did, every man much talked of for a great man? Are they diffident
when they meet such men? And do they feel themselves to be in the
presence of gods? I should much like to put myself into the mind of
one of them and to see if, to that generation the simplest of all
social lies is Gospel. If it is so, I must suppose they think a Prime
Minister, a Versifier, an Ambassador, a Lawyer who frequently comes
up in the Press, to be some very superhuman person. And doubtless
also they ascribe a sort of general quality to all much-talked-of or
much-be-printed men, putting them on one little shelf apart, and all
the rest of England in a ruck below.
Then this thought comes to me. What of their bewilderment? We used
all to be so bewildered! Things did not fit in with the very simple
and rigid scheme that was our most undoubted creed of the State. The
motives of most commercial actions seemed inscrutable save to a few
base contemporaries no older than ourselves, but cads, men who would
always remain what we had first known them to be, small clerks upon the
make. At what age, I wonder, to this generation will come the discovery
that of _these_ men and of _such_ material the Great are made; and will
the long business of discovery come to sadden them as late as it came
to their elders?
I must believe that young man walking down Cockspur Street thinks
that all great poets, all great painters, all great writers, all
great statesmen, are those of whom he reads, and are all possessed of
unlimited means and command the world. Further, I must believe that the
young man walking down Cockspur Street (he has got to Northumberland
Avenue by now), lives in a static world. For him things are immovable.
There are the old: fathers and mothers and uncles; the very old are
there, grandfathers, nurses, provosts, survivors. Only in books does
one find at that age the change of human affection, child-bearing,
anxiety for money, and death. All the children (he thinks) will be
always children, and all the lovely women always young. And loyalty and
generous regards are twin easy matters reposing natively in the soul,
and as yet unbetrayed.
Well, if they are all like that, or even most of them, the young
people, quite half the world is happy. Not one of that happy half
remembers the Lion of Northumberland House, or the little streets there
were behind the Foreign Office, or the old Strand, or Temple Bar, or
what Coutts's used to be like, or Simpson's, or Soho as yet uninvaded
by the great and good Lord Shaftesbury. No one of the young can
pleasantly recall the Metropolitan Board of Works.
And for them, all the new things--houses which are veils of mud on
stilts of iron, advertisements that shock the night, the rush of
taxi-cabs and the Yankee hotels--are the things that always were and
always will be.
A year to them is twenty years of ours. The summer for them is games
and leisure, the winter is the country and a horse; time is slow and
stretched over long hours. They write a page that should be immortal,
but will not be; or they hammer out a lyric quite undistinguishable
from its models, and yet to them a poignantly original thing.
Or am I all wrong? Is the world so rapidly changing that the Young also
are caught with the obsession of change? Why, then, not even half the
world is happy.
XVI
ETHANDUNE
In the parish of East Knoyle, in the county of Wiltshire, and towards
the western side of that parish, there is an isolated knoll, gorse
covered, abrupt, and somewhat over 700 feet above the sea in height.
From the summit of it a man can look westward, northward, and eastward
over a great rising roll of countryside.
To the west, upon the sky-line of a level range of hills, not high,
runs that long wood called Selwood and there makes an horizon. To the
north the cultivated uplands merge into high open down: bare turf of
the chalk, which closes the view for miles against the sky, and is the
watershed between the Northern and the Southern Avon. Eastward that
chalk land falls into the valley which holds Salisbury.
From this high knoll a man perceives the two days' march which Alfred
made with his levies when he summoned the men of three Shires to fight
with him against the Danes; he overthrew them at Ethandune.
The struggle of which these two days were the crisis was of more moment
to the history of Britain and of Europe than any other which has
imperilled the survival of either between the Roman time and our own.
That generation in which the stuff of society had worn most threadbare,
and in which its continued life (individually the living memory of
the Empire and informed by the Faith) was most in peril, was not the
generation which saw the raids of the fifth century, nor even that
which witnessed the breaking of the Mahommedan tide in the eighth, when
the Christians carried it through near Poitiers, between the River
Vienne and the Chain, the upland south of Chatellerault. The gravest
moment of peril was for that generation whose grandfathers could
remember the order of Charlemagne, and which fought its way desperately
through the perils of the later ninth century.
Then it was, during the great Scandinavian harry of the North and
West, that Europe might have gone down. Its monastic establishment was
shaken; its relics of central government were perishing of themselves;
letters had sunk to nothing and building had already about it something
nearly savage, when the swirl of the pirates came up all its rivers.
And though legend had taken the place of true history, and though
the memories of our race were confused almost to dreaming, we were
conscious of our past and of our inheritance, and seemed to feel that
now we had come to a narrow bridge which might or might not be crossed:
a bridge already nearly ruined.
If that bridge were not crossed there would be no future for
Christendom.
Southern Britain and Northern Gaul received the challenge, met it,
were victorious, and so permitted the survival of all the things we
know. At Ethandune and before Paris the double business was decided.
Of these twin victories the first was accomplished in this island.
Alfred is its hero, and its site is that chalk upland, above the Vale
of Trowbridge, near which the second of the two white horses is carved:
the hills above Eddington and Bratton upon the Westbury road.
The Easter of 878 had seen no King in England. Alfred was hiding with
some small band in the marshes that lie south of Mendip against the
Severn sea. It was one of those eclipses which time and again in the
history of Christian warfare have just preceded the actions by which
Christendom has re-arisen. In Whitsun week Alfred reappeared.
There is a place at the southern terminal of the great wood, Selwood,
which bears a Celtic affix, and is called "Penselwood," "the head of
the forest," and near it there stood (not to within living memory,
but nearly so) a shire-stone called Egbert's Stone; there Wiltshire,
Somerset, and Dorset meet. It is just eastward of the gap by which
men come by the south round Selwood into the open country. There the
levies, that is the lords of Somerset and of Wiltshire and their
followers, come also riding from Hampshire, met the King. But many had
fled over sea from fear of the Pagans.
"And seeing the King, as was meet, come to life again as it were after
such tribulations, and receiving him, they were filled with an immense
joy, and there the camp was pitched."
Next day the host set out eastward to try its last adventure with the
barbarians who had ruined half the West.
Day was just breaking when the levies set forth and made for the
uplands and for the water partings. Not by mere and the marshes of the
valley, but by the great camp of White Sheet and the higher land beyond
it, the line of marching and mounted men followed the King across the
open turf of the chalk to where three Hundreds meet, and where the
gathering of the people for justice and the courts of the Counts had
been held before the disasters of that time had broken up the land.
It was a spot bare of houses, but famous for a tree which marked the
junction of the Hundreds. No more than three hundred years ago this
tree still stood and bore the name of the Iley Oak. The place of that
day's camp stands up above the water of Deveril, and is upon the
continuation of that Roman road from Sarum to the Mendips and to the
sea, which is lost so suddenly and unaccountably upon its issue from
the great Ridge wood. The army had marched ten miles, and there the
second camp was pitched.
With the next dawn the advance upon the Danes was made.
The whole of that way (which should be famous in every household in
this country) is now deserted and unknown. The host passed over the
high rolling land of the Downs from summit to summit until--from that
central crest which stands above and to the east of Westbury--they saw
before them, directly northward and a mile away, the ring of earthwork
which is called to-day "Bratton Castle." Upon the slope between the
great host of the pirates came out to battle. It was there from those
naked heights that overlook the great plain of the Northern Avon, that
the fate of England was decided.
The end of that day's march and action was the pressing of the Pagans
back behind their earthworks, and the men who had saved our great
society sat down before the ringed embankment watching all the gates of
it, killing all the stragglers that had failed to reach that protection
and rounding up the stray horses and the cattle of the Pagans.
That siege endured for fourteen days. At the end of it the Northmen
treatied, conquered "by hunger, by cold, and by fear." Alfred took
hostages "as many as he willed." Guthrum, their King, accepted our
baptism, and Britain took that upward road which Gaul seven years later
was to follow when the same anarchy was broken by Eudes under the walls
of Paris.
All this great affair we have doubtfully followed to-day in no more
than some three hundred words of Latin, come down doubtfully over a
thousand years. But the thing happened where and as I have said. It
should be as memorable as those great battles in which the victories of
the Republic established our exalted but perilous modern day.
XVII
THE DEATH OF ROBERT THE STRONG
Up in the higher valley of the River Sarthe, which runs between low
knolls through easy meadow-land, and is a place of cattle and of
pasture, interspersed with woods of no great size, upon a summer
morning a troop of some hundreds of men was coming down from the higher
land to the crossings of the river. It was in the year 866. The older
servants in the chief men's retinue could remember Charlemagne.
Two leaders rode before the troop. They were two great owners of land,
and each possessed of commissions from the Imperial authority. The one
had come up hastily northwards from Poitiers, the other had marched
westward to join him, coming from the Beauce, with his command. Each
was a _Comes_, a Lord Administrator of a countryside and its capital,
and had power to levy free men. Their retainers also were many. About
them there rode a little group of aides, and behind them, before the
footmen, were four squadrons of mounted followers.
The force had already marched far that morning. It was winding in line
down a roughly beaten road between the growing crops of the hillside,
and far off in the valley the leaders watched the distant villages, but
they could see no sign of their quarry. They were hunting the pirates.
The scent had been good from the very early hours when they had broken
camp till lately, till mid-morning; but in the last miles of their
marching it had failed them, and the accounts they received from the
rare peasantry were confused.
They found a cottage of wood standing thatched near the track at the
place where it left the hills for the water meadows, and here they
recovered the trace of their prey. A wounded man, his right arm bound
roughly with sacking, leaned against the door of the place, and with
his whole left arm pointed at a group of houses more than a mile away
beyond the stream, and at a light smoke which rose into the still
summer air just beyond a screen of wood in its neighbourhood. He had
seen the straggling line of the Northern men an hour before, hurrying
over the Down and coming towards that farm.
Of the two leaders the shorter and more powerful one, who sat his horse
the less easily, and whose handling of the rein was brutally strong,
rode up and questioned and requestioned the peasant. Could he guess the
numbers? It might be two hundred; it was not three. How long had they
been in the countryside? Four days, at least. It was four days ago that
they had tried to get into the monastery, near the new castle, and had
been beaten off by the servants at the orchard wall. What damage had
they done? He could not tell. The reports were few that he had heard.
His cousin from up the valley complained that three oxen had been
driven from his fields by night. They had stolen a chain of silver from
St. Giles without respect for the shrine. They had done much more--how
much he did not know. Had they left any dead? Yes, three, whom he had
helped to bury. They had been killed outside the monastery wall. One of
his fields was of the monastery benefice, and he had been summoned to
dig the graves.
The lord who thus questioned him fixed him with straight soldierly
eyes, and, learning no more, rode on by the side of his equal from
Poitiers. That equal was armoured, but the lord who had spoken to the
peasant, full of body and squat, square of shoulder, thick of neck,
tortured by the heat, had put off from his chest and back his leather
coat, strung with rings of iron. His servant had unlaced it for him
some miles before, and it hung loose upon the saddle hook. He had taken
off, also, the steel helm, and it hung by its strap to the same point.
He preferred to take the noon sun upon his thick hair and to risk its
action than to be weighed upon longer by that iron. And this though at
any moment the turn of a spinney might bring them upon some group of
the barbarians.
Upon this short, resolute man, rather than upon his colleague, the
expectation of the armed men was fixed. His repute had gone through
all the North of Gaul with popular tales of his feats in lifting and
in throwing. He was perhaps forty years of age. He boasted no lineage,
but vague stories went about--that his father was from the Germanies;
that his father was from the Paris land; that it was his mother who had
brought him to court; that he was a noble with a mystery that forbade
him to speak of his birth; that he was a slave whom the Emperor had
enfranchised and to whom he had given favour; that he was a farmer's
son; a yeoman.
On these things he had never spoken. No one had met men or women of his
blood. But ever since his boyhood he had gone upwards in the rank of
the empire, adding, also, one village to another in his possession,
from the first which he had obtained no man knew how; purchasing land
with the profits of office after office. He had been _Comes_ of Tours,
_Comes_ of Auxerre, _Comes_ of Nevers. He had the commission for all
the military work between Loire and Seine. There were songs about him,
and myths and tales of his great strength, for it was at this that the
populace most wondered.
So this man rode by his colleague's side at the head of the little
force, seeking for the pirates, when, unexpectedly, upon emerging
from a fringe of trees that lined the flat meadows, his seat in the
saddle stiffened and changed, and his eyes fired at what he saw. Two
hundred yards before him was the stream, and over it the narrow stone
bridge unbroken. Immediately beyond a group of huts and houses, wood
and stone, and a heavy, low, round-arched bulk of a church marked the
goal of the pirates--and there they were! They had seen the imperial
levy the moment that it left the trees, and they were running--tall,
lanky men, unkempt, some burdened with sacks, most of them armed with
battle-axe or short spear. They were making for cover in the houses of
the village.
Immediately the two leaders called the marshallers of their levies,
gave orders that the foot-men should follow, trotted in line over the
bridge at the head of the squadron, and, once the water was passed,
formed into two bodies of horse and galloped across the few fields into
the streets of the place.
Just as they reached the market square and the front of the old church
there, the last of the marauders (retarded under the weight of some
burden he would save) was caught and pinned by a short spear thrown. He
fell, crying and howling in a foreign tongue to gods of his own in the
northland. But all his comrades were fast in the building, and there
was a loud thrusting of stone statues and heavy furniture against the
doors. Then, within a moment, an arrow flashed from a window slit, just
missing one of the marshals. The Comes of Poitiers shouted for wood to
burn the defence of the door, and villagers, misliking the task, were
pressed. Faggots were dragged from sheds and piled against it. Even as
this work was doing, man after man fell, as the defenders shot them at
short range from within the church-tower.
The first of the foot-men had come up, and some half-dozen picked for
marksmanship were attempting to thread with their whistling arrows the
slits in the thick walls whence the bolts of the Vikings came. One such
opening was caught by a lucky aim. For some moments its fire ceased,
then came another arrow from it. It struck the Comes of Poitiers and he
went down, and as he fell from his horse two servants caught him. Next,
with a second shaft, the horse was struck, and it plunged and began a
panic. No servant dared stab it, but a marshal did.
Robert, that second count, the leader, had dismounted. He was in a
fury, mixed with the common men, and striking at the great church door
blow upon blow, having in his hand a stone so huge that even at such a
moment they marvelled at him.
Unarmoured, pouring with sweat, though at that western door a great
buttress still shaded him from the noonday sun, Robert the Strong
thundered enormously at the oak. A hinge broke, and he heard a salute
of laughter from his men. He dropped his instrument, lifted, straining,
a great beam which lay there, and trundled it like a battering-ram
against the second hinge. But, just as the shock came, an arrow from
the tower caught him also. It struck where the neck joins the shoulder,
and he went down. Even as he fell, the great door gave, and the men of
the imperial levy, fighting their way in, broke upon the massed pirates
that still defended the entry with a whirl of axe and sword.
Four men tended the leader, one man holding his head upon his knee, the
three others making shift to lift him, to take him where he might be
tended. But his body was no longer convulsed; the motions of the arms
had ceased; and when the arrow was plucked at last from the wound, the
thick blood hardly followed it. He was dead.
The name of this village and this church was Brissarthe; and the man
who so fell, and from whose falling soldier songs and legends arose,
was the first father of all the Capetians, the French kings.
From this man sprang Eudes, who defended Paris from the Sea-Rovers:
Hugh Capet and Philip Augustus and Louis the Saint and Philip the Fair;
and so through century after century to the kings that rode through
Italy, to Henri IV, to Louis XIV in the splendour of his wars, and to
that last unfortunate who lost the Tuileries on August 10th, 1793. His
line survives to-day, for its eldest heir is the man whom the Basques
would follow. His expectants call him Don Carlos, and he claims the
crown of Spain.
XVIII
THE CROOKED STREETS
Why do they pull down and do away with the Crooked Streets, I wonder,
which are my delight, and hurt no man living?
Every day the wealthier nations are pulling down one or another in
their capitals and their great towns: they do not know why they do it;
neither do I.
It ought to be enough, surely, to drive the great broad ways which
commerce needs and which are the life-channels of a modern city,
without destroying all the history and all the humanity in between:
the islands of the past. For, note you, the Crooked Streets are packed
with human experience and reflect in a lively manner all the chances
and misfortunes and expectations and domesticity and wonderment of men.
One marks a boundary, another the kennel of an ancient stream, a third
the track some animal took to cross a field hundreds upon hundreds of
years ago; another is the line of an old defence, another shows where a
rich man's garden stopped long before the first ancestor one's family
can trace was born; a garden now all houses, and its owner who took
delight in it turned to be a printed name.
Leave men alone in their cities, pester them not with the futilities of
great governments, nor with the fads of too powerful men, and they will
build you Crooked Streets of their very nature as moles throw up the
little mounds or bees construct their combs. There is no ancient city
but glories, or has gloried, in a whole foison and multitude of Crooked
Streets. There is none, however wasted and swept by power which, if you
leave it alone to natural things, will not breed Crooked Streets in
less than a hundred years and keep them for a thousand more.
I know a dead city called Timgad, which the sand or the barbarians of
the Atlas overwhelmed fourteen centuries ago. It lies between the
desert and the Algerian fields, high up upon a mountain-side. Its
columns stand. Even its fountains are apparent, though their waterways
are choked. It has a great forum or market-place, all flagged and even,
and the ruined walls of its houses mark its emplacement on every side.
All its streets are straight, set out with a line, and by this you
may judge how a Roman town lay when the last order of Rome sank into
darkness.
Well, take any other town which has not thus been mummified and
preserved but has lived through the intervening time, and you will
find that man, active, curious, intense, in all the fruitful centuries
of Christian time has endowed them with Crooked Streets, which kind
of streets are the most native to Christian men. So it is with Arles,
so it is with Nîmes, so it is with old Rome itself, and so it is with
the City of London, on which by a special Providence the curse of the
Straight Street has never fallen, so that it is to this day a labyrinth
of little lanes. It was intended after the Great Fire to set it all
out in order with "piazzas" and boulevards and the rest--but the
English temper was too strong for any such nonsense, and the streets
and the courts took to the natural lines which suit us best.
The Renaissance indeed everywhere began this plague of vistas and of
avenues. It was determined three centuries ago to rebuild Paris as
regular as a chessboard, and nothing but money saved the town--or
rather the lack of money. You may to this day see in a square called
the "Place des Vosges" what was intended. But when they had driven
their Straight Street two hundred yards or so the exchequer ran dry,
and thus was old Paris saved. But in the last seventy years they
have hurt it badly again. I have no quarrel with what is regal and
magnificent, with splendid ways of a hundred feet or more, with great
avenues and lines of palaces; but why should they pull down my nest
beyond the river--Straw Street and Rat Street and all those winding
belts round the little Church of St. Julien the Poor, where they say
that Dante studied and where Danton in the madness of his grief dug up
his dead love from the earth on his returning from the wars.
Crooked Streets will never tire a man, and each will have its
character, and each will have a soul of its own. To proceed from one
to another is like travelling in a multitude or mixing with a number
of friends. In a town of Crooked Streets it is natural that one should
be the Moneylenders' Street and another that of the Burglars, and a
third that of the Politicians, and so forth through all the trades and
professions.
Then also, how much better are not the beauties of a town seen from
Crooked Streets! Consider those old Dutch towns where you suddenly
come round a corner upon great stretches of salt water, or those towns
of Central France which from one street and then another show you the
Gothic in a hundred ways.