He had a high-domed forehead, as some poets have, and he wore upon
it, tilted rather far back, a dirty grey hat, soft and somewhat on one
side. He had a heavy old grey overcoat upon him. He was thin. He had
no gloves upon his hands, which were long and bony and very withered.
These hands of his were clasped one over the other upon the handle of
his umbrella. So he sat, and so I watched him; I in a fever to catch a
train, he apparently no longer fighting the complexities of this world.
The block broke up and we all began to dodge past each other towards
Paddington. His taxi turned into the station just in front of mine. We
got out together. I was interested to note that he asked for a ticket
to the same station in the same town which I was about to visit. So
great was my curiosity that I did what perhaps no one should do save a
servant of the State in pursuit of a criminal, that is, I deliberately
watched into which carriage he got and I got in with him. The express
started and we were alone together for some two hours. He sat in the
opposite corner to mine, still patient and still silent. He had bought
no newspaper, his hands were still clasped on his umbrella, and he
looked out of the window without interest as we passed by the various
degrees of sordid and unhappy life which fringe London. And when we
came out into the open country he still continued to gaze thus emptily.
I was most eager to speak to him, but I did not know how to begin. He
solved the difficulty for me by saying at a point where the great mass
of Windsor is to be seen to the south of the line upon a clear day
(and he leant forward to say it and said it in a low, rather pleading
voice): "Stands out well?"
"Yes," said I.
"Stands out wonderful well!" he said again, and sighed, not profoundly,
but in a manner that was very touching to hear.
When a little while later we crossed the Thames he moved his head
slowly to look down at the water, and he sighed as we passed the town
of Maidenhead. Then he said to me again spontaneously, "D'you often
travel upon this line?"
I said I travelled upon it fairly often, and I asked him, since this
appeared to strike some slight note of interest in his mind, whether
he travelled upon it also. He answered, in a tone a little lower and
sadder than that which he had used before and shaking his poor grey
head from side to side. "Not now!... I did once.... But it was broad
gauge then!" and again he sighed profoundly.
He continued upon this topic, which apparently had been one of the
thin veins of interest in the mine of his heart. He told me they would
never have anything like the old broad gauge again--never; and he shook
his head pathetically once more. He proceeded to remember the name of
Isambard Brunel, and he spoke of the Thames Tunnel and how men could go
dry shod under the river. "Under the river! Dry shod from one shore to
the other! Marvellous...."
Then, still on that theme, he referred to the _Great Eastern_ and said
what a mighty great ship she was.
"They will never have another like her--never! No one else will ever
make a ship as big as that!"
Now at this point I would have contradicted him had I known him to be
a man upon whom contradiction might act as a tonic and he might have
told me something about his extraordinary self. For it is certain that
now-a-days ships much larger than the _Great Eastern_ and fifty times
more efficient sail in and out of our harbours every hour. And I could
even have told him that the _Great Eastern_ had been broken up--but I
did not know that such a truth might not provoke tears in those old
eyes, so I forbore.
After a little pause he continued again, for he was now fairly on the
run: "Wonderful thing--steam!" and then he was silent for a long while.
I began to wonder whether perhaps he was much older than I had guessed,
but in a little while he settled this for me by talking to me with some
enthusiasm of Lord Palmerston. It was an enthusiasm of youth. I know
not how many metaphors he did not use. Little bits of sly slang--as
dead as the pyramids--peeped into his conversation as he described his
hero, and he would always end a paragraph of his panegyric by wagging
his head and letting his heart sink again at the reflection that such
men could not endure for ever.
I gently agreed with him and talked boastfully of foreign politics
(for that was the trend of his own mind apparently), but his ideas
upon these were not only simple but few. He had a craze that made it
very difficult to keep up, if I may use that expression, for his one
obsession was the French; and though he was too patriotic to prophesy
their arrival upon these shores his head shook more nervously than ever
when he had turned on to that topic. However, he said, we had beaten
them before and we should beat them again; and he added that it was not
the same Napoleon. His mind fastened upon this relief and he repeated
it several times. Then he remained silent for a while, too tired to
notice the towns among which we were passing.
I asked him whether he was acquainted with the Vale of the White Horse.
He told me sadly, and with the first faint smile I had seen upon his
face, that he had known it years ago, but "not now." He said that when
he had known it the White Horse was much more distinct and much more
like a horse, and he wandered on to tell me that Swindon to-day was
not at all the place it had been. This was his universal judgment of
everything along the line, and for a little he would have told me that
the crest of the downs had changed.
He remarked that there was no wheat in the fields, which, after all,
was not surprising at this time of year, and looking at the dull earth
as we passed it he assured me he could remember the time when the
whole of it had been yellow with corn, and if I had said: "But not in
January?" I might have compelled him to an uneasy silence, which was
the last thing in the world I wished.
Perhaps what I most remarked about him as strange was his not reading.
I have already said that he had bought no newspaper for himself, but he
did not ask for mine. When his eyes fell upon it where it lay upon the
seat they looked at it as a man looks at the cat upon the hearthrug.
But he did not take up the paper, though the moment through which we
were passing was not without interest--and this leads me to the way in
which we parted.
We had sat for some time in silence, his old face still turned to
the rapid landscape, which took on with every mile more and more the
unmistakable nature of the West of England, the sharp hills, the
combes, and with it all that which has something about it _Roman_, a
note I never miss when I cross its boundaries. At last we drew up into
the great station of the city. I opened the door for him and got out
first in case he should wish to hand me his bag. But though he was
feeble he took it down himself and slowly came out of the carriage
backwards and with the utmost caution; when he reached the platform
he gasped, with some little hint of adventure in his tone, "There!"
And he told me that railways were dangerous things. So we went down
the platform together, for I wished to get all the experience of him
I could before we had to part. He knew his way out, and when we got
into the main place of the town an enormous mob, pushing and shoving,
cheering and doing all that mobs do, was filling the whole of it. For
the first time since we had met I saw a look of terror in his old eyes.
He whispered to me, instead of speaking, "What's all that?"
"It's only a crowd," I said. "They're good-natured enough. It's the
election."
"The election?" he answered, his look of terror increasing. "Whose
election? Oh, I never could abide a riot! I never could abide one!"
I assured him I would get him through without any danger, and I took
his thin arm in mine, and pushed and scrambled him through to a hotel
that was near and there I left him. The terror had left his eyes, but
he was much weaker. I asked him if I could do anything more, but the
manageress told me that she knew him and that he often came there. She
was a very capable person, and she reassured me, and so I left the
Abstracted Man, he telling me in a tone still low, but no longer in a
whisper, that he dursen't go out until the riot was gone.
And all this shows that during an election you meet more different
kinds of men and explore more corners of England than at any other
time. Not until I had lost him did I remember that I had forgotten
to ask him on which side of our present struggle he had formed his
opinion, but perhaps it was just as well I did not. It would only have
confused him.
ON THE METHOD OF HISTORY
An apprehension of the past demands two kinds of information.
First, the mind must grasp the inner nature of historic change, and
therefore must be made acquainted with the conditions of human thought
in each successive period, as also with the general scheme of its
revolution.
Secondly, the external actions of men, the sequence in dates and hours
of such actions, and their material conditions and environment must be
strictly and accurately acquired.
Neither of these two foundations, upon which repose both the teaching
and the learning of history, is more important than the other. Each
is essential. But a neglect of the due emphasis which one or the
other demands, though both be present, warps the judgment of the
scholar and forbids him to apply this science to its end, which is the
establishment of truth.
History may be called the test of true philosophy, or it may be called
in a very modern and not very dignified metaphor the object-lesson of
political science, or it may be called the great story whose interest
is upon another plane from all other stories because its irony, its
tragedy, and its moral are real, were acted by real men, and were the
manifestation of God.
Whatever brief and epigrammatic summary we make to explain the value of
history to men, that formula still remains an imperative formula for
them all, and I repeat it: the end of history is the establishment of
truth.
A man may be ever so accurately informed as to the dates, the hours,
the weather, the gestures, the type of speech, the very words, the
soil, the colour, that between them all would seem to build up a
particular event. But if he be not seized of the mind which lay behind
all that was human in the business, then no synthesis of his detailed
knowledge is possible. He cannot give to the various actions which he
knows their due order and proportion; he knows not what to omit, nor
what to enlarge upon among so many, or rather a number potentially
infinite of, facts; and his picture will not be (as some would put it)
distorted: it will be false. He will not be able to use history for its
end, which is the establishment of Truth. All that he establishes by
his action, and all that he confirms and makes stronger, is Untruth.
And so far as truth is concerned it would be far better that a man
should be possessed of no history than that he should be possessed of
history ill-stated as to its prime factor, which is human motive.
A living man has, to aid his judgment and to guide him in the
establishment of truth, contemporary experience. Other men are his
daily companions. The consequence and the living principles of their
acts and of his own are fully within his grasp. If he is rightly
informed of all the past motive and determining mind from which the
present has sprung, that information of his will illumine and expand
and confirm his use of present experience. If he know nothing of the
past his personal observation and the testimony of his own senses
are, so far as they go, an unshakable foundation. But if he brings to
the aid of contemporary experience an appreciation of the past which
is false because it gives to the past a mind which was not its own,
then he will not only be wrong upon that past, but he will tend to
be wrong also in his conclusions upon the present. He will for ever
read into the plain facts before him origins and predetermining forces
which do not explain them and which are not connected with them in the
way he imagines. He will come to regard his own society--which, as a
man wholly uninstructed, he might fairly though insufficiently have
grasped--through a veil of illusion and of false philosophy, until at
last he will not even be able to see the things before his eyes. In a
word, it is better to have no history at all than to have history which
misconceives what were the general direction and the large sweeps of
thought in the immediate and the remoter past.
This being evidently the case, one is tempted to say that a just
estimate of the revolution and the progression of human motive in the
past is everything to history, and that an accurate scholarship in the
details of the chronicle, in dates especially, is of wholly inferior
importance. Such a statement would be quite false. Scholarship in
history (that is, an acquaintance with the largest possible number of
facts, and an accurate retention of them in the memory) is as essential
to this study as is that other background of motive which has just been
examined.
The thing is self-evident if we put an extreme case. For if a man
were wholly ignorant of the facts of history and of their sequence,
he could not possibly know what might lie behind the actions of the
past, for we only obtain communion with that which is within and that
which is foundational in human action by an observation of its external
effect. A man's history, for instance, is sound and on the right lines
if, though he have but a vague and general sentiment of the old pagan
civilisation of the Mediterranean, that sentiment corresponds to the
very large outline and is in sympathy with the main spirit of the
affair. But he cannot possess so much as a sketch of the truth if he
has not heard the names of certain of the great actors, if he is wholly
unacquainted with the conception of a City State, and if the names of
Rome, of Athens, of Antioch, of Alexander, and of Jerusalem have never
been mentioned to him.
Nor will a knowledge of facts be valuable (contrariwise, it will be
detrimental and of negative value to his judgment), if accuracy in his
knowledge be lacking. If he were invariably inaccurate, thinking that
red which was blue, inverting the order of any two events, and putting
without fail in the summer what happened in winter, or in the Germanies
what took place in Gaul, his facts would never correspond with the
human motive of them, and his errors upon externals would at once close
his avenues of access towards internal motive and suggest other and
non-existent motive in its place.
It is, of course, a pedantic and negligible error to imagine that the
knowledge of a time grows out of a mere accumulation of observation.
External things do not produce ideas, they only reveal them. And to
imagine that mere scholarship is sufficient to history is to put one's
self on a level with those who, in the sphere of politics for instance,
ignore the necessity of political theory and talk muddily of the
"working" of institutions--as though it were possible to judge whether
an institution were working ill or not when one had no ideal of what
that institution might be designed to attain. But though scholarship
is not the source of judgment in history, it is the invariable and the
necessary accompaniment of it. Facts which (to repeat) do not produce
ideas, but only reveal or suggest them, do none the less reveal and
suggest them, and form the only instrument of such suggestion and
revelation.
Scholarship, accurate and widespread, has this further function: that
it is necessary to a general apprehension of the past, which, however
just, is the firmer, the larger, and the more intense as the range
of knowledge and its fixity increase. And scholarship has one more
function, which is that it corrects, and it corrects with more and more
precision in proportion as it is more and more detailed, the tendency
of the mind to extend a general and perhaps justly apprehended idea
into the region of unreality. For the mind is creative; it will still
make and spin; and if you do not feed it with material it will spin
dreams out of emptiness. Thus a man will have a just appreciation of
the Thirteenth Century in England, he will perhaps admire or will
perhaps be repelled by its whole spirit according to his temperament
or his acquired philosophy; but in either case, though his general
impression was once just, he will, if he considers it apart from
reading, tend to add to it excrescences of judgment, which, as the
process continues, will at last destroy the true image; scholarship,
like a constant auditor, comes in regularly to check and tally his
conclusions. Does he admire the Thirteenth Century? Then he will tend
to make it more national than it was because our time is national, and
to forget its cruelties because the good enthusiasms of our own age
happen for the moment not to be accompanied by cruelty. He will tend
to lend the Thirteenth Century a science it did not possess, because
physical science is in our own time an accompaniment of greatness. But
if he reads and reads continually, these vagaries will not oppress or
warp his vision. More and more body will be added to that spirit which
he does justly, but only vaguely, know. And he will at last have with
the English Thirteenth Century something of that acquaintance which
one has with a human face and voice: these also are external things,
and these also are the product of a soul. Indeed--though metaphors are
dangerous in such a matter--a metaphor may with reservation be used
to describe the effect of the chronicle, of research, and of accurate
scholarship in the science of history. A man ill provided with such
material is like one who sees a friend at a distance; a man well
provided with it is like a man who sees a friend close at hand. Both
are certain of the identity of the person seen, both are well founded
in that certitude; but there are errors possible to the first which
are not possible to the second, and close and intimate acquaintance
lends to every part of judgment a surety which distant and general
acquaintance wholly lacks. The one can say something true and say it
briefly: there is no more to say. The other can fill in and fill in
the picture, until though perhaps never complete it is asymptotic to
completion.
To increase one's knowledge by research, to train one's self to an
accurate memory of it, does not mean that one's view of the past is
continually changing. Only a fool can think, for instance, that some
document somewhere will be discovered to show that the mass of the
people of London had for James II an ardent veneration, or that the
national defence organised by the Committee of Public Safety during the
French Revolution was due to the unpopular tyranny of a secret society.
But research in either of these cases, and a minute and increasing
acquaintance with detail, does show one a London largely apathetic in
the first case, and does show one large sections of rebellious feeling
in the armies of the Terror. It permits one to appreciate what energy
and what initiative were needed for the overthrow of the Stuarts, and
to see from how small a body of wealthy and determined men that policy
proceeded. It permits one to understand how the battles of '93 could
never have been fought upon the basis of popular enthusiasm alone;
it permits one to assert without exaggeration that the autocratic
power of the Committee of Public Safety and the secrecy of its action
were necessary conditions of the national defence during the French
Revolution.
One might conclude by saying what might seem too good to be true: that
minute and accurate information upon details (the characteristic of our
time in the science of history) must of its own nature so corroborate
the just and general judgments of the past that when the modern phase
of wilful distortion is over mere blind scholarship will restore
tradition.
ON HISTORY IN TRAVEL
I have sometimes wondered whether it might not be possible to have
guide-books written for the great routes of modern travel--I mean of
modern pleasure-travel--which should make the whole road a piece of
history; for history enlarges everything one sees, and gives a fulness
to flat experience, so that one lives more than one's own life in
contemplating it, and so that new landscapes are not only new for a
moment, but subject to centuries of varieties in one's mind.
It is true that those who write good guide-books do put plenty of
history into them, but it is sporadic history, as it were; it is not
continuous or organic, and therefore it does not live. You are told of
a particular town that such was its Roman name; that centuries later
such a mediæval contest was decided in its neighbourhood. If it is
connected in some way with the military history of this country you
will be given some detailed account of an action fought there, and that
is particularly the case in Spain, which one leaves with the vague
impression that it was created to serve as a terrain for the Peninsular
War.
All knowledge of that sort interests the traveller, but it hardly
remains, nor does it "inform" in the full sense of that word.
Now, to be "informed" is the object, and the process of it is the
pleasure, of learning. To give life to the history of places there
must be connection in it, and it so happens that with _our_ travel
to-day--especially our pleasure-travel--a connection stands ready to
the writer's hand: for we go in herds to-day along the great roads
which have made Europe. It is the railways that have done this.
Before they were built the network of cross-roads--already excellent
in the end of the Eighteenth Century and the beginning of the
Nineteenth--tempted men of leisure in every direction; towns that had
something curious to show were visited as easily, whether they lay on
the main roads or no. The fruit of that time you may see in the great
inns which still stand, though often half deserted, in places eccentric
to modern travel. It may be that this old universality of travel will
return with our new ease of going wherever there is a good surface
for wheels--it has in part returned--but still much the most of us go
along the lines laid down fast for us by the first great expenditure
upon railways, and this was invested, necessarily, along some at least
of the immemorial tracks which--from long before history--were the
framework of Western society.