the coast to Rome, you go mile for mile along the central highway
that bound together the Roman Empire, the road that Hadrian went and
Constantine descended. York, London, Dover, Boulogne, Laon, Dijon,
Lyons, Marseilles are the posts strung along it, and the same long line
is the line of advance which the Creed took when Christianity came up
northwards from the Mediterranean. It is the line the second advent of
that influence took when St. Augustine brought it back to this island
after the breakdown of the Empire. Or if you will consider that short
eight hours of tearing speed which so many thousands know, the main
line from London to Paris, see what a thick past there is gathered all
along it. The crossing of the Darent, where stood one of the string
of Canterbury palaces, and just to the left of your train the field
where Edmund Ironside met the Danes, further on Wrotham, another of the
archbishops' line of houses, and on the hills above and in the plain
below the sacred monoliths that the savages put up for worship before
letters or buildings were known, and beyond the valley Kit's Coty
House and the bare place where stood the Rood of Boxley and Aylesford,
the first bridge where the pirates first drove the British in their
conquest of this country, and much further the British camp which the
Tenth Legion stormed, standing above the Stour. Canterbury, where there
is fixed continuity with Rome and with the history before Rome, the
little Roman bricks in St. Martin's Church, the Roman roads radiating
to the ports of the Channel, and the British tracks on which they lay
or which they straightened, deep under the site of the city the group
of lake-dwellings when its defence was a lagoon, now meads--and, in the
site of the great Central Tower, the end of the Middle Ages with which
that town is crammed. Or if you reach it by the northern way, then
everywhere you are following the great military road whereby for two
thousand years travel has come from the Straits to London; Rochester,
the armed defence of the river-crossing, the capture of whose castle
twice gave an army the South of England, and all but saved Henry III
against his Barons; the second bishopric of England; the garrison which
stood central and sheltered the halt of forced marches from the sea
upon London--and every step of the way Chaucer.
If you cross by Boulogne you see above you, on the last of English
land, the hill forts they built to overlook the broad shallow harbour
of Lemanus, now dry; you cross upon the narrow sea the track of Cæsar,
who, when he first invaded, drifted here under a light breeze and
with the tide for hours, coming with the transports from Boulogne and
beaching at last upon the flats of Deal. Also in Boulogne that broad
valley was a land-locked harbour in Cæsar's day, and there he built his
ships.
If you cross by Calais you come, some three miles from French land,
over that good holding ground where the Armada lay at anchor on a
summer evening waiting to take aboard the unconquered soldiery which
was designed for the assault of England; but Howard and the flock of
little English boats came up after, just thwart of Griz-nez, which
you see tall and huge to your right: they lay there at anchor out of
range against the stormy sunset, and when night came drove in their
fire-ships against the Spanish Fleet and broke its formation, and next
day the tempest drove them up that flat coast to your left, and so on
to destruction in the open sea.
Then see how the French road is full also. Here, just beyond Étaples,
is the place where the two ambassadors passed in '93, neither knowing
the other: the one returning, driven out of London, the other
posting thither at full speed to avert war. They missed, and so war
came. A little further on to your left is a patch of wood; to your
right, beyond the flats, is a broad estuary of which you may see
the lighthouse towers. That wood is the wood of Crécy: through it
there marched the English host on their way to victory in the rising
ground beyond. The river mouth is that whence William started with
his hundreds of ships on the way to Hastings: he lay gathered there
with the wind in his teeth for days, until the equinox sent him a
south-wester and he bowled across to Pevensey and landed there: every
stretch of this road is alive with stories and things done.
The way down into Italy by Bourg is a way of armies also, though not a
way of English armies, and it is a way of great influences too. Thus,
if you would see the Gothic North and the Southern Renaissance first
meeting, like salt water and fresh at the turn of a river-tide, get out
at Bourg and drive a mile to Brou and see there the tombs of the House
of Savoy. There is no sight like it in Europe, yet how few know it out
of all who whirl down that line--often by night--on the way to the Alps
or to Italy?
There are other roads: each tempts one to a list of wonders. The road
northeastward from Paris, every step of which is the line of the last
Napoleonic struggle. The road eastward into Germany by Metz, every
step of which is the history of the Revolution, or of invasion, or of
success in the field. A little station which your eyes will hardly
catch as the express goes by is neighbour to the camp that Attila made
before he was defeated in those plains of Champagne; another little
station, the station of a hidden hamlet, is called Valmy; half-an-hour
on, beyond Les Islettes, you see quite close by the forest path that
Drouet took when he intercepted the flight of the King and so destroyed
the French Monarchy.
All these roads are known roads, but there is one which the railway has
abandoned and which is therefore half derelict; many motors rediscover
it, for it has half the story of Europe strung along it--I mean the
road from Paris by Tours and Poictiers to Perigueux, to Toulouse, over
the High Pyrenees and on to Saragossa. No one line serves it. Across
the mountains for a day and more of travel there is no line at all, but
this is the road up which Islam came a thousand years ago to end us.
The host got past Poictiers. Charles met them from Tours and they were
destroyed. You may see the place to-day, and this is the road by which
all the Frankish and Gothic invasions moved on Spain, and this is the
road that Charlemagne must have taken when he first marched across the
hills against the Valley of Ebro. I know of no road more holy with past
wars, none more wonderful where it meets the mountains, none better
made for all sorts of going--and none more deserted than it is upon the
high places between France and Spain--but of this road I will write
later to prove how much there may be in travel.
ON THE TRAVELLER
Those who travel about England for their pleasure, or, for that matter,
about any part of Western Europe, rightly associate with such travel
the pleasure of history: for history adds to a man, giving him, as
it were, a great memory of things like a human memory, but stretched
over a far longer space than that of one human life. It makes him, I
do not say wise and great, but certainly in communion with wisdom and
greatness.
It adds also to the soil he treads, for to this it adds meaning. How
good it is when you come out of Tewkesbury by the Cheltenham road, to
look upon those fields to the left and know that they are not only
pleasant meadows, but also the place in which the fate of English
mediæval monarchy was decided; or, as you stand by that ferry which is
not known enough to Englishmen (for it is one of the most beautiful
things in England) and look back and see Tewkesbury tower framed
between tall trees over the level of the Severn, to see the Abbey
buildings in your eye of the mind--a great mass of similar stone with
solid Norman walls, standing to the right of the building.
All this historical sense and the desire to marry History with Travel
is very fruitful and nourishing, but there is another interest allied
to it which is very nearly neglected, and which is yet in a way more
fascinating and more full of meaning. This interest is the interest in
such things as lie behind recorded history, and have survived into our
own times. For underneath the general life of Europe, with its splendid
epic of great Rome turned Christian, crusading, discovering, furnishing
the springs of the Renaissance and flowering at last materially into
this stupendous knowledge of to-day, the knowledge of all the Arts, the
power to construct and to do--underneath all that is the foundation on
which Europe is built, the stem from which Europe springs; and that
stem is far, far older than any recorded history, and far, far more
vital than any of the phenomena which recorded history presents.
Recorded history for this island, and for Northern France and for
the Rhine Valley, is a matter of two thousand years; for the Western
Mediterranean of three; but the things of which I speak are to be
reckoned in tens of thousands of years. Their interest does not lie
only or even chiefly in things that disappeared. It is indeed a great
pleasure to rummage in the earth and find the polished stones of
the men who came so many centuries before us, but of whose blood we
certainly are; and it is a great pleasure to find or to guess that we
find under Canterbury the piles of a lake or marsh dwelling, proving
that Canterbury has been there from all time, and that the apparently
defenceless valley city was once chosen as an impregnable site when the
water-meadows of the Stour were impassable as marsh, or with difficulty
passable as a shallow lagoon. And it is delightful to stand on the
earthwork beyond Chilham and to say to oneself (as one can say with a
fair certitude), "Here was the British camp defending the south-east;
here the tenth legion charged." All these are pleasant, but more
pleasant I think to follow the thing where it actually survives.
Consider the Track-ways, for instance. How rich England is in these!
No other part of Europe will afford the traveller so permanent and so
fascinating a problem. Elsewhere Rome hardened and straightened every
barbaric trail, but in this distant province of Britain she would only
spend just so much energy as made them a foothold for her soldiery; and
all over England you go if you choose foot by foot along the ancient
roads that were made by the men of your blood before they had heard of
brick, or of stone, or of iron, or of written laws.
I wonder that more men do not set out to follow, let us say, the
Fosse-way. There it runs right across Western England from the
south-west to the north-east, in a line direct yet sinuous, characters
which are the very essence of a savage trail. It is a modern road for
many miles, let us say; and there you are tramping along the Cotswold
on a hard-metalled modern English highway, with milestones and notices
from the county council telling you that the culverts will not bear
a steam-engine, if so be you were travelling in one. Then suddenly
it comes up against a cross-road and apparently ceases, making what
map draughtsmen call a "T"; but right in the same line you will see
a gate, and beyond it a farm lane, and so you follow. You come to a
spinney where a ride is cut through by the wood-reeve, and it is all
in the same line. The Fosse-way turns into a little path, but you are
still on it; it curls over a marshy brook-valley, keeping on firm
land, and as you go you see old stones put there Heaven knows how many
generations ago--or perhaps yesterday, for the tradition remains and
the countryfolk strengthen their wet lands as they have strengthened
them all these thousands of years; you climb up out of that depression,
you get you over a stile, and there you are again upon a lane. You
follow that lane, and once more it stops dead. This time there is a
field before you. No right of way, no trace of a path, nothing but
grass rounded into those parallel ridges which mark the decay of the
corn lands and pasture taking the place of agriculture. Now your
pleasure comes in casting about for the trail; you look back along the
line of the way; you look forward in the same line till you find some
indication, a boundary between two parishes, perhaps upon your map, or
two or three quarries set together, or some other sign; and very soon
you have picked up the line again.
So you go on mile after mile, and as you tread that line you feel in
the horizons that you see, in the very nature and feel of the soil
beneath your feet, in the skies of England above you, the ancient
purpose and soul of this kingdom. Up this same line went the Clans
marching when they were called Northward to the Host; and up this
went slow, creaking wagons with the lead of the Mendips or the tin of
Cornwall, or the gold of Wales.
And it is still there; it is still used from place to place as a
high-road, it still lives in modern England. There are some of its
peers: as for instance the Ermine Street, far more continuous, and
affording problems more rarely; others like the ridgeway of the
Berkshire Downs, which Rome hardly touched, and of which the last two
thousand years has therefore made hardly anything. You may spend a
delightful day piecing out exactly where it crossed the Thames, making
your guess at it, and wondering as you sit there by Streatley Vicarage
whether those islands did not form a natural weir below which lay the
ford.
The roads are the most obvious things. There are many more; for
instance, thatch. The same laying of the straw in the same manner,
with the same art, has continued, we may be certain, from a time long
before the beginning of history. See how in the Fen Land they thatch
with reeds, and how upon the Chalk Downs with straw from the lowlands.
I remember once being told of a record in a manor which held of the
church, and which lay upon the southern slope of the Downs, that so
much was entered "for straw from the lowlands"; then years afterwards,
when I had to thatch a Bethlehem in an orchard underneath tall elms--a
pleasant place to write in with the noise of bees in the air--the man
who came to thatch said to me: "We must have straw from the lowlands;
this upland straw is no good for thatching." Then immediately when I
heard him say this there was added to me ten thousand years. And I know
another place in England, far distant from this, where a man said to
me that if I wished to cross in a winter mist, as I had determined to
do, Cross Fell, that great summit of the Pennines, I must watch the
drift of the snow, for there was no other guide to one's direction in
such weather. And I remember another man in a boat in the North Sea,
as we came towards the Foreland, talking to me of the two tides, and
telling me how if one caught the tide all the way up to Long Nose and
then went round it, one made two tides in one day. He spoke with the
same pleasure that silly men show when they talk about an accumulation
of money. He felt wealthy and proud from the knowledge, for by this
knowledge he had two tides in one day. Now knowledge of this sort is
older than ten thousand years; and so is the knowledge of how birds
fly, and of how they call, and of how the weather changes with the
moon.
Very many things a man might add to the list that I am making. Dew-pans
are older than our language or religion; and the finding of water with
a stick; and the catching of that difficult animal, the mole; and the
building of flints into mortar, which if one does it the old way (as
you may see at Pevensey) lasts for ever, and if you do it the new way
does not last ten years; and then there is the knowledge of planting
during the crescent part of the month but not before the new moon
shows; and there is the influence of the moon on cider, and to a less
extent upon the brewing of ale; and talking of ale, the knowledge of
how ale should be drawn from the brewing just when a man can see his
face without mist upon the surface of the hot brew; and there is the
knowledge of how to bank rivers, which is called "throwing the rives"
in the South, but in the Fen Land by some other name; and how to bank
them so they do not silt, but scour themselves. There are these things
and a thousand others. All are immemorial, but I have no space for any
now.
ON MILTON
The letters of a people reflect its noblest as architecture reflects
its most intimate mind and as its religion (if it has a separate or
tribal religion) reflects its military capacity or incapacity. The word
"noblest" is vague, and nobility must here be defined to mean that
steadiness in the soul by which it is able to express a fixed character
and individuality of its own. Thus a man contradicts himself from
passion or from a variety of experience or from the very ambiguity and
limitation of words, but he himself resides in all he says, and when
this self is clearly and poisedly expressed it is then that we find him
noble.
The poet Milton, according to this conception, has best expressed the
nobility of the English mind, and in doing a work quite different from
any of his peers has marked a sort of standard from which the ideal of
English letters does not depart.
Two things are remarkable with regard to English literature, first
that it came late into the field of European culture, and secondly
that it has proved extraordinarily diversified. The first point is
immaterial to my subject; the second is material to it; for it might
be superficially imagined that such bewildering complexity and, as it
were, lawless exuberance of method and of matter would never find a
pole, nor ever be symbolised by but one aspect of it. Yet Milton has
found that pole, and Milton's work has afforded that symbol.
In any one moment of English literary history you may contrast two
wholly different masterpieces from the end of the Fourteenth to the end
of the Eighteenth Centuries. After the first third of the Nineteenth,
indeed, first-rate work falls into much more commonplace groove, and
it is perceptible that the best verse and the best prose written in
English are narrowing in their vocabulary, and, in what is far more
important, their way of looking at life. The newspapers have levelled
the writers down as with a trowel; you have not side by side the coarse
and the refined, the amazing and the steadfast, the grotesque and the
terrible; but in all those earlier centuries you had side by side
manner and thought so varied that a remote posterity will wonder how
such a wealth could have arisen upon so small an area of national soil.
_Piers Plowman_ and the _Canterbury Tales_ are two worlds, and a third
world separate from each is the world of those lovely lyrics which
are now so nearly forgotten, but which the populace, spontaneously
engendered and sang throughout the close of the Middle Ages. The
Sixteenth Century was perhaps less modulated, and flowed, especially
towards its end, in one simpler stream, but in the Seventeenth what a
growth of variety from the Jacobean translation of the Bible to Swift.
The very decade in which _Paradise Lost_ was published corresponded
with the first riot of the Restoration.
If we look closely into all this diversity we can find two common
qualities which mark out all English work in a particular manner from
the work of other nations. To qualities of this kind, which are like
colours rather than like measurable things, it is difficult to give
a title; I will hazard, however, these two words, "Adventure" and
"Mystery." There is no English work of any period, especially is there
no English work of any period later than the middle of the Sixteenth
Century, which has not got in it all those emotions which proceed from
the love of Adventure. How notable it is, for instance, that Landscape
appears and reappears in every diverse form of English verse. Even in
Shakespeare you have it now and then as vivid as a little snapshot,
and it runs unceasingly through every current of the stream; it glows
in Gray's _Elegy_, and it is the binding element of _In Memoriam_. It
saves the earlier work of Wordsworth, it permeates the large effect of
Byron, and those two poems, which to-day no one reads, _Thalaba_ and
_The Curse of Kehama_, are alive with it. It is the very inspiration of
Keats and of Coleridge. Now this hunger for Landscape and this vivid
sense of it are but aspects of Adventure; for the men who thus feel
and speak are the men who, desiring to travel to unknown places, are
in a mood for sudden revelations of sea and land. So a living poet has
written--
When all the holy primal part of me
Arises up within me to salute
The glorious vision of the earth and sea
That are the kindred of the destitute....
The note of those four lines is the note of Landscape in English
letters, and that note is the best proof and effect of Adventure. If
any man is too poor to travel (though I cannot imagine any man so
poor), or if he is constrained from travel by the unhappy necessities
of a slavish life, he can always escape through the door of English
letters. Let such a one read the third and fourth books of _Paradise
Lost_ before he falls asleep and he will find next morning that he has
gone on a great journey. Milton by his perpetual and ecstatic delight
in these visions of the world was the normal and the central example of
an English poet.
As when far off at sea a fleet descri'd
Hangs in the clouds....
or, again,
.... Hesperus, that led
The Starry Host, rode brightest 'til the Moon,
Rising in cloudy majesty, at length
Apparent Queen, unveiled....
He everywhere, and in a profusion that is, as it were, rebellious
against his strict discipline of words, sees and expresses the picture
of this world.
If Landscape be the best test of this quality of adventure in English
poets and the Milton as their standard, so the mystic character of
English verse appears in them and in him. No period could be so formal
as to stifle or even to hide this demand of English writers for Mystery
and for emotions communicable only by an art allied to music. The
passion is so strong that many ill-acquainted with foreign literature
will deny such literature any poetic quality because they do not find
in it the unmistakable thrill which the English reader demands of a
poet as he demands it of a musician. As Landscape might be taken for
the best test of Adventure, so of this appetite for the Mysterious the
best measurable test is rhythm. Highly accentuated rhythm and emphasis
are the marks and the concomitants of that spirit. As powerful a line
as any in the language for suddenly evoking intense feeling by no
perceptible artifice is that line in _Lycidas_--
Smooth-sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds.
I confess I can never read that line but I remember a certain river
of twenty years ago, nor does revisiting that stream and seeing it
again with my eyes so powerfully recall what once it was to those who
loved it as does this deathless line. It seems as though the magical
power of the poet escaped the effect of time in a way that the senses
cannot, and a man curious in such matters might find the existence
of such gifts to be a proof of human immortality. The pace at which
Milton rides his verse, the strong constraint within which he binds
it, deeply accentuate this power of rhythm and the mystical effect it
bears. Now you would say a trumpet, now a chorus of human voices, now a
flute, now a single distant song. From the fortieth to the fifty-fifth
line of the third book _Paradise Lost_ has all the power and nature
of a solemn chant; the large complaint in it is the complaint of an
organ, and one may say indeed in this connection that only one thing
is lacking in all the tones Milton commanded; he disdained intensity
of grief as most artists will disdain intensity of terror. But whereas
intensity of terror is no fit subject for man's pen, and has appealed
only to the dirtier of our little modern fellows, intense grief has
been from the very beginning thought a just subject for verse.
[Greek: Têle d' apo kratos chee desmata sigaloenta
Ampyka kekryphalon t', êde plektên anadesmên
Krêdemnon th', ho rha hoi dôke chryseê Aphroditê
Hêmati tôi, hote min korythaiolos êgageth' Hektôr
Ek domou Êetiônos, epei pore myria hedna.]
Milton will have none of it. It is the absence of that note which has
made so many hesitate before the glorious achievement of _Lycidas_, and
in this passage which I quote, where Milton comes nearest to the cry of
sorrow, it is still no more than what I have called it, a solemn chant.
.... Thus with the year
Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn,
Or sign of vernal bloom, or Summer's Rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the chearful waies of men
Cut off, and, for the Book of knowledge fair,
Presented with a Universal blanc
Of Nature's works, to mee expung'd and ras'd,
And wisdome at one entrance quite shut out.
So much the rather thou, Celestial light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.
There is one other character in Milton wherein he stands not so much
for English Letters as for a feature in English nature as a whole,
which is a sort of standing apart of the individual. Where this may be
good and where evil it is not for a short appreciation to discuss. It
is profoundly national and nowhere will you see it more powerfully than
in the verse of this man. Of his life we all know it to be true, but I
say it appears even in his verse. There is a sort of _noli me tangere_
in it all as though he desired but little friendship and was not broken
by one broken love, and contemplated God and the fate of his own soul
in a lonely manner; of all the things he drew the thing he could never
draw was a collectivity.
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN