Reality

A couple of generations ago there was a sort of man going mournfully

about who complained of the spread of education. He had an ill-ease in

his mind. He feared that book learning would bring us no good, and he

was called a fool for his pains. Not undeservedly—for his thoughts were

muddled, and if his heart was good it was far better than his head. He

argued badly or he merely affirmed, but he had strong allies (Ruskin

was one of them), and, like every man who is sincere, there was

something in what he said; like every type which is numerous, there was

a human feeling behind him: and he was very numerous.

Now that he is pretty well extinct we are beginning to understand what

he meant and what there was to be said for him. The greatest of the

French Revolutionists was right—“After bread, the most crying need of

the populace is knowledge.” But what knowledge?

The truth is that secondary impressions, impressions gathered from

books and from maps, are valuable as adjuncts to primary impressions

(that is, impressions gathered through the channel of our senses), or,

what is always almost as good and sometimes better, the interpreting

voice of the living man. For you must allow me the paradox that in some

mysterious way the voice and gesture of a living witness always convey

something of the real impression he has had, and sometimes convey more

than we should have received ourselves from our own sight and hearing

of the thing related.

Well, I say, these secondary impressions are valuable as adjuncts to

primary impressions. But when they stand absolute and have hardly any

reference to primary impressions, then they may deceive. When they

stand not only absolute but clothed with authority, and when they

pretend to convince us even against our own experience, they are

positively undoing the work which education was meant to do. When we

receive them merely as an enlargement of what we know and make of the

unseen things of which we read, things in the image of the seen, then

they quite distort our appreciation of the world.

Consider so simple a thing as a river. A child learns its map and

knows, or thinks it knows, that such and such rivers characterize such

and such nations and their territories. Paris stands upon the River

Seine, Rome upon the River Tiber, New Orleans on the Mississippi,

Toledo upon the River Tagus, and so forth. That child will know one

river, the river near his home. And he will think of all those other

rivers in its image. He will think of the Tagus and the Tiber and the

Seine and the Mississippi—and they will all be the river near his home.

Then let him travel, and what will he come across? The Seine, if he is

from these islands, may not disappoint him or astonish him with a sense

of novelty and of ignorance. It will indeed look grander and more

majestic, seen from the enormous forest heights above its lower course,

than what, perhaps, he had thought possible in a river, but still it

will be a river of water out of which a man can drink, with clear-cut

banks and with bridges over it, and with boats that ply up and down.

But let him see the Tagus at Toledo, and what he finds is brown rolling

mud, pouring solid after the rains, or sluggish and hardly a river

after long drought. Let him go down the Tiber, down the Valley of the

Tiber, on foot, and he will retain until the last miles an impression

of nothing but a turbid mountain torrent, mixed with the friable soil

in its bed. Let him approach the Mississippi in the most part of its

long course and the novelty will be more striking still. It will not

seem to him a river at all (if he be from Northern Europe); it will

seem a chance flood. He will come to it through marshes and through

swamps, crossing a deserted backwater, finding firm land beyond, then

coming to further shallow patches of wet, out of which the tree-stumps

stand, and beyond which again mud-heaps and banks and groups of reeds

leave undetermined, for one hundred yards after another, the limits of

the vast stream. At last, if he has a boat with him, he may make some

place where he has a clear view right across to low trees, tiny from

their distance, similarly half swamped upon a further shore, and behind

them a low escarpment of bare earth. That is the Mississippi nine times

out of ten, and to an Englishman who had expected to find from his

early reading or his maps a larger Thames it seems for all the world

like a stretch of East Anglian flood, save that it is so much more

desolate.

The maps are coloured to express the claims of Governments. What do

they tell you of the social truth? Go on foot or bicycling through the

more populated upland belt of Algiers and discover the curious mixture

of security and war which no map can tell you of and which none of the

geographies make you understand. The excellent roads, trodden by men

that cannot make a road; the walls as ready loopholed for fighting; the

Christian church and the mosque in one town; the necessity for and the

hatred of the European; the indescribable difference of the sun, which

here, even in winter, has something malignant about it, and strikes as

well as warms; the mountains odd, unlike our mountains; the forests,

which stand as it were by hardihood, and seem at war against the

influence of dryness and the desert winds, with their trees far apart,

and between them no grass, but bare earth alone.

So it is with the reality of arms and with the reality of the sea. Too

much reading of battles has ever unfitted men for war; too much talk of

the sea is a poison in these great town populations of ours which know

nothing of the sea. Who that knows anything of the sea will claim

certitude in connexion with it? And yet there is a school which has by

this time turned its mechanical system almost into a commonplace upon

our lips, and talks of that most perilous thing, the fortunes of a

fleet, as though it were a merely numerical and calculable thing! The

greatest of Armadas may set out and not return.

There is one experience of travel and of the physical realities of the

world which has been so widely repeated, and which men have so

constantly verified, that I could mention it as a last example of my

thesis without fear of misunderstanding. I mean the quality of a great

mountain.

To one that has never seen a mountain it may seem a full and a fine

piece of knowledge to be acquainted with its height in feet exactly,

its situation; nay, many would think themselves learned if they know no

more than its conventional name. But the thing itself! The curious

sense of its isolation from the common world, of its being the

habitation of awe, perhaps the brooding-place of a god!

I had seen many mountains, I had travelled in many places, and I had

read many particular details in the books—and so well noted them upon

the maps that I could have re-drawn the maps—concerning the Cerdagne.

None the less the sight of that wall of the Cerdagne, when first it

struck me, coming down the pass from Tourcarol, was as novel as though

all my life had been spent upon empty plains. By the map it was 9000

feet. It might have been 90,000! The wonderment as to what lay beyond,

the sense that it was a limit to known things, its savage

intangibility, its sheer silence! Nothing but the eye seeing could give

one all those things.

The old complain that the young will not take advice. But the wisest

will tell them that, save blindly and upon authority, the young cannot

take it. For most of human and social experience is words to the young,

and the reality can come only with years. The wise complain of the

jingo in every country; and properly, for he upsets the plans of

statesmen, miscalculates the value of national forces, and may, if he

is powerful enough, destroy the true spirit of armies. But the wise

would be wiser still if, while they blamed the extravagance of this

sort of man, they would recognize that it came from that half-knowledge

of mere names and lists which excludes reality. It is maps and

newspapers that turn an honest fool into a jingo.

It is so again with distance, and it is so with time. Men will not

grasp distance unless they have traversed it, or unless it be

represented to them vividly by the comparison of great landscapes. Men

will not grasp historical time unless the historian shall be at the

pains to give them what historians so rarely give, the measure of a

period in terms of a human life. It is from secondary impressions

divorced from reality that a contempt for the past arises, and that the

fatal illusion of some gradual process of betterment of “progress”

vulgarizes the minds of men and wastes their effort. It is from

secondary impressions divorced from reality that a society imagines

itself diseased when it is healthy, or healthy when it is diseased. And

it is from secondary impressions divorced from reality that springs the

amazing power of the little second-rate public man in those modern

machines that think themselves democracies. This last is a power which,

luckily, cannot be greatly abused, for the men upon whom it is thrust

are not capable even of abuse upon a great scale. It is none the less

marvellous in its falsehood.

Now you will say at the end of this, Since you blame so much the power

for distortion and for ill residing in our great towns, in our system

of primary education and in our papers and in our books, what remedy

can you propose? Why, none, either immediate or mechanical. The best

and the greatest remedy is a true philosophy, which shall lead men

always to ask themselves what they really know and in what order of

certitude they know it; where authority actually resides and where it

is usurped. But, apart from the advent, or rather the recapture, of a

true philosophy by a European society, two forces are at work which

will always bring reality back, though less swiftly and less whole. The

first is the poet, and the second is Time.

Sooner or later Time brings the empty phrase and the false conclusion

up against what is; the empty imaginary looks reality in the face and

the truth at once conquers. In war a nation learns whether it is strong

or no, and how it is strong and how weak; it learns it as well in

defeat as in victory. In the long processes of human lives, in the

succession of generations, the real necessities and nature of a human

society destroy any false formula upon which it was attempted to

conduct it. Time must always ultimately teach.

The poet, in some way it is difficult to understand (unless we admit

that he is a seer), is also very powerful as the ally of such an

influence. He brings out the inner part of things and presents them to

men in such a way that they cannot refuse but must accept it. But how

the mere choice and rhythm of words should produce so magical an effect

no one has yet been able to comprehend, and least of all the poets

themselves.