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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
PAGE
ON BUILDING CASTLES IN SPAIN 1
ON CLAY 8
ON NO BOOK 14
ON IRONY 18
ON THE SIMPLICITY OF WORDS 23
ON SECLUDED PLACES 30
ON PEOPLE IN BOOKS 37
ON THE EFFECT OF TIME 45
ON A POET 54
ON A PROPHET 63
ON BELIEVING 70
ON THE AIR OF THE DORDOGNE 77
ON THE SITES OF THE REVOLUTION 83
A SECRET LETTER 89
THE SHADOWS 98
THE CANVASSER 104
THE ABSTRACTED MAN 112
ON THE METHOD OF HISTORY 120
ON HISTORY IN TRAVEL 128
ON THE TRAVELLER 135
ON MILTON 142
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN 149
THE CHRISTMAS OF 1808 154
ON COMMUNICATIONS 159
ASTARTE 167
THE HUNGRY STUDENT 174
THE BRIGAND OF RADICOFANI 183
THE HONEST MAN AND THE DEVIL 196
COMPIÈGNE 205
THE CANDOUR OF MATURITY 212
THE FOG 220
THE SPANIARD 229
THE FORTRESS 236
THE HUNTER 243
OUR INHERITANCE 252
THE NEW ROAD 258
ON TWO TOWNS 265
THE JUDGMENT OF ROBESPIERRE 273
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--
[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