It is perhaps not possible to put into human language that emotion
which rises when a man stands upon some plot of European soil and can
say with certitude to himself: “Such and such great, or wonderful, or
beautiful things happened here.”
Touch that emotion ever so lightly and it tumbles into the commonplace,
and the deadest of commonplace. Neglect it ever so little and the
Present (which is never really there, for even as you walk across
Trafalgar Square it is yesterday and tomorrow that are in your mind),
the Present, I say, or rather the immediate flow of things, occupies
you altogether. But there is a mood, and it is a mood common in men who
have read and who have travelled, in which one is overwhelmed by the
sanctity of a place on which men have done this or that a long, long
time ago.
Here it is that the gentle supports which have been framed for human
life by that power which launched it come in and help a man. Time does
not remain, but space does, and though we cannot seize the Past
physically we can stand physically upon the site, and we can have (if I
may so express myself) a physical communion with the Past by occupying
that very spot which the past greatness of man or of event has
occupied.
It was but the other day that, with an American friend at my side, I
stood looking at the little brass plate which says that here Charles
Stuart faced (he not only faced, but he refused) the authority of his
judges. I know not by what delicate mechanism of the soul that record
may seem at one moment a sort of tourist thing, to be neglected or
despised, and at another moment a portent. But I will confess that all
of a sudden, pointing out this very well-known record upon the brass
let into the stone in Westminster Hall, I suddenly felt the presence of
the thing. Here all that business was done: they were alive; they were
in the Present as we are. Here sat that tender-faced, courageous man,
with his pointed beard and his luminous eyes; here he was a living man
holding his walking-stick with the great jewel in the handle of it;
here was spoken in the very tones of his voice (and how a human voice
perishes!—how we forget the accents of the most loved and the most
familiar voices within a few days of their disappearance!); here the
small gestures, and all the things that make up a personality, marked
out Charles Stuart. When the soul is seized with such sudden and
positive conviction of the substantial past it is overwhelmed; and
Europe is full of such ghosts.
As you take the road to Paradise, about halfway there you come to an
inn, which even as inns go is admirable. You go into the garden of it,
and see the great trees and the wall of Box Hill shrouding you all
around. It is beautiful enough (in all conscience) to arrest one
without the need of history or any admixture of the pride of race; but
as you sit there on a seat in that garden you are sitting where Nelson
sat when he said goodbye to his Emma, and if you will move a yard or
two you will be sitting where Keats sat biting his pen and thinking out
some new line of his poem.
What has happened? These two men with their keen, feminine faces, these
two great heroes of a great time in the great story of a great people
of this world, are not there. They are nowhere. But the site remains.
Philosophers can put in formulæ the crowd of suggestions that rush
into the mind when one’s soul contemplates the perpetual march and
passage of mortality. But they can do no more than give us formularies:
they cannot give us replies. What are we? What is all this business?
Why does the mere space remain and all the rest dissolve?
There is a lonely place in the woods of Chilham, in the County of Kent,
above the River Stour, where a man comes upon an irregular earthwork
still plainly marked upon the brow of the bluff. Nobody comes near this
place. A vague country lane, or rather track; goes past the wet soil of
it, plunges into the valley beyond, and after serving a windmill joins
the high road to Canterbury. Well, that vague track is the ancient
British road, as old as anything in this Island, that took men from
Winchester to the Straits of Dover. That earthwork is the earthwork (I
could prove it, but this is not the place) where the British stood
against the charge of the Tenth Legion, and first heard, sounding on
their bronze, the arms of Caesar. Here the river was forded; here the
little men of the South went up in formation; here the Barbarian broke
and took his way, as the opposing General has recorded, through devious
woodland paths, scattering in the pursuit; here began the great history
of England.
Is it not an enormous business merely to stand in such a place? I think
so.
I know a field to the left of the Chalons Road, some few miles before
you get to Ste. Menehould. There used to be an inn by the roadside
called “The Sign of the Moon.” It has disappeared. There used to be a
ramshackle windmill beyond the field, a mile or so from the road, on an
upland swell of land, but that also has gone, and had been gone for
some time before I knew the field of which I write. It is a bare fold
of land with one or two little scrubby spinneys alongside the plough.
And for the rest, just the brown earth and the sky. There are days on
which you will see a man at work somewhere within that mile, others on
which it is completely deserted. Here it is that the French Revolution
was preserved. Here was the Prussian charge. On the deserted, ugly lump
of empty earth beyond you were the three batteries that checked the
invaders. It was all alive and crowded for one intense moment with the
fate of Christendom. Here, on the place in which you are standing and
gazing, young Goethe stood and gazed. That meaningless stretch of
coarse grass supported Brunswick and the King of Prussia, and the
brothers of the King of France, as they stood windswept in the rain,
watching the failure of the charge. It is the field of Valmy. Turn on
that height and look back westward and you see the plains rolling out
infinitely; they are the plains upon which Attila was crushed; but
there is no one there.
All men have remarked that night and silence are august, and I think
that if this quality in night and silence be closely examined it will
be found to consist, in part at least, in this: that either of them
symbolizes Absence. By a paradox which I will not attempt to explain,
but which all have felt, it is in silence and in darkness that the Past
most vividly returns, and that this absence of what once was possesses,
nay, obtrudes itself upon the mind: it becomes almost a sensible thing.
There is much to be said for those who pretend, imagine, or perhaps
have experienced under such conditions the return of the dead. The mood
of darkness and of silence is a mood crammed with something that does
not remain, as space remains, that is limited by time, and is a
creature of time, and yet something that has an immortal right to
remain.
Now, I suppose that in that sentence where I say things mortal have
immortal rights to permanence, the core of the whole business is
touched upon. And I suppose that the great men who could really think
and did not merely fire off fireworks to dazzle their contemporaries—I
suppose that Descartes, for instance, if he were here sitting at my
table—could help me to solve that contradiction; but I sit and think
and cannot solve it.
“What,” says the man upon his own land, inherited perhaps and certainly
intended for his posterity—“what! Can you separate me from this? Are
not this and I bound up inextricably?” The answer is “No; you are not
so far as any observer of this world can discover. Space is in no way
possessed by man, and he who may render a site immortal in one of our
various ways, the captain who there conquered, the poet who there
established his sequence of words, cannot himself put forward a claim
to permanence within it at all.”
There was a woman of charming vivacity, whose eyes were ever ready for
laughter, and whose tone of address of itself provoked the noblest of
replies. Many loved her; all admired. She passed (I will suppose) by
this street or by that; she sat at table in such and such a house;
Gainsborough painted her; and all that time ago there were men who had
the luck to meet her and to answer her laughter with their own. And the
house where she moved is there and the street in which she walked, and
the very furniture she used and touched with her hands you may touch
with your hands. You shall come into the rooms that she inhabited, and
there you shall see her portrait, all light and movement and grace and
beatitude.
She is gone altogether, the voice will never return, the gestures will
never be seen again. She was under a law; she changed, she suffered,
she grew old, she died; and there was her place left empty. The not
living things remain; but what counted, what gave rise to them, what
made them all that they are, has pitifully disappeared, and the
greater, the infinitely greater, thing was subject to a doom
perpetually of change and at last of vanishing. The dead surroundings
are not subject to such a doom. Why?
All those boys who held the line of the low ridge or rather swell of
land from Hougoumont through the Belle Alliance have utterly gone. More
than dust goes, more than wind goes; they will never be seen again.
Their voices will never be heard—they are not. But what is the mere
soil of the field without them? What meaning has it save for their
presence?