unhappy at least unrestful time, to come across a thing which is
cleanly itself! What a pleasure it is amid our entwining controversies
to find straightness, and among our confused noises a chord. Hans
Christian Andersen is a good type of that simplicity; and his own
generation recognised him at once; now, when those contemporaries
who knew him best are for the most part dead, their recognition
is justified. Of men for whom so much and more is said by their
contemporaries, how many can stand the test which his good work now
stands, and stands with a sort of sober triumph? Contemporary praise
has a way of gathering dross. We all know why. There is the fear of
this, the respect for that; there is the genuine unconscious attachment
to a hundred unworthy and ephemeral things; there is the chance
philosophy of the moment over-weighing the praise-giver. In a word,
perhaps not half-a-dozen of the great men who wrote in the generation
before our own would properly stand this test of a neat and unfringed
tradition. It is not to be pretended that according to that test so
must men be judged. Many of the very greatest, Hugo for instance, and
in his line, Huxley (a master of English); or, again, to go further
back, the great Byron, would not pass the test.
Things have been said about most men, great or little, in our fevered
time, so exaggerated, so local and so lacking balance, whether of
experience or of the fear of posterity, that contemporary opinion
should not be allowed by its misfortunes to weigh them down. But
a man has a quality of his own when he is so made that even his
contemporaries do him justice, and that was the case with Hans
Christian Andersen. I will bargain that if our letters survive five
hundred years, this excellent writer will quietly survive. Even the
French may incorporate him. And next it is the business of one who
praises so much to ask in what the excellence of this writer consists.
It is threefold: in the first place, he always said what he thought; in
the second place, he was full of all sorts of ways of saying it; and,
in the third place, he said only what he had to say.
To say what one thinks, that is, to tell the truth, is so exceedingly
rare that one may almost call it a grace in a man. Just those same
manifold strings which pull contemporary criticism hither and thither,
and which have made me suggest above that contemporary criticism
commonly belittles a man in the long run, just those same strings pull
at every writer to make him conform to what he knows to be false in
his time. But some men--with limitations, it is true, and only by
choosing a particular framework--manage to tell the truth all their
lives; those men, if they have other literary qualities, are secure of
the future.
And this leads me to the second point, which is that Andersen could
not only tell the truth but tell it in twenty different ways, and of a
hundred different things. Now this character has been much exaggerated
among literary men in importance, because literary men, perceiving
it to be the differentiation which marks out the great writer from
the little, think it to be the main criterion of letters. It is not
the main criterion; but it is a permanent necessity in great writing.
There is no great writing without this multiplicity, which is sometimes
called imagination, sometimes experience, and sometimes judgment, but
which is in its essence a proper survey of the innumerable world. This
quality it is which makes the great writers create what are called
"characters"; and whether we recognise those "characters" as portraits
drawn from the real world (they are such in Balzac), or as figments
(they are such in Dickens), or as heroines and heroes (they are such
in Shakespeare and in Homer, if you will excuse me), yet that they
exist and live in the pages of the writer means that he had in him that
quality of contemplation which corresponds in our limited human nature
to the creative power.
Lastly, I say that Andersen said what he had to say and no more. This
quality in writers is not restraint--a futile word dear to those who
cannot write--it is rather a sort of chastity in the pen. The writer
of this kind is one who unconsciously does not add; if any one were to
ask him why he should not add an ornament or anything supposititious,
he would be bewildered and perhaps might answer: "Why should I?"
The instinct behind it is that which produces all terseness, all
exactitude, and all economy in style.
Andersen, then, had all those three things which make a great writer,
and a very great writer he is.
Note that he chose his framework, or, at any rate, that he was
persuaded to it. He could not have been so complete had he not
addressed himself to children, and it is his glory that he is read in
childhood. There is no child but can read Hans Christian Andersen, and
I at least have come across no man who, having read him in childhood,
does not continue to read him throughout life. He wrote nothing that
was not for the enlivening or the sustenance or the guiding of the
human soul; he wrote nothing that suggested questions only. If one may
speak of him in terms a trifle antiquated (or rather for the moment
old-fashioned), he was instinct with charity, and therefore he is still
full of life.
Having said so much of Andersen in general, something should be said
of him in particular. He was Northern; you always feel as you read
him that if his scene is laid in the open air, the air is fresh and
often frosty; that if he is talking indoors the room is cosy and
often old. Certain passions which the North lacks are lacking in him,
both upon their good and upon their evil side. He is never soldierly,
and he is never revengeful; he is never acute with the desire for
life, but, again, he is never envious. Those who read him and who
are also Northern may well be in love with Denmark. It is a triumph
of our civilisation that this little land, quite outside the limits
of the Roman Empire, not riven by any of the Empires' great vital
resurrections, undisturbed by the vision of the Twelfth and of the
Thirteenth Centuries, spared from the march of Napoleon's armies,
should be so completely European. What could be more European to-day
than that well-organised, contented, peasant State? It is a good irony
to put against the blundering prophecies of barbaric people that beyond
the Germanies this secure and happy State exists. One might put it
in a phrase a little too epigrammatic and say that as one reads Hans
Christian Andersen one remembers Elsinore, and one recalls the good
architecture of Copenhagen. If ever any misfortune again shall threaten
that State, and if barbarism attempts to play the fool with it,
something that really is the conscience of Europe and not the empty and
sham organisation to which that phrase is too often prostituted will
arise and protect the Danes.
THE CHRISTMAS OF 1808
No British Army in force has capitulated in Europe for many
generations. It is the peculiar historical position of this country.
That historical fact lends to the common history of the schools and
universities an attitude towards military history in general which
is commonly distorted, but it lends to the policy of the country as
a whole a confident tradition, the strength and value of which it is
impossible to exaggerate.
The nearest touch to such a disaster, if we except the sieges, was
passed during the days in which these words are written and read;
the close thing came about in the days just before and just after
Christmas, one hundred and two years ago. I will attempt to describe as
simply as I can the nature of that adventure.
It must first of all be premised that, in the words of Napier, position
determines the fate of armies. No truth is more apparent to the
soldier, none more forgotten by the civilian--and more especially by
the civilian touched with the unmilitary vice of Jingoism. Position
determines the fate of armies, and, armaments being supposedly equal,
he is a great or a fortunate general who, in the critical moment,
has so arranged matters that disposition is upon his side, or who by
some stroke of luck is in that advantage. There are exceptions to
this truth. Certain decisive battles (though very few) have utterly
determined campaigns; and among these battles some, again, have been
won at a drive, and by a sort of impetus, the factor of position being
so simple as to be negligible, or so equally balanced as to advantage
neither side and be eliminated. But, as a rule, it is true even of
decisive actions, that position is the determining factor. It is
necessarily true of the strategy of a campaign, and it is with this
consideration that I return to the particular crisis of the British
Army at the close of December 1808.
Sir John Moore, as every one knows, had raided right into the North of
Spain, with the object of withdrawing the pressure of the French upon
the South of that country. It was in the South that French ambition
had found its first check, and that Napoleon's plan had been warped
by the unexpected and, as it were, impossible capitulation of Baylen.
Close upon twenty thousand of the French forces had there laid down
their arms. The Emperor came in person to restore the fortunes of his
house; it was in the South that resistance could best be expected; by
the occupation of the South that he might put himself at ease over the
whole territory, and from the South that the English operations were
destined to draw him.
On the 21st of December, a Wednesday, Lord Paget, with the Tenth and
Fifteenth Hussars, surprised an advanced body of French Cavalry at
Sahagun. It was the extreme limit of Moore's great raid; the town was
occupied, and all the Thursday, all the Friday, Moore halted there
with his force of some twenty-three thousand and sixty guns. He was
nearly two hundred miles from the port on the sea-coast, whereto he
must retire if he would escape. In front of him was Soult, against whom
it was his business, if he were undisturbed, to march from Sahagun
immediately; but upon his right, nearly as far off as the sea, though
not quite so far, a matter of a hundred and fifty to a hundred and
seventy miles, Napoleon, at Madrid, commanded the best and the largest
of the armies in Spain. Sixty thousand men, with a hundred and fifty
guns, lay at the gates of Madrid, and during those same hours in which
the British Army had marched into Sahagun, Napoleon's great force began
to move northward over the Guadarrama.
I will not here describe that famous march: I have done so elsewhere at
greater length: but the reader, to appreciate the conditions of this
great duel, must imagine a country denuded and largely mountainous,
deep in snow, and subject throughout those days to intolerable weather;
and the race upon the issue of which depended so many and such final
things was run at a time and in a place when one would have thought
that no man could be abroad. But the protagonists of the Revolutionary
wars were not men like ourselves.
Christmas Day fell upon the Sunday. Moore had got ahead of his
supplies; they had reached him on the Friday, and on the Saturday,
Christmas Eve, he had intended to go forward and attack the opponent
before him. But on that same Friday when, in the night, his Infantry
were already beginning to march eastward, he heard of Napoleon's
amazing feat; he knew that he had succeeded in drawing the great
commander northward, but he knew also, since that commander could work
miracles, that the distance separating them would be crossed with a
swiftness not to be measured by the old rules of war, and that the vast
force three times his own would, if he hesitated, be found holding
the snow-blocked roads between his position and the sea. The order to
advance was cancelled, the order to retreat was given. By Christmas Eve
Baird and Hope were on the line of the Esla River; on Christmas Day,
Sunday, the troops were passing that obstacle. On Monday, the 26th, the
baggage and the last of the army, under Moore's own eye, were crossing
by the bridge of Castro Gonzalo before Benevente, and the trick was
done. There was a thick fog, the passage was far slower than the
strained intelligence of the imperilled commander had designed. On that
same day, the 26th, Napoleon was at Tordesillas, one long day's march
away from the Esla River. He had covered in that dash of three days and
a half a hundred and twenty miles, but he was too late. He was too late
by half a day.
In the dark and storm-driven night of that Monday the extreme van of
Napoleon's horse rode up to the bridge of Castro Gonzalo. They were
unsupported, of course, and rode far before the army to discover; but,
though it was not contact in any serious sense, there is something very
worthily dramatic in the appearance of those tall horsemen suddenly in
the night through the blinding snow, come up just too late to do more
than watch the escape of Moore's column.
By the next day the purpose of the British commander was achieved:
Napoleon knew he could no longer intercept: the bridge was destroyed.
The opportunity of recording the envelopment and destruction of a
British force was lost to Napoleon; he abandoned to Soult the further
long pursuit, which is called in history the retreat upon Corunna.
ON COMMUNICATIONS
There is nothing more curious in the material change which is passing
so rapidly over the modern world than what I may call the Romance of
Communication.
With the Romance of Discovery every one is thoroughly acquainted. The
modern world is saturated with that form of romance; it has permeated
all our literature and is still the theme of most of our books of
travel. But like all things which have attained a literary position,
the Romance of Discovery already belongs to the past. Not that nothing
remains to be discovered: on the contrary, the modern world has hardly
yet begun to appreciate how it may penetrate from detail to detail and
find perpetually something new in that which it thinks it knows, but
the great broad unknown spaces, the horizons quite new to Europeans
which break upon them for the first time, are now no longer left to the
explorer. With the romance of communication, luckily for us, there is
another, a newer and, in a certain sense, a much wider field. Many who
have travelled largely have felt this, but it has not yet, I think,
been expressed.
What I mean by the Romance of Communication is this: that the
establishment of regular lines for ocean traffic, the building of
railways and, above all, of good roads, have made it possible for
a multitude of men to see those contrasts which travel can afford,
and this development of modern travel has just begun to afford our
generation, and will afford with much greater generosity the generation
to come, an opportunity for feeling physically the complexity and
variety and wonder of the world. This is a good thing.
Not so long ago it was a difficult matter for a man to go from some
Northern part of Europe, such as England, to so isolated a community
as that which inhabits the Island of Majorca. Now it is easy for a man
and costs him but a few pounds to go from England to Barcelona, and
from Barcelona he can sail with a rapid and regular service to the port
of Palma. When he reaches that port he cannot but feel the Romance,
finding this little isolated State wealthy and contented in the midst
of the sea. Corsica, of which men know so little, is similarly at
hand to-day, and so are the Valleys of the Pyrenees, especially of
the Spanish valleys upon which as yet there is hardly any Northern
literature or experience. In a year or two we shall have the railway
through the Cerdagne, and another line will take one up the Valley of
the Ariège into the middle part of Northern Spain.
But of all these benefits to the mind which the modern charge is
procuring, I know of none more remarkable than the entry into the
Desert.
That portion of Northern Africa which the French have reclaimed for
Europe, and which was throughout the existence of the Roman Empire
an integral part of European civilisation, consists of the great
tableland buttressed to the north and the south by mountain ranges,
and crossed in its middle part by parallel outcrops of high rock. This
plateau stretches for somewhat more than a thousand miles all along the
southern shore of the Western Mediterranean. If the reader will take
a map he will see jutting out from the general contour of Africa, an
oblong as it were, the eastern end of which is Tunis, the western end
Morocco. All that oblong is the tableland of which I speak. The coast
is warm, fertile, densely cultivated and populous; full of ports and
cities and the coming and going of ships. The highlands behind and to
the south of the coast line are more arid, very cold in winter, baking
in summer, and always dry and rugged to our Northern eyes. But they
are habitable, the population is spreading upon them, and they contain
the past relics of the old Roman civilisation which prove what man
can do with them when their water supply is stored and their soil is
cultivated.
Now this habitable land suddenly ceases, and falls into the Desert of
Sahara. The demarkation is abrupt and is everywhere noticeable to the
eye. It is indeed more noticeable in the eastern than in the western
part. The limit between what Miss Bell has called, in a fine book of
hers, "the Desert and the Sown," is more than a day's march in width
upon the Moroccan frontier; indeed it is several days' march, and one
is not over-sure when one has left the habitable soil and when one
has reached the inhospitable sand at the eastern end. The limits are
not only marked sharply by a differentiation in the climate and the
vegetation, but also by an abrupt escarpment. The Atlas (as the plateau
of Northern Africa is generally called) falls in huge, precipitous red
cliffs right down upon the Sahara. It so happens that these cliffs,
just at the point where they are most abrupt and most rugged, and most
romantic, are cleft by a profound gorge through which the Wady Biskra
runs very clear and cold, filled with the melting of the snow upon
the high mountain of Aures to the north of it. This gap in the cliffs
the Romans knew well. They had a military station here to guard them
against the ravages of the nomad tribes who afterwards, in the form
of the Arabian Invasion, overran their African province and turned it
from an European and a Christian to an Asiatic and Mohammedan thing.
The Romans called that gorge "The Kick of Hercules," as though the god
had here by a stroke of his foot broken away from the cultivated north
toward the Desert. Through this gap ran their military road, and here,
as a formation of the gorge demanded, they carried that road over the
river, the Wady Biskra, upon the bridge the stones of which still
remain, though renovated and supported by modern work, to recall the
greatness of the empire.
The Arabs, in their turn, have called this astonishing breach "Foum es
Sahara"--the mouth of the Sahara; and, as is always the case where they
found a Roman bridge, they have added the name El Kantara, the bridge.
For it is remarkable that the Arabs were unable to continue Roman work,
especially in masonry, save where they had a large Roman population to
help them after their conquest, and the bridges which the Romans had
built were regarded by them with a sort of superstitious reverence.
Now this Mouth of the Sahara, this gap in the glaring wall of the
Desert, has, by a coincidence which has its obvious geographical cause,
and which is to be discovered in many another pass throughout Europe
and Northern Africa, served for modern methods of communication the
purpose which it served for the ancients. It is the nearest approach
which the Desert makes to the sea-coast; it is the approach involving
the least engineering effort, the most obvious and the most natural
entry from the northern cultivated land on to the waterless sandy
waste. Therefore, modern civilisation has used it, and you get here
more than anywhere else that romance of sudden contrast with which, as
I have said, modern methods of travel have gifted the modern world. The
French first built down this track a military road, as hard, excellent
and well graded as any that you will find in Europe. It not only goes
through the gorge, but right on into the sand of the desert, bounded
upon either side by masonry, and it has reached, or very soon will
reach, Biskra without a break.
Some time after this road had been planned, a railway was constructed
along the same track, with certain divergences where the gradient of
the highway was too steep for the rails and where therefore long curves
were necessary. Whether a man goes by the road or the rail, this is
what he sees--and he had best see it in early spring, or what is with
us in England late winter. As the road and the rail wind downwards
from the little plateaux, by great steps as it were from one level to
another, the traveller has about him such scenery as has accompanied
him for the last hundred miles: fields of cotton, the trees proper to
a temperate climate, and rugged, rocky ridges cropping up from the
cultivated soil. There is nothing around him to remind him of what is
called "The East," except the camel preceding its master up or down
the great highway and the distinctive dress of the natives; for the
climate, the crops, and the temperature, the quality of the sunlight,
he might be on one of the plains of Western America, which indeed this
part of Africa most nearly resembles.
He comes to a clean little inn entirely French in architecture,
surrounded by a cool and quiet garden, and with the river running
behind it. He walks on a few hundred yards through the gorge, and quite
suddenly at the turning of a corner the Desert and all its horizon
breaks upon his eyes. He sees a waste of hot, red, unusable sand, a
brilliant oasis of palm trees, and even the sun, small and glaring
above that plain, seems something different from the familiar light
which he had received but an hour before.
It is the most complete contrast, the most sudden and memorable
revelation which modern travel affords. And if I had to advise any
one who with short leisure desired some experience of modern travel,
at least in the way of landscape, I would advise him to visit this
astounding place. It has already found its way into many English books,
but the great mass of people who could enjoy it do not yet know how
exceedingly easy is its access. For travellers even to so near a place
like to put on an air of mystery. There is no one with a fortnight
to spare and £20 to spend who cannot walk or bicycle or motor to
this place at the right time of the year (for in summer the heat is
insupportable and in winter the snow on the high northern plains makes
travel difficult). Any one who will take that journey would have a
memory to last him all his life.
There are those who say that the popularisation of wonderful things is
the spoiling of them. I have never been able to agree. Places are not
spoiled by the multitude of those who reach them, but by the character
of those who reach them, and no one will journey to this meeting place
of the East and the West, I think, save with a desire to wonder and
to observe, which of itself breeds reverence. Such men may come in
any numbers and the place will be the better for them. At any rate, I
repeat, it ought to be known to any one who has the sum or the time
to spare, that a revelation of such a kind is quite close at hand,
for as yet hundreds of Englishmen with far more than that leisure and
infinitely more than that wealth are ignorant of the place and its
opportunities; and your quickest way is by Marseilles and Bona, and on
your way I beseech you to stop and see Timgad, which is a dead Roman
city lying silent and empty under the sun upon the Edge of the Desert.
ASTARTE
If you stand outside the old fortifications of the town of Toul and
look eastward toward the German peoples, you see a long even line of
hills, very high but not quite mountainous; they end in a sharp dip,
and rise again, and terminate in an isolated summit which, like so many
of the striking conical peaks of Europe, is dedicated to St. Michael.
These heights, like all the crests which surround the basin of that
entrenched camp, are fortified, both with complete works and with
connecting trenches and batteries; save in the gap between the isolated
hill and the ridge I have mentioned the guns are everywhere. In this
gap, in the hollow of it and upon the hillside, is a little village
which, like all the villages on the actual line of the encircling
forts, is wholly dominated by the soldiery; these furnish it with all
its trade, these give it its few adventures and its manner of life. The
peasants are woken summer and winter by the sound of bugles; the heavy
firing of practice is a usual thing to them; a profitable commerce with
a garrison twice as numerous as the civil population enriches those who
work upon their land.