he was very stupid. Much more than this, he was a Prophet.

The learned have observed (or at least the only ones among them who count have persistently observed) that it is in the nature of barbaric peoples to accept whatever is told them with sufficient assurance, conviction and simplicity, but especially if it regard the future. On this account (the learned say) he who will prophesy with flame shall certainly among barbarians become a founder. Now it is sufficiently certain that this type of man, so successful among the primitive, and perhaps also among the decayed, continues through all ages and in all societies, though varying perhaps in proportion, and certainly varying enormously in the source of his information according to the generation in which he lives, is here to-day; and this man was one of him.

At first I did not know in what a Presence I stood—or rather sat—for he was very modest, if indeed it be modest to make no noise in the eating of soup, to frown heavily, and never to speak a word. There were but three of us there, the Squire, myself, et Rex Meus the Prophet. Having seen little of the world I much desired to hear what he would say; although he was still what politicians call young he seemed old to me, because he had a full beard, and because life had already wearied him, a thing incomprehensible to boys. The Squire watched him with a good deal of admiration and of fear, until at last he said, "There won't be any war." Here let me tell you that these words were pronounced in the year 1888, and a little before the bursting of the spring upon the Kentish Weald.

Nor was there one. There was no war about that time.

Those who read these lines, I am quite certain, will find them a shock. We live in a time when war is so struck with doom that it is putting on speed, as it were, to make a fine ending. War is out of our manners; we can tolerate it no more. Every year is a new reconciliation, and a new treaty in the federation of all mankind except those who have neglected their armament, and in general we are forgetting war. But there have been wars, and of some calibre—hefty and noisy wars since you and I were boys. Now in 1888 there was no war. So the Prophet was right.

The Squire was interested and humble, and being a plain man he asked why there would be no war, for it was imagined at that moment by eight or nine newspaper men that some war or other was going to break out; but what war I forget after such a lapse of time. The Prophet was a true prophet, by which I do not mean that he prophesied truth, but only that he was in keeping with all that I have ever read of his breed; he shook his doormat of a head and wagged his beard, smiling, as bearded men do, with the eyes only, and would give no reasons; and, indeed, there was no war. But as the dinner went on he talked of other things; he prophesied a Parliament in Dublin "within ten years," and, new as I was to the world, I could but note how much of his conversation worked within fixed frames and limits, as should beseem a prophet. Some things were going to happen "within five years," some "within twenty years," some—and the leap was indeed splendid—"within fifty years." Among these last I dimly remember was the spread of a universal language, which I think he called "Anglo-Saxon"; and there was something or other about the birth-rate which escapes me now, but which I can remember to have appalled me at the time, for it was a destruction of all I loved and revered in Europe.

The dinner went on, and as he got more food and wine into him he prophesied less—for fasting is the mother of prophecy. He was still assertive, he was still sure; his talk was still of public men, of continents, of armies, of battle and of sudden death, but the future entered less into it, and the present more. He became not so much a prophet, but, if I may use the word quite gently, more of a liar. I can remember vividly now, after so many years, how he stood in the hall of that great house, all wrapped up to go through the park to "The Hollies." I looked at his large frame and masterful demeanour. I remembered all that he had said, both of things distant from me and of things to come, and I admired such eyes in the brain.

It was ten years before I met him again. I am wrong—it was nine. I met him upon a steamboat in the North Sea, and he remembered me. We looked over the side of the ship and talked about America and Spain. As to the chance of war he waved it all away with his hand. It might come or it might not [the truth was, it was too near for his type of vision], but what would come after, whether the war was fought or not, was quite clear. "America," he said, "would learn that she could fight a European Power." It seems that having learnt this, all sorts of things would happen, and there would be banging and bingeing to some tune. The earning of one's living, the weight and dullness which come upon the mind from seeing too many places and knowing too many men, left my impression less vivid. For, as it says in the song—

Ki moulte y resve mainte a vu:

Ki pleure trop a trop vescu.

But anyhow there remains to me the impression of that conflict between the Old World and the New which I was destined to experience, and which I in no way desired. He had been following French politics also, and he told me—not by way of prophecy, but as a revelation of inner truth—why it was that Germany had not declared war upon France and taken Paris in the autumn of the preceding year. I talked to him, therefore, of the 75mm. gun. He did not shirk it. He talked of it as one who knew; and as I heard him my mind grew aged. I left him in a port of Holland after luncheon, and the last I remember of him on that occasion was a slight gesture of his from the wrist only (for he was a dignified man) explaining how all that I saw, the port, the shipping, the docks, everything, would be German "within ten years."

I met him again several times in the succeeding waves of our century. I met him just before the Boer War, and a little after Colenso. He prophesied only upon one matter upon these occasions, and that was the length of the conflict, which, with an exact discrimination, he invariably placed within "six months" of the day upon which he addressed me, and the third time he assured me of this thing was in the month of February 1902, and that time he was right.

Since then I have met him continually, for he knows less people than he used to do, and he has fallen into a routine of old friends. The Squire is dead, and he only goes down to "The Hollies" now and again. It is his pleasure still to foresee. The war over, he bought Consols. He was careful to explain that he was no fool. They were at 97. They would fall, of course; he was not buying for immediate rise. In part of this anticipation he was not disappointed, but in another part he was. He was in a fume for some little time about an approaching war with Russia upon the frontiers of India, and again he would return to that recurrent theme of his life, the destruction of all limitrophous civilisations by the organised might of Germany. But his chief concern was the march of China upon Europe, which, as he clearly foresaw, could not be long delayed. "That," he said, with a sort of Christian enthusiasm, "would bind us all together once more!"

Whether it be a labour to prophesy or no, his hair had certainly grown white in the pursuit of his vocation, and when I last saw him (which was a little after the Epiphany in Rugby Station, waiting for the train to Carlisle) we spent ten minutes together, and he told me with unabated gladness that war would break out in the Balkans "when the snow melted." I asked him at what time this change came about in the Balkans, but he did not know.

ON BELIEVING

Whenever one studies, even superficially, any generation of men who have acted in the past and of whose actions there is some considerable record, that, I think, which most strikes the curious student is the nature of the things which were taken for granted during the period.

Very much might be written—whole books—upon the effects which this has upon history. Innumerable points arise as one considers it. For instance, there is no case I can remember of the things which were taken for granted existing in the same plenitude of record as the other things of history. The men of the Ninth Century did not sit down formally and tell us that they looked at the world in such and such a fashion. We have to glean and to pick out their standpoint by working parallel, noting unconscious expressions and side effects. It is like watching a man speaking on some matter of minor interest and trying to define through his tone and gesture the standpoint from which not only that minor interest, but every other, is regarded by his mind.

Perhaps nothing is more subject to close scrutiny to-day, is more suspected, and has more difficulty in establishing itself than an unusual physical experience, especially if there be about it a suspicion of connection with the nature and destiny of the human soul. There are certain periods in human history—the end of the Roman Empire is one of them; the beginning, or at least the very early dawn, of the Middle Ages was another—when marvels of this kind were sought after and met, as it were, half way by the mind of the time. The marvellous ran through the spirit of those generations very much as the accumulation of the ascertained, common and often unimportant, fact runs through the spirit of our time. They accumulated legend and what must, in the vast majority of cases, have been even falsehood with the same readiness with which we accumulate columns of statistics. They believed certain types of things to be true, and that belief led them to accept very much of the same nature on which they had no proof.

A very excellent example of the changes which take place from one generation to another in this respect may be discovered by any one who will set himself out to answer this question: "What did Englishmen in the middle and end of the Twelfth Century think about property in land?" Note the conditions of the problem. Land was the all-important thing of the time. It was the one thing on which men left records which they were determined should be minute, accurate and permanent. Yet there is no scholar at once so learned and so wise that he can with any exactitude answer the question. And it is evident that the fascination of the subject chiefly lies in the limitless field which it opens for discussion. There are those—excellent scholars—who will have it that the Englishmen of that time thought of land fundamentally as something common to the community. There are others—scholars of perhaps equal standing—who will have it that the Roman conception of absolute ownership had survived in nearly all its original simplicity. Between these two extremes scholarship may range at will; and however certain one may be individually that one's own point of view is right, one will never be able to marshal proof which shall certainly convince, and finally convince, the whole of the learned world. The men of that time believed something about land. They never set it down, they took it for granted; and we can only judge of what that belief was by its secondary effects. It sounds amazing, but it is true.

Another character of this unseizable spirit of the time is the distortion it appears to produce in morals when one is looking at it through the medium of another spirit belonging to another time—our own.

No one can read the history of the French Revolution without perceiving that certain doctrines of comparatively little effect upon the material circumstance of men so entirely filled the whole mental atmosphere of the great bulk of the French people, and certainly of a very large proportion of Western Europe in general, as to mould the whole of thought. We can name those doctrines, we can talk of "equality"—a dogma which may be true or false, but is certainly transcendental; we may talk as they talked about "liberty," but that does not give us any conception of the colour, smell, atmosphere, of the thing that drove them. And unless the reader is in touch with that evasive and central thing in the period it becomes an inexplicable welter: the inexplicable welter which so many of our school and university text-books make of it. A man (apparently a poor orator) moves men to frenzy—Robespierre. Another, a somewhat over-refined scientist of good birth and excellent balance of mind, is the first to propose the total dissolution of all the most ancient organs of the State and the destruction of the Monarchy. A third, an honest little lawyer, anxious to keep his little family, appears like a tiger ravening for blood. A fourth, a linendraper in Limoges, is put at the head of an army of 85,000 men and wins one victory after another. It is an amazing dance of impossible results following upon incredible causes—unless one has the spirit; and if one has it, as Michelet had it, the whole thing can be presented, not only in proportion and in orders, but actually with splendour.

You have something of the same kind in the contemplation of what are to us the atrocious cruelties of the Fifteenth Century. You do not find those cruelties striking the imagination of the time. You find injustice denounced, approaching chastisement prophesied, all the symptoms of a diseased society in the rulers and great vitality that perceived that disease among the oppressed, but what you do not get specifically mentioned, or at any rate not mentioned with reiteration, is the cruelty which to us as we read of it seems something quite remote from human habit or experience. Men and women are burnt alive in numbers which steadily increase from that time to the first generation of the Seventeenth Century. They are not thus tortured by the ferocity of the mob. The thing is done quite quietly by process of law, exactly as one might distrain for debt. You will perpetually hear vigorous protests against the justice of some particular sentence, but you will very rarely (but for the fear of such a negative, I should say never) find men saying "just or unjust, the cruelty of the execution is so revolting that I protest against it." Men believed something with regard to the whole doctrine of expiation, of penal arrangements which they have not described to us and which we cannot understand save through glimpses, side-lights, and careful deductions from or guesses through what they imagine to be their plainest statements. Thus in the particular case of burning alive—a thing we can scarcely bear to contemplate even in words—the framers of the statutes seem to have thought not of the thing as a horror but as a particular type of execution symbolic of the total destruction of the culprit. It is quite easy to prove, from numerous instances—Savonarola is one in point—that the judges often appeared indifferent whether the body consumed were alive or dead. The chance pity of spectators in some cases, the sentence of the court in others, is permitted to release the sufferer long before the flames. To us it is amazing that such an attitude towards such a pain could have existed, but it did exist.

Now the moral of such suggestions (and they crop up innumerable all over the surface of historical study) is that our own time lives in such an atmosphere and cannot define it. One would imagine in the torrent of printing and of record that everything concerning our time would be fixed and known. The most fundamental thing of all will not be fixed and known: it will have to be imperfectly guessed at. Some chance student in some particular era of posterity will say: "These people were more concerned with questions of property, apparently, than with religion. That is madness—but let us see what kind of madness it was and work out its nature, since they never clearly set down how they got into such a frame of mind nor even what that frame of mind was." Or another student will say in another epoch: "These people hesitated before personal combat—the most rational and commonplace of daily happenings. It is amazing, but it is true. Let me ferret out the state of mind which can have produced such an abnormal result." And so forth. Our time, like all those past times, will be watched curiously, and this mysterious thing will be sought and hardly found. The irony lies in this: that the spirit posterity will so seek is in us, here, to-day—and we cannot express it.

ON THE AIR OF THE DORDOGNE

All countries are built in vast inclined planes which lean up against one another and have ridges between. The great rivers run in the hollows where these planes meet at their lowest, and the watersheds are the lines along which their top edges come together—and there, you might think, was the end of it: but there is much more.

You must not only say: "I have left the valley of the Thames, I have found the valley of the Itchen," nor only: "I have come over St. Leonards Forest; I am no longer among the Surrey rivers, I am on the headwaters of the Sussex Weald," nor only: "I have left the great fields of the Yonne and the Seine and I have come down on to the Plain of Burgundy and the Eastern Rivers"—it is much more than that.

The slope that looks northward is one thing, the slope that looks southward another. The slope that has been conquered or ordered by the foreigner, or civilised from without, or in any way rearranged, may march with, but will contrast violently against, the slope that has been protected or isolated or left desert.

The very storms of Nature treat one and the other differently; the rivers do a different work according to the treatment of forests by men within their watershed; the soil sometimes, the air always, changes. Above all, the houses of men change.

The accent of speech changes, if not the form of speech; nay, in the transition from one such region to another I can believe that the daylight seems to change.

All those subtle, permanent, and masterly things which we cannot measure, but which are infinitely important compared with what we can measure, are grouped in groups in those great depressions which look to one sea or to one city, and the regions of Europe and its patriotisms run ultimately with the valleys. So it is with the Loire, and the Dordogne.

Whatever feeds the Loire is one. There are large uncultivated heaths the size of a country; there are very quiet pastures, very rich and silent, stretching for a hundred miles and as broad as a man would care to walk in a day; and in the highlands of the watershed there are rocks, and the trees of rocks, and at last sterile and savage mountains. And the upper courses of all the rivers of the Loire are torrents foaming in glens. Nevertheless, whatever feeds the Loire has a unity. The Allier, the Vienne, the Creuse, the Loire itself (which is only one stream out of many) are bound together.

Well, you go up into the sources of the watershed, you cross a confused land of rounded hills and knobs of crested rock and short, sturdy, sparse wood and heather and broom, and at last you see at your feet, trickling southward, not northwards, a stream that knows its way. And this at last, when it has worked its way through little waterfalls and past the gates it knows, will be the River Isle. If you knew it only from the map you would think it a stream like any other stream, but when you go downwards with it upon your feet, and when you see it with your eyes, tumbling and hurrying there, you know that everything has changed—you are in the air of the Dordogne.

There is a louder noise in the village streets; the habit of summer clings to them late into the winter time and re-arises in them early with the spring—though the cold is sharp in all the hills of the Limousin, whether to the north or to the south of that watershed, yet the south of it has a tradition very different from the north, and the sun is more kind or more worshipped. Here are lodges built beside or over the humblest houses; the vine is not so disciplined; it has a simpler and a more natural growth, it is an ornament and a shade. The churches have flat roofs such as Italy and Spain will use. Their Gothic is an attempt, their Romanesque is native.

The children and the birds are careless. Wealth is not spent in luxury but in externals, and property is contented. All this is the air of the Dordogne.

You feel what you have come to when you drink your first cup of wine on the southward slope of the hill, for the wine of every country is the soul of it. No Romans taught these men to plant the vine, it was surely native here. Here the vine grudges nothing; the god who inhabits it is not here a guest or a prisoner. Its juice is full and admirable. It needs no age. In Burgundy, where an iron works in the earth, they need nine years to breed perfection in their wine, but here, in the air of the Dordogne, though so far south, they need not seven. Within twelve months of the vintage a stranger can hardly tell its age, and for my part I would drink it gladly in November with the people there.

God forbid that any one should blaspheme the wines of the Loire, the cherished and difficult vineyards of Touraine. Great care and many friends protect them, and an infinite labour brings them to maturity. The wine of Chinon, which made Rabelais, the wine of Vouvray, which is good for the studying of mathematics, the wine of Saumur, which teaches men how to leap horses over gates—all these wines are of the north, and yet it would be treason to malign them.

I will not be tempted to such a treason, but could I be tempted I should be tempted by the generous invitation which, when one comes down the southward slope and feels the air of the Dordogne, proceeds and gathers from the vineyards of that delightful land. You may have seen on bottles the word "St. Emilion," and if what was within was from St. Emilion indeed, then you saw a great name upon the label; for you must know that St. Emilion is built in a sacred hollow. There Guadet, "who could not forgive," was born. Thence the noblest blood of the Revolution proceeded. In its vineyards died by their own hand the best of the Republicans, and this place still keeps, as in a kind of chalice, the spirit of the Gironde. If you doubt it, drink the wine. And St. Emilion is, as it were, the centre and navel of the country of the Dordogne. Here there stands or stood a church built all out of one rock. St. Martin, or some such person, beginning the monastic habit, was pestered (I have heard) by the grand nobles whom he had persuaded to monkishness in a fit of piety, for they said: "This life of yours is all very well, but what is there to do?"

Then St. Martin, lifting up his eyes, saw a large rock, and said to the youngest of them—

"Here is a great rock. Hack it about and chisel it until it has the shape of a church outside, and then cut doors and windows and hack away into it until it has the shape of a church inside, and you will have plenty to do."

The story as it was told to me goes on to say that they lived to be so old and so very old at their labour that they saw Charlemagne go riding by before the first Mass was sung in that rock church; and that that great soldier, coming in to their first Mass, thought the workers in their extreme old age to be the spirits of another world.

Now the church of St. Emilion is a symbol of the air of the Dordogne on account of its strength, its homogeneity, its legend, and its virtue of delicate but profound age.

You have drunk Barsac—and in so drinking you drank (you thought) April woods and the first flowers. Barsac would not be Barsac but for the Dordogne, which helps to make the great Gironde. And you have drunk Entremer, which is the name for a host of wines, but the kernel of the whole thing is the full blood that dreams and ripens, and as it were procreates, where the slope of the Dordogne is most the Dordogne, although the Dordogne is not there: at St. Emilion.

The pen has the power to describe, not general, but particular things. Though it may define what is general, it can call up only what is particular, and in that extended province which is ruled by the Dordogne St. Emilion has moved me to a particular description.

ON THE SITES OF THE REVOLUTION

There is not in travel an interest more fascinating than that of noting with the eyes and proving by the memory and by books the exact place of great or decisive actions. So have I just done in many places. Here (I have said to myself) Abdul-ul-Rahman went up Aragon till he came to the head of the Pass. Here he first saw the plains of Gaul from a height and promised himself the conquest of all Europe for Islam. Here, where the two rivers meet somewhat north of Poitiers, the two hosts watched each other for a week, and that which was not ours was defeated.

Then again, in Toulouse it was amazing to collect, as one wandered through, the memories of so many centuries. Here were the shrine where the body of Saturninus was found dead, dragged to death by a bull through the streets of the city; the quarter from which the populace saw advancing the Northern Army that was to defeat the Visigoths; the site of the wall whence the retreat of the Saracen was noted, a flood of men pouring back towards the wall of the Pyrenees; the flat heights beyond the city to the east, where the English Army came up from Spain in the defeats of Napoleon and drove back the resistance of the defence.

All these, and many more, a man notes in a travel of but few days, for all Europe—and no province more than this—is crammed with the story of its own past; but perhaps that which, in such reminiscences or resurrections, most moves one is to observe the obliteration of the last and most immediate of our efforts. The sites of the Revolution have disappeared.

One may walk about Paris—as I have walked to-day—and see stones and windows that are still alive with the long business of the city. There is the room where Madame de Sévigné wrote, there is the long gallery where Sully paced, recognising the new power of artillery and planning the greatness of his master. You may stand on the very floor where the priests stood when St. Louis held the Crown of Thorns above them, more than six hundred years ago; you may stand on the stone that covers Geoffrey Plantagenet before the altar of the Cathedral; you may touch the altar that the boatmen raised under Tiberius to their gods when our Lord was preaching in Galilee, and as you marvel at that stone you may note around you the little Roman bricks that stood in the same arches when Julian saw them, sitting at the Council that saved the Faith for the West.

All these old things remain in this moving, and yet unchanging, town—except the things of its principal and most memorable feat of will.

The Revolution is even now not old. Its effects are still in movement; they are not yet accomplished. Of the fundamental quarrels which it raised (some five or six) one at least, that of religion, is by no means resolved.

It is not even old in time. I who write this have known some who saw it; many who remembered its soldiers or its victims. I have but to-day visited a room where a daughter of the Montgolfiers would tell me in her extreme old age how the mob poured on the Bastille, and her companion, nearer to me in blood, had seen, and in my boyhood talked to me of, Napoleon. How many all round me, to-day or yesterday, were filled with the light or fire of that time, saying, "My father died in such and such a battle," in Spain, or in Italy, or beyond the Vistula—at the ends of the world. It is not so very long ago. It was much the chief business, for good or evil, that Europe has known since the Empire accepted the Faith. And what visible relics of it remain?

Where the National Assembly sat at Versailles, the Salle des Menus Plaisirs, there are a few houses or barracks, a place in building. Where they sat in Paris, they and the first days of the Convention, wrestling with and throwing Necessity, the Riding School, that vast oval cavern in which they forged the modern world, has utterly gone.

I never pass the place, even hurriedly and on business to some work or other, but I pause a moment to consider so great a change! It is where the Rue Castiglione comes now into the Rue de Rivoli—two streets whose very names are those of battles fought long after the atlantean work was done. Not a trace remains. A drinking shop for foreign jockeys, a cosmopolitan hotel, a milliner's where the rich of all nations (the women of the rich, that is) go in and buy; these hold the place. Here Mirabeau spoke his last words with effort and went home to die; here Verginaud thundered; here Louis and Mary Antoinette took refuge in the oven of the August days; here the long vote, a day and a night and yet another day, dragged on and ended with the end of the Capétians—after a thousand years.

The Tuileries saw more. They saw the outlawing of Thermidor, the quarrels that ended in the dictatorship, the hard scuffle that killed the monarchy. They have wholly disappeared. At the one end of them still stands the room where the committee made war on the whole world, and imposed upon the nation that leaden law of armies which we still call the Terror. But for that room all has gone.

The town-hall has gone. It was the focus of the revolt, it led the fever of the war against the kings. From it came the massacres of September—by order, I believe,—into it retreated and was defeated the last effort of extreme equality. This building at least (one might have hoped) might have been spared for history. It had sprung from the Renaissance, whole and beautiful. It had seen all the growths of the Bourbons and of their power, all the growing consciousness of Paris. It held half the documents of the city and more than half its destiny. It was the head, and its Italian front was the face, of Paris. It has gone altogether. It was burned when the Tuileries was burned.

The room where Danton pleaded so that his voice was heard beyond the river; the room where the Queen, in a voice low and firm, replied to the questions of her judges; the room where Marat was acquitted, and where the Girondins sang—all that has gone in fire. The house where Desmoulins first conspired is pulled down. The house where Danton sat in his last hours watching the fire and caring little for life or death has also gone. The Jacobins are a market-place. The temple was pulled down by the order of Napoleon. That furious business seems to have burnt out the very stones of its origin or to have burst the confines wherein it was conceived.

Perhaps a fate rested upon them all.

I went to-day through woods that were quite lonely twenty years ago. They stood near my home. Here, in the midst of the trees, and in a deserted place reached by a dismantled and neglected road, rose a country-house, regular in outline, monotonous, and faded. The windows were open to the night, the floors rotten; green moss grew on the plaster of the walls; the roof was ruinous. It was the house to which the daughter of Marie Antoinette had come, reserved, and perhaps with terrors in her mind, to find silence while the restoration still endured. It was her refuge. Years after it stood as I have recalled it. I saw it (I say) again to-day—or rather, I saw it no longer.

The woods are felled in regular great roads. There are villas built and new inns, and pleasure-places. A new Paris has spread out towards it and killed it. Here also the memory of the Revolution, the physical memory, has disappeared.

I know of no wave like it in Europe or in the history of Europe: of no such attempt, so great, so full of men and of creation, whose outward garment in building has been so thrust away by the irony of Time.

A SECRET LETTER

I had promised Your Excellency in my last dispatch to let him know with the least delay both the consequences of my appeal to the King in this country and the events that might flow from his attitude.

It is with profound sorrow that I communicate to Your Excellency the whole of this passage.

Upon Wednesday, St. James's Day, I was granted an audience by His Majesty at seven in the morning, which is his usual hour for receiving foreign envoys and all those accredited with public or secret powers from another Court.

His Majesty, whom I had not met before, is a man tall in stature, but stooping somewhat at the shoulders. His age is not apparent in his features, his hair and beard (which is scanty) are still black, and his eyes, though they betray an expression of weariness, are lively. He was good enough to bid certain officials near him to go out into the anteroom, where I trust my words could not be heard, though there is no door separating the King's closet from that passage, but only a German tapestry, presented, I think, at the time of the King's marriage by the Elector, his father-in-law.

The King would first have me set before him what I had to say, which I did as briefly as possible, and following exactly the instructions given me by Your Excellency. I made no attempt to diminish, still less to deny the crime of which My Lord had been guilty; nay, I even exaggerated it, if that were possible, in order to prepare his Sovereign for my plea, which was that My Lord's youth and the manner in which the adventure was presented to him excused him in some part for the action of which he had been guilty. I briefly spoke of the campaigns in which he had fought since his sixteenth year, and I showed how easily to a soldier the expedition which has had so disastrous an ending might have appeared as a just and loyal war. I was careful to omit any whisper of what the Emperor had threatened in case of a refusal (for such were your instructions), and finally I laid at the feet of His Majesty the plea of common mercy, dwelling upon My Lord's household, the future of his young and innocent children, and all else that would follow upon the sacrifice of such a life.

His Majesty listened to me gravely, and replied that he had fully revolved My Lord's action, and its nature and consequence, in his mind, as also the effect of the determination he himself had taken, which determination could not be shaken by any argument that I or another might put before him. It was (he said) a necessary example to others, and the more highly placed the culprit the stronger the necessity of the sentence appeared to him. He said further, that in the matter of rebellion and treason (which, as Holy Writ discovered, was among the most detestable of crimes, and compared even to witchcraft, against which enormity His Majesty is especially watchful) it was a thing which must be ended once and for all, and could not be dealt with in any manner save by the extirpation of its authors and the total suppression and extinction of the originators and begettors thereof. To be brief, His Majesty would not be moved in any manner, but told me, speaking as a man will who has no more to say, the date and hour were already fixed, and had been communicated to me. With this His Majesty dismissed me, and I left him.

Upon the Thursday, therefore, the morrow, which they reckon in this country as the 15th of the month, I bade Charles, my attendant, go warn My Lord that I would see him at his convenience, and My Lord answered very graciously that my convenience was his own, whereupon I said I would come at once, and did so, it being about an hour after noon, and My Lord sitting at wine after his meal, which he had eaten alone in the room assigned to him.

My Lord was well furnished in all particulars, and the clemency of the season further lessened his discomforts of prison, but he was closely guarded, and he complained to me, though without bitterness, that when his wife had visited him but a week before, bringing with her the little Count, my master, and his little sister also by the hand, a man-at-arms had been present throughout their interview. He also told me that for writing he might have what liberty he would, but that he might fold over and seal no letter. I asked him what his regimen had been in the matter of religion, at which he sighed and said that he had been permitted to see the Carthusian whom Your Excellency had sent to this part under a safeguard, but that no Mass might be said in his room, nor within the precincts of the whole castle: which, as he was told, was forbidden by a law of this realm; but this I would hardly believe, and indeed we had permission of His Majesty (who is indifferent to such things) that Mass should be privily said upon the following morning, which was that on which My Lord was to suffer. And for this purpose a table was set, he whom Your Excellency has sent bringing with him a little altar stone and all that was necessary for the Office.

My Lord dismissed me when I had spoken to him for perhaps half-an-hour, asking him what I should do, but he bade me return a little before sunrise on the morrow, which (Your Excellency) I very punctually did, more sorrowful at heart than I could say, having not slept that night for the multitude of letters that I must read and dispatch, and for the weight of the business that was before me.

When therefore it was fully light, but the sun not yet risen, I went over from my lodgings (which are not far from the Royal Mint) to the Castle, and was admitted to My Lord's presence, where he sat with a heavy look, and yet gallantly as it were, having with him My Lady and the two little children, the Priest having said Mass and the table being now in order, but he remaining for the last Offices.

My Lady was troubled exceedingly, and a woman of hers who was with her was but little help to her or to us. As for My Lord's children, though they could not understand the case, they saw that something great and terrible was at hand. But all this should not be detailed to Your Excellency, nor can my pen properly express it. My Lady and her servant and the two children were taken, I think, from the room, but I did not look, nor did I hear any sound except a slight sobbing, which very soon ceased: the passing of men-at-arms set at regular places without I remember to hear continuing, and if it be a trivial matter to have this set down for Your Excellency, I do so only in the desire to relate every particular and to omit nothing. I asked My Lord whether there was anything that I could further communicate to the King or to his family, or to any one. He answered in a firm voice that he had attended to all. And he gave me a letter sealed (for this was now permitted him), which letter I am to deliver to Your Excellency and will do so, since I must entrust it to no one. He told me further that he had made his peace and that he had received Communion, but that he would beg the priest whom Your Excellency had sent to remain with him to the end. The Warden of the Castle, a man of strict purpose, but not harsh in his demeanour (though silent, as are the most of these people), said here that the populace, who had gathered in a great crowd, might be angered at the sight of a priest, which sight indeed would recall in them all the circumstances of the war. To this My Lord answered, a little disdainfully I thought, that it was but little to ask, and that for the anger of the people, and indeed for any feeling they might have towards himself, he had no care of it. He did not desire to arouse it, nor did he fear it. Then said the Warden of the Castle, he might be accompanied as he wished, but the priest must put off his gown: which he did and stood dressed like any common man of this country, or rather like some servant. But his hair and the trim of his beard seemed the more foreign in such a habit.

The sun had now risen, and we were apprised that My Lord's hour had come by the beating of drums outside the castle and the noise of the people. My Lord hearing this looked at me sorrowfully for a little time and asked me a question in the matter of religion which I thought both terrible and confusing at such a time, but he pressed me and I replied very humbly that for my part I had lived as most men lived in these times, which are corrupt and evil, and that indeed no man could fully understand the unseen things; no, nor so much as conceive them; but that none the less I hoped I might always bear witness to the Faith as did he at that very moment. To which My Lord answered, sighing, "I bear no witness to that, but only to my constancy, and I could wish that they had left me my sword."

I set down for Your Excellency all that happened, but I would not have Your Excellency think that My Lord was troubled in these matters; only it was his custom to debate learning and philosophy and to express doubts that he might hear them answered: this was all. And it is truly said that a man's custom will be seen expressed in the end of his life.

Meanwhile they were waiting for us, and as I was to be the other that might be present with My Lord when he suffered, the priest and I went before him and behind the men-at-arms, while first went the Warden of the Castle. And we found that the scaffold had been put up upon a level with the window at the side of the main gate, which looks westward towards the City. There was a red cloth upon it, a square, but the rest naked, and round it a sort of railing of rope stretched from posts. The whole was guarded by soldiers of the King's Guard who were a-horse, even the drummers. There was a very great crowd of people who were silent, but when they saw My Lord shouted and made a confusion, till the soldiers pressed them back. The Warden asked My Lord whether he would speak to the people, but he shook his head and pressed his lips together so firmly that one would have thought he smiled. Then the Headsman, kneeling upon one knee, as is the custom, asked My Lord's forgiveness for what he was to do, to whom My Lord answered in a cheerful voice that he very heartily forgave him and all others in this matter. And then saying this word "Come," wherein I did not understand his meaning—but he may have been doing no more than call me as one calls a servant—he took off his cloak, which was dark and heavy and which was that which he had commonly carried in the field, very serviceable and without ornament, and this cloak he handed to me, so that I have it and will bring it with me upon my journey. When he had done this he took off also his undercoat, upon which, as upon his cloak, he had kept no sign of his rank nor any jewel, even of his Order; and this done he kissed me and also him whom Your Excellency sent, the Religious; then he knelt down and, as I think, prayed, but very shortly, after which he laid his head upon the block and asked the Headsman if it were fairly so. To which the Headsman said yes, and that at his signal he would strike: which, when it was given, the Headsman struck, and by the mercy of God was ready at his business: so we threw a cloth that had been given us quickly over the body of My Lord, and while the people groaned we lifted him, two men-at-arms, the priest and I together, to set him in a case of wood which was prepared. Only the Headsman showed My Lord's head to the people, and said, "So perish all traitors," while the people still groaned. Then My Lord's head also was given us and we set it very reverently down, and we covered the case with the cloth given us, which was the end of the business of that morning, from which time till now I have not written, but now write as Your Excellency ordered, and in the first hour in which I find myself able and in command of myself to do so.

My Lord was a great Captain.

THE SHADOWS

It is always in a time when one's attention is at the sharpest strain, when innumerable details are separately and clearly grasped by the mind, and, in a word, when the external circumstance of life is most real to us that the comic contrast between ourselves and the greatness outside us can best be appreciated.

We humans make all that present which is never there, and which is always hurrying past us like the tumble of a stream, an all-important thing.

A form of dress unusual at one particularly insignificant moment, a form of words equally unusual, and so forth, seem like immovable eternities to us; they seem so particularly in those moments when we are most thoroughly mixed with our time. Then what fun it is to remember that the whole thing, all the trappings of life, are nothing but a suit of clothes: old-fashioned almost before we have used them, and worthless anyhow.

It is a general election that has made me think these things.

In the moment of an election men mix together very closely; the life of one's time is set before one under a very brilliant and concentrated light, which shows a thousand things one had forgotten in the habits of the nation.

One sees so many kinds of men, one finds about one the relics of so many philosophies, one is astonished to meet, still surviving, so many illusions—that these contemporary details take up a very exaggerated place in our mind. Then it is good for one to remember that the whole of it is but a little smoke.

There are commonplace tags in history which boys can never understand. One of the most commonplace and the most worn is Burke's exclamation in the Bristol election. He heard of the death of a man, and said: "What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!" and the phrase has gone threadbare, and no school-boy can understand why his elders dwell upon that phrase.

The reason is that it expresses a thing which is not only obvious, but which also happens to be of the utmost moment; and it is peculiarly valuable coming from Burke, who of all men was keenest upon the shams of his time, who of all men was most immersed in the game of politics, who of all men, perhaps, in Parliamentary history was capable of self-deception and of the salaried advocacy which is the basis of self-deception. Burke is, as it were, a little god or idol of your true politician. He was a politician of the politicians. Burke is to the politician what Keats is to the poet, the exemplar, the mirror of the profession; yet Burke it was who said: "What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!" He was quite right.

A little time ago in Paris an experiment was tried, which later was repeated in London. It was a curious success in each capital. The experiment was this: to put upon the stage a play, the time of which was the sixties of the last century, and to dress the actors up in the clothes of the sixties. In Paris they went further: they reproduced the slang, the jests, the very tone and affectations of fashion which marked the period of Napoleon III. The younger generation, which could not remember the time, looked on curiously at the experiment. To the older people it was comic, with an uncanny comedy, and the irony of it was sometimes more bitter than they liked. So this was man! This was the immortal being! This was the ambitious fellow who would now write a deathless poem, now discover the ultimate truths of Hell and Heaven; now dominate the earth with his machines, now enter the adventure of Mexico—and the rest! There he was, in peg-top trousers, long whiskers, and an absurd top-hat with a narrow brim. And there was woman, the woman, for whom such and such a man had killed himself, such and such another had volunteered for the Crimea; or the woman of whom a third had made a distant idol in the Atlas when he was out in Africa. And there was the woman upon whom the Court depended, or the Ministry; there was the woman who had inspired the best work of Hugo, or who had changed the life of Renan. She wore a crinoline. At the back of her head was a mass of ugly false hair, and how odd these gestures seemed, and what queer turns of phrases there were in her language! What waxwork, and how dead the whole thing seemed!

That experiment in either capital was a dreadful one, which will not easily be tried again. Like all things that grip the mind, the power of its action lay in its truth, and the truth which vivified that experiment and gave it its power was the truth that our affairs are mortal things, and the ephemeral conditions which clothe our lives seem to us at a moment to be the universe itself, and yet are not even as important as the dust. They are small, they are ridiculously small—and also they are evanescent as the snow.

It is an amusement in which I have sometimes indulged, and no doubt many of those who are reading this have tried it for themselves, to turn to the files of old newspapers, choosing some period of great excitement which one can oneself remember, but which is separated from the present time by a sufficient space of years. It is well in practising this sport to choose the columns of a journal which expressed one's own enthusiasm and one's own conviction at the moment. The smile provoked by such a resurrection of the past must be bitter, but it will be the more salutary for its bitterness. There is that great question which (we supposed!) would change the world; there is all the shouting and the exaggeration and violence; and there, beyond it, unseen, is the reality which we have come to know. Their future has become our past, and note how utterly the vision disagrees with the real stuff, and see how vain the vision was. Look how terrors were never fulfilled, read how these hopes were still less destined to fulfilment, and, above all, attached to worthless ends.

In nothing is this lesson better learned or more valuable than in the matter of loves and hatreds. Look up the heroes. They were your heroes too. Read mournfully the enormous nonsense which was written of the villains. "Sir!" said a famous politician and writer of the Victorian time—"Sir! the world in which Palmerston is allowed to live makes me doubt the kindness of my Creator!" That is the kind of thing. Smith is your Hector and Jones is your Thersites! And then the mills of the years take up that flimsy stuff and begin grinding out reality, and what a different thing that finished article is from the raw material of guesswork and imagination with which the mills were fed! You can look back now and see the real Smith and the real Jones. You can see that the real Smith was chiefly remarkable for having one leg shorter than the other, and that the principal talent of the real Jones was the imitating of a steam engine, or a very neat way of playing cards; and that both Jones and Smith were of that common stature which men have in the middle distance of a very ordinary landscape.

For the benefit of mankind, the illusion which it is impossible to feel with regard to a past actually remembered re-arises when attached to a past longer still. One can make a hero or villain of Fox or of Pitt. One can look at the dress of the Eighteenth Century, or the puffs and slashes of the Sixteenth, not only without a smile, but actually with pleasure and admiration. We find it glorious to read the English of Elizabeth, and pleasant to read the plain letters written when George the Third was King. But, oh heavens! the Idylls of a King! I say, for the benefit of man, one is allowed an illusion with regard to the remote past; of the near past which we have known, alas, we know the truth—and it appals one with its emptiness. There is no doubt at all that Burke was right for once in his life when he said that we were shadows and that we pursued shadows.

Nevertheless, there is one important thing, and there is one eternal subject which survives.

THE CANVASSER

In that part of the Garden of Eden which lies somewhat to the south-west of the centre thereof the weather, during the recent election which was held there, was bad. It blew, it rained, it hailed, it snowed, and all this was on account of the great comet, of which the people of that region said proudly to strangers, "Have you seen our comet?" Imagining, with I know not how much justice, that this celestial phenomenon was local rather than national or imperial.

The Garden of Eden being mainly of a clay soil, large parts of it were flooded, and a Canvasser (a draper by profession and a Gentleman from London by birth), unacquainted as he was with the Garden of Eden, thought it a foul place, and picked his way without pleasure. He went down a lane the like of which he did not even know to exist in England (for it was what we call in the Garden of Eden a "green lane," and only those learned in the place could get along it at all during the floods).

I say he went down this lane, turned back, took a circumbendibus over some high but abominably sticky ploughed fields, and turned up with more of English earth than most citizens can boast at the door of the Important Cottage. He had been given his instructions carefully, and he was sure of the place. He swung off several pounds of clay from his boots to the right and to the left, and then it struck him that he did not know how to accost a cottage door. There was no knocker and there was no bell. But he had had plenty of proof and instruction dinned into him as to the importance of that cottage, so at last he made up his mind to do something bold and unconventional, and he knocked at it with his knuckles.

Hardly had he done so when he heard within a loud series of syllables proceeding from two human mouths and consisting mainly of the broad A in the vowels and of Z by way of the consonants. At last the door was opened a little way and a rather forbidding-looking old woman, short, fat, but energetic, looked out at him through the crack. She continued to look at him curiously, for it is good manners in the Garden of Eden to allow the guest to speak first.

When the Canvasser grasped this from the great length of silence which he had to endure, he said with the utmost politeness, taking off his hat in a graceful manner and speaking with the light accent of the cultured—

"Is your husband in, madam?"

By way of answer she shut the door upon him and disappeared, and the Canvasser, not yet angry, marvelled at the ways of the Garden of Eden. In a few moments she was back again; she opened the door a little wider, just wide enough to let him come in, and said—

"Ye can see un: but he bain't my husband. He wor my sister's husband like." As she said this she kept her eyes fixed upon the stranger, noting every movement of his face and of his body, until she got him into the large old kitchen. There she put a chair for him, and he sat down.

He found himself opposite a very, very old man, much older than the old woman, sitting in a patched easy chair and staring merrily but fixedly at the fire.

The very, very old man said: "Marnin'."

There was a pause. The Canvasser felt nervous. The old, fat, but energetic woman, still scowling somewhat and still fixedly regarding the stranger, said—

"I do be tellin' of un you bain't my husband, you be poor Martha's husband that was. Ar!"

"Ar!" said the old man, by way of corroboration; and the smile—if it were a smile—upon his drawn and wrinkled face became more mysterious than ever.

The Canvasser coughed a little. "I've brought bad weather with me," he said, by way of opening the delicate conversation.

"Ar!" said the old man. "You ain't brought un nayther! Naw.... Bin ere a sennight com Vriday...." Then he added more reflectively, and as though he were already passing into another world, while he stared at the fire: "You ain't brought un nayther; naw!"

"Well," said the stranger gallantly, though a little put out, "I'm sure I should have been sorry to have brought it."

"Ar, so you may zay! Main sorry I lay," said the old man, and went off into a rattle of laughter which ended in a violent fit of coughing. But even as he coughed he wagged his head from side to side, relishing the joke immensely, and repeating it several times to himself in the intervals of his spasms.

"A lot of water lying about," said the Canvasser, hoping to start some vein at least which would lead somewhere.

"Mubbe zo, mubbe no," said the Ancient, like a true peasant, glancing sideways for the first time at his visitor and quickly withdrawing his eyes again. "Thur be mar watter zome plaa-ces nor others.... Zo they tell," he concluded, for fear of committing himself. Then he added: "I ain't bin out mesel'."

"He's got rheumatics chronic," said the sister-in-law, standing by and watching them both with equal disapproval.

"Ar!" said the Ancient. "Arl ower me!"

The Canvasser despaired. He took the plunge. He said as pleasantly as he could: "I've come to ask you how you're going to vote, Mr. Layton."

"Ow I be whaat?" answered his host with a look of extreme cunning and affecting a sudden deafness as he put his left hand to his shrivelled ear and leaned towards the Londoner.

"How you were going to vote, Mr. Layton," said the Canvasser, still good-humoured, but a little more rosy than before, and leaning forward and speaking in a louder tone.

"Ow I were voattun?" answered the aged Layton with a touch of indignation in his cracked tones, "I ain't voättud 'tarl yet!"

"No, no, Mr. Layton," said the Canvasser, relieved at any rate to have got to the subject. "What I meant was how are you going to vote?"