There lies in the North-East of France, close against the Belgian
frontier and within cannon shot of the famous battlefield of
Malplaquet, a little town called Bavai—I have written of it elsewhere.
Coming into this little town you seem to be entering no more than a
decent, unimportant market borough, a larger village meant for country
folk, perhaps without a history and certainly without fame.
As you come to look about you one thing after another enlivens your
curiosity and suggests something at once enormous and remote in the
destinies of the place.
In the first place, seven great roads go out like the seven rays of a
star, plumb straight, darting along the line, across the vast, bare
fields of Flanders, past and along the many isolated woods of the
provinces, and making to great capitals far off—to Cologne, to Paris,
to Treves, and to the ports of the sea.
These roads are deserted in great part. Some of them are metalled in
certain sections, and again in other sections are no more than lanes,
and again no more than footpaths, as you proceed along their miles of
way; but their exact design awfully impresses the mind. You know, as
you follow such strict alignment, that you are fulfilling the majestic
purpose of Imperial Rome. It was the Romans that made these things.
Then, intrigued and excited by such remains of greatness, you read what
you can of the place.... And you find nothing but a dust of legend. You
find a story that once here a king, filled with ambition and
worshipping strange gods, thrust out these great roads to the ends of
the earth; desired his capital to be a hub and navel for the world. He
put them under the protection of the seven planets and of the deities
of those stars. Three he paved with black marble and four with white
marble, and where they met upon the market place he put up a golden
terminal. There the legend ends.
It is only legend—a true product of the Dark Ages, when all that Rome
had done rose like a huge dream in the mind of Europe and took on
gorgeous and fantastic colouring. You learn (for the rest) very
little—that ornaments and money have been found dating from two
thousand years, that once great walls surrounded the place. It must
have had noble buildings and solemn courts. In strict history all you
will discover is that it was the capital of that tribe, the Nervii,
against whom Caesar fought, and whose territory was early conquered for
the Empire. You will find nothing more. There is no living tradition,
there is no voice; the little town is dumb.
The place is a figure, and a striking one, of greatness long dead, and
a man visiting its small domestic interests to-day, and noting its
comfort, its humility, and its sleep, is reminded of many things
attaching to human fame. It would seem as though the ambitions of men,
and that exalted appetite for glory which has produced the chief things
of this world, suffer the effect of time somewhat as the body of an
animal slain will suffer that.
One part of the organism and then another decays and mixes back with
nature. The effect of will has vanished. The thing is a prey to all
that environment which, once alive, it combated, conquered, and
transformed to its own use. One portion after another is lost, until at
last only the most resisting stands—the skeleton and hard framework,
the least expressive, the least personal part of the whole. This also
decays and perishes. Then there remains no more but a score of hardened
fragments that linger in their place, and what has passed away is
fortunate if even the slightest or most fantastic legend of itself
survives.
The great dead are first forgotten in their physical habit; we lose the
nature of their voices, we forget their sympathies and their
affections. Bit by bit all that they intended to be eternal slips back
into the common thing around. A blurred image, growing fainter and
fainter, lingers. At last the person vanishes, and in its place some
public raising material things—a monument, a tomb, an ornament, or
weapon of enduring metal—is all that remains.
If it were possible for the spring of appetite and quest to be dried up
in man, such a spectacle would dry up that spring.
It is not possible, for it is providentially in the nature of man to
cherish these illusions of an immortal memory and of a life bestowed
upon the shade or the mere name of his living greatness. Those various
forms of fame which are young men’s goals, and to which the eager
creative power of early manhood so properly directs itself, seem each
in turn or each for its varying temperament to promise the desired
reward; and one imagines that his love, another that his discoveries,
another that his victories in the field or his conspicuous acts of
courage will remain permanently with his fellows long after he has left
their feast.
As though to give some substance to the flattering cheat, there is one
kind of fame which men have been permitted to attain, and which does
give them a sort of fixed tenure—if not for ever, yet for generations
upon generations—in the human city. This sort of fame is the fame of
the great poets. There is nothing more enduring. It has for some who
were most blessed outlasted, you may say, all material things which
they handled or they knew—all fabrics, all instruments, all
habitations. It is comparable in its endurance to the years, and a man
reads the “Song of Roland” and can still look on that same unchanged
Cleft of Roncesvalles, or a man reads the Iliad and can look to-day
westward from the shores to Tenedos. But wait a moment. Are they indeed
blessed in this, the great poets? Ronsard debated it. He decided that
they were, and put into the mouth of the muses the great lines:——
Mais un tel accident n’arrive point a l’âme,
Qui sans matière vist immortelle là haut.
Vela saigement dit, Ceux dont la fantaisie
Sera religieuse et devote envers Dieu
Tousjours acheveront quelque grand poésie,
Et dessus leur renom la Parque n’aura lieu.
But the matter is still undecided.