which always accompanies virtue. "I run a risk," says he, "in proposing
the State purchase of this or that at such and such a price. My friend
the Old Knave went under thus in 1895; but the Good Dupe is a buckler
in the fight; he will dare all because his heart is pure."
The Knave Slovenly looks to the Dupe to see to details and to meet
men in ante-chambers, and to have kind, honest eyes in bargaining.
This sort of Knave will have two or even three Dupes for private
secretaries, and often one for a brother-in-law.
The Dupe is in God's providence very numerous, for his normal rate
of breeding is high in the extreme, his normal death-rate low. On
this account those curious in this part of natural history may watch
the Dupes going about in great herds, conducted and instructed by
the Knave; nor is the one to be distinguished from the other by the
coat, but rather by the snout and visage, the eyes and, if one be old
enough to open the mouth, by the teeth. The Dupe, upon the other hand,
will not be of great service in any physical struggle and must not be
depended upon for this. It is his delight to browse and when disturbed
he scatters rather than flies. Here and there a Rogue Dupe will turn
upon his pursuers, in which case he is invariably devoured.
The Dupe has his habitat, but that not easily defined, as in the
suburbs of great cities, and in those towns called residential, where
the leisured and the inane make their lives seem so much longer than
those of others. But there are exceptions also to this, and the Dupe
will sometimes migrate in vast numbers from one spot to another in
such few years as wholly to discomfit the calculations of the Knaves.
Some of these have been found to stand up in public halls before
numbers whom they had thought to be Dupes (seeing that the locality was
Little Partington) but only to discover a great boiling of Anti-Dupes,
men working with their hands or what-not, quite undeceivable, as often
as not Atheist, and ready to storm the platform and tear the Knave
alive.
The Dupe loves courtesy and, as has been said above, will tolerate no
hint of impatience. On the other hand, he needs no breaking in and
will carry upon the back from his earliest years. It is incredible
to travellers when they first come across the Dupe what burdens he
will bear in this fashion, so that sometimes the whole Plain appears
to be a moving mass of gold bags, public salaries, contracts, large
houses, yachts, motor-cars, opera houses, howdahs sheltering masters
and mistresses, cases of wine, rich foods, and charitable institutions,
all as it were endowed with a motion of their own until you stoop down
and perceive that the whole of this vast weight sways securely upon the
backs of an enormous migratory body of Dupes upon the trek for a Better
Land.
The Dupe also differs from other creatures in that he will sleep
comfortably with such things upon his back, nor ever roll over upon
them, and that he will bear them to a great old age and even to death
itself without dispute. Indeed the Dupe unburdened has about him a
forlorn and naked feeling to which it were a pity to condemn him. His
food must be ample, but there is no need to prepare it carefully, and
he will eat almost anything that is given him, except a leek, which he
will not touch unless he be told that it is an onion. Of wheat he takes
very little, but he insists that a great portion be put before him,
that he may munch and trample upon it. Why he manifests this appetite
is not known, but upon any attempt to lessen the ration he will kick,
buck, and rear, and behave in a manner altogether out of his nature.
The Dupe must be given drink at irregular intervals, but he loves
to treat it shyly, and to flirt with it as it were. There is no
prettier sight than to see a number of Dupes met together arching and
curvetting, side-glancing and denying, before they plunge their heads
and manes into the life-giving liquid.
It is the reward of the Dupe that he is all his life very consistently
happy, and on this account many not born Dupes, imitate the Dupes and
would be of them, in which they fail, for the Dupe is God's creature
and not man's, and proceeds by moral generation as has already been
affirmed.
XXVI
THE LOVE OF ENGLAND
Love of country is general to mankind, yet is not the love of country a
general thing to be described by a general title. Love changes with the
object of love. The country loved determines the nature of its services.
The love of England has in it the love of landscape, as has the love
of no other country: it has in it as has the love of no other country,
the love of friends. Less than the love of other countries has it
in it the love of what may be fixed in a phrase or well set down in
words. It lacks, alas, the love of some interminable past nor does it
draw its liveliness from any great succession of centuries. Say that
ten centuries made a soil, and that in that soil four centuries more
produced a tree, and that that tree was England, then you will know to
what the love of England is in most men directed. For most men who
love England know so little of her first thousand years that when they
hear the echoes of them or see visions of them, they think they are
dealing with a foreign thing. All Englishmen are clean cut off from
their long past which ended when the last Mass was sung at Westminster.
The love of England has in it no true plains but fens, low hills, and
distant mountains. No very ancient towns, but comfortable, small and
ordered ones, which love to dress themselves with age. The love of
England concerns itself with trees. Accident has given to the lovers
of England no long pageantry of battle. Nature has given Englishmen
an appetite for battle, and between the two men who love England make
a legend for themselves of wars unfought, and of arms permanently
successful; though arms were they thus always successful would not be
arms at all.
The greatness of the English soul is best discovered in that strong
rebuke of excesses, principally of excess in ignorance, which a
minority of Englishmen perpetually express, but which has not sufficed
as yet to save the future of England. In no other land will you so
readily discover critics of that land ready to bear all for their right
to doubt the common policy; but though you will nowhere discover such
men so readily, nowhere will you discover them so impotent or so few.
The love of England breeds in those who cherish it an attachment to
institutions which is half reverential, but also half despairing. In
its reverence this appetite produces one hundred living streams of
action and of vesture and of custom. In its despair, in its refusal
to consider upon what theory the institution lies, it permits the
institution to sterilise with age and to grow fantastic.
The love of England has never destroyed, but at times, and again at
closer and at closer times (while we have lived) it has failed to save.
Yet it will save England in the end. Men are more bound together by
this music in their souls than by any other, wherever England is or
is spoken of by Englishmen. Here you may discover what religion has
been to many, and also you may discover here how legend and how epics
arise. In men cut off from England, the love of England grows into a
set repetitive thing, a thing of peculiar strength yet almost barren.
Nourished and exampled by England, flourishing upon the field of
England, the love of England is a love of the very earth: of the smell
of growing things and of certain skies, and of tides in river-mouths,
and of belts of sea.
If a man would understand this great thing England which is now in
peril and which has so worked throughout the world, he must not
consider the accident of England's success and failure, nor certain
empty lands filled without battle, nor others ruined by folly, nor
certain arts singularly discovered and perfected by England, nor other
arts as singularly neglected and decayed. Nor must he contrast the
passionate love of England with some high religion of which it takes
the place, nor with some active work in contrast with which it seems
so empty and unproducing a thing. He must not set it against a creed
(it is not so high as that), nor against a conquest or a true empire
such as Spain and Rome possessed.
If a man would understand the love of England he must do what hardly
any one would dare to do: that is, he must clearly envisage England
defeated in a final war and ask himself, "What should I do then?"
XXVII
THE STORM
There is a contemptible habit of mind (contemptible in intellect, not
in morals) which would withdraw from the mass of life the fecundity of
perception.
The things that we see are, according to the interpretation of the
mystics, every one of them symbols and masks of things unseen. The
mystics have never proved their theory true. But it is undoubtedly
true that the perception of things when it is sane is manifold; it is
true that as we grow older the perception of things is increasingly
manifold, and that one perception breeds one hundred others, so that
we advance through life as through a pageant enjoying in greater and
greater degree day by day (if we open ourselves to them) the glorious
works of God.
There is a detestable habit of mind, which either does not understand,
or sneers at, or despises, or even wholly misses--when it is persisted
in--this faculty for enjoyment, which even our gross senses endow us
with. This evil habit of the mind will have us neglect first colour
for form, then form for mere number. It would have us reject those
intimations of high and half-remembered things which a new aspect of
a tree or house or of a landscape arouses in us. It would compel us
to forget, or to let grow stale, the pleasure with which the scent
of woods blest us in early youth. Perpetually this evil habit of the
mind would flatten the diversity of our lives, suck out the sap of
experience, kill humour and exhaust the living spring. It whispers to
us the falsehood that years in their advance leave us in some way less
alive, it adds to the burden upon our shoulders, not a true weight of
sad knowledge as life, however well lived, must properly do, but a
useless drag of despair. It would make us numb. In the field of letters
it would persuade us that all things may be read and known and that
nothing is worth the reading or the knowing, and that the loveliest
rhythms or the most subtle connotations of words are but tricks to be
despised. In the field of experience it would convince us that nothing
bears a fruit and that human life is no more than anarchy or at best
an unexplained fragment. Even in that highest of fields, the field of
service, it would persuade us that there is nothing to serve. And if
we are convinced of that, then every faculty in us turns inward and
becomes useless: may be called abortive and fails its end.
These thoughts arose in me as I watched to-day from the platform of my
Mill the advance of a great storm cloud; for in the majestic progress
which lifted itself into the sky and marched against the north from
the Channel I perceived that which the evil, modern, drying habit of
thought would neglect and would attempt to make material, and also that
which I very well knew was in its awfulness allied to the life of the
soul.
For very many days the intense heat had parched the Weald. The leaves
dropped upon the ash and the oak, the grass was brown, our wells had
failed. The little river of the clay was no more than several stagnant
pools. We thought the fruits would wither; and our houses, not built
for such droughts and such an ardent sun, were like ovens long after
the cool of the evening had come.
At the end of some days one bank of cloud and then another had passed
far off east or far to the west, over the distant forest ridge or over
Egdean Side, missing us. We had printed stuff from London telling us
how it had rained in London--as though rain falling in London ever fell
upon earth or nourished fruits and men!
We thought that we were not to be allowed any little rain out of
Heaven. But to-day the great storm came up, marching in a dark
breastplate and in skirts of rain, with thunders about it; and it was
personal. It came right up out of the sea. It walked through the gate
which the River Adur has pierced, leaving upon either side the high
chalk hills; the crest of its helmet carried a great plume of white and
menacing cloud.
No man seeing this creature as it moved solemn and panoplied could have
mistaken the memory or the knowledge that stirred within him at the
sight. This was that great master, that great friend, that great enemy,
that great idol (for it has been all of these things), which, since
we have tilled the earth, we have watched, we have welcomed, we have
combated, we have unfortunately worshipped. This was that God of the
Storm which has made such tremendous music in the poets.
The Parish Church, which had seemed under the hard blue sky of the
early morning a low brown thing, with its square tower of the Templars
and of the Second Crusade, stood up now white, menacing, and visionary
against the ink of the cloud. The many trees of the rich man's park
beyond were taller, especially the elms. They stood absolutely and
stubbornly still, no leaves upon them moving at all. The Downs an hour
away first fell dull, low, and leaden. These were but half seen, and at
last faded altogether into the gloom. The many beasts round about were
struck with silence. The fowls nestled together, and the only sign that
animate nature gave of an approaching stroke was the whinny of a horse
in a stable where the door was left wide open to the stifling air, and
the mad circling and swooping of a bird distracted by the change in the
light.
For the sun was now blotted out, and the enormous thing was upon us
like a foe. First I saw from the high platform of my Mill a sort of
driving mist or whirl, which at first I thought to be an arrow-shoot of
rain; but looking again I saw it to be no more than the dust of many
parched fields and lanes, driving before the edge of the thunder. There
was a wind preceding all this like a herald. In a moment the oppressive
air grew cool. It grew cool by a leap. It was like the descent into
a cellar; it was like the opening of a mine door to a draft. The
vigour of the mind, dulled by so many days of heat and nights without
refreshment, leaped up to greet this change, which, though it came
under a solemn and uncomforting aspect, gave breath and expansion. One
might for some five minutes have imagined as the dust clouds advanced
and the furious shaking of the trees and hedges a mile away began
to be heard as well as seen, that the call of coolness for work had
come. Then that wall of wind hit the two great oaks of my neighbour
next to my own frontier trees. The fan of the Mill groaned, turning a
little; it turned furiously, and the strength of the storm was upon
us. It lightened, single and double and fourfold. The blinding fire
sprang from arch to arch of an incredible architecture, higher than
anything you might dream of, larger than the mountains of other lands.
The thunder ran through all this, not very loud but continuous, and
a sweep of darkness followed like a train after the movement of the
cloud. White wreaths blown out in jets as though by some caprice in
wilful shapes showed here and there, and here and there, against such
a blackness, grey cloudlets drifted very rapidly, hurrying distracted
left and right without a purpose. All the while the rain fell.
The village and the landscape and the Weald, the Rape, the valley,
all my county you would have said, was swallowed up, occupied, and
overwhelmed. It was more majestic than an army; it was a victory more
absolute than any achievement of arms, and while it flashed and poured
and proclaimed itself with its continual noise, it was itself, as it
were, the thing in which we lived, and the mere earth was but a scene
upon which the great storm trod for the purpose of its pageant.
When the storm had passed over northward to other places beyond, and
when at evening the stars came out very numerous and clear in a sky
which the thunder had not cooled, and when the doubtful summer haze was
visible again very low upon the distant horizon, over the English sea,
the memory of all this was like the memory of a complete achievement.
No one who had seen the storm could doubt purpose or meaning in the
vastness of things, nor the creative word of Almighty God.
XXVIII
THE VALLEY
Everybody knows, I fancy, that kind of landscape in which hills seem
to lie in a regular manner, fold on fold, one range behind the other,
until at last, behind them all, some higher and grander range dominates
and frames the whole.
The infinite variety of light and air and accident of soil provide all
men, save those who live in the great plains, with examples of this
sort. The traveller in the dry air of California or of Spain, watching
great distances from the heights, will recollect such landscapes all
his life. They were the reward of his long ascents, and they were the
sunset visions which attended his effort when at last he had climbed to
the utmost ridge of his day's westward journey. Such a landscape does a
man see from the edges of the Guadarrama, looking eastward and south
toward the very distant hills that guard Toledo and the ravines of the
Tagus. Such a landscape does a man see at sunrise from the highest
of the Cevennes looking right eastward to the dawn as it comes up in
the pure and cold air beyond the Alps, and shows you the falling of
their foothills, a hundred miles of them, right down to the trench of
the Rhone. And by such a landscape is a man gladdened when, upon the
escarpments of the Tuolumne, he turns back and looks westward over the
Stockton plain towards the coast range which guards the Pacific.
The experience of such a sight is one peculiar in travel, or, for
that matter, if a man is lucky enough to enjoy it near his home,
insistent and reiterated upon the mind of the home-dwelling man. Such
a landscape, for instance, makes a man praise God if his house is upon
the height of Mendip, and he can look over falling hills right over
the Vale of Severn toward the rank above rank of the Welsh solemnities
beyond, until the straight line and height of the Black Mountain
against the sky bounds his view and frames it.
It is the character of these landscapes to suggest at once a vastness,
a diversity, and a seclusion. When a man comes upon them unexpectedly
he can forget the perpetual toil of men and imagine that those who
dwell below in the nearer glens before him are exempt from the
necessities of this world. When such a landscape is part of a man's
dwelling place, though he well knows that the painful life of men
within those hills is the same hard business that it is throughout the
world, yet his knowledge is modified and comforted by the permanent
glory of the thing he sees.
The distant and high range that bounds his view makes a sort of wall,
cutting the country off and guarding it from whatever may be beyond.
The succession of lower ranges suggests secluded valleys, and the
reiterated woods, distant and more distant, convey an impression of
fertility more powerful than that of corn in harvest upon the lowlands.
Sometimes it is a whole province that is thus grasped by the eye;
sometimes in the summer haze of Northern lands, a few miles only;
always this scenery inspires the onlooker with a sense of completion
and of repose, and at the same time, I think, with worship and with awe.
Now one such group of valleys there was, hill above hill, forest above
forest, and beyond it a great, noble range, unwooded and high against
Heaven, guarding all the place, which I for my part knew from the day
when first I came to know anything of this world. There is a high place
under fir trees; a place of sand and bracken in South England, whence
such a view was always present to my eye in childhood, and "There,"
said I to myself (even in childhood) "a man should make his habitation.
In those valleys is the proper settling place for a man."
And so there was. There was a steading for me in the midst of those
hills.
It was a little place which had grown up as my county grows, the house
throwing out arms and layers, and making itself over ten generations of
men. One room was panelled in the oak of the seventeenth century--but
that had been a novelty in its time, for the walls upon which the
panels stood were of the late fifteenth, oak and brick intermingled.
Another room was large and light, built in the manner of one hundred
and fifty years ago, which people call Georgian.
It had been thrown out South--and this is quite against our custom;
for our older houses looked east and west to take all the sun and to
present a corner to the south-west and the storms. So they stand still.
It had round it a solid cornice which the modern men of the towns would
have called ugly, but there was ancestry in it. Then, further on this
house had modern roominess stretching in one new wing after another;
and it had a great set of byres and barns, and there was a copse and
some six acres of land. Over a deep gully stood over against it the
little town that was the mother of the place; and altogether this good
place was enclosed, silent, and secure.
"The fish that misses the hook regrets the worm." If this is not a
Chinese proverb it ought to be. That little farm and steading and
those six acres, that ravine, those trees, that aspect of the little
mothering town; the wooded hills fold above fold, the noble range
beyond--all these were not, and for ever will not be mine.
For all I know some man quite unacquainted with that land took the
place, grumbling, for a debt; or again, for all I know it may have
been bought by a blind man who could not see the hills, or by some man
who, seeing them perpetually, regretted the flat marshes of his home.
To-day, this very day, up high on Egdean Side, not thinking of such
things, through a gap in the trees, I saw again after so many years,
set one behind the other, the woods, wave upon wave, the summer heat,
the high, bare range guarding all; and in the midst of that landscape,
set like a toy, the little Sabine farm.
Then, said I, to this place I might not know, "Continue. Go and serve
whom you will. You were not altogether mine because you would not be,
and to-day you are not mine at all. You will regret it perhaps, and
perhaps you will not. There was verse in you perhaps, or prose, or,
much better still (for all I know), contentment for a man. But you
refused. You lost your chance. Good-by," and with that I went on into
the wood and beyond the gap and saw the sight no more.
It was ten years since I had seen it last, the little Sabine farm. It
may be ten years before I see it again, or it may be for ever. But as I
went through the woods saying to myself:
"You lost your chance, my little Sabine farm, you lost your chance!"
another part of me at once replied:
"Ah, and so did you!"
Then, by way of riposte, I answered in my mind:
"Not at all, for the chance I never had; all I have lost is my
desire--no more."
"No, not only your desire," said the voice to me within, "but the
fulfilment of it." And when that reply came I naturally turned, as all
men do on hearing such interior replies, to a general consideration
of regret, and was prepared, if any honest publisher should have come
whistling through that wood, with an offer proper to the occasion to
produce no less than five volumes on the Nature of Regret, its mortal
sting, its bitter-sweetness, its power to keep alive in man the pure
passions of the soul, its hint at immortality, its memory of Heaven.
But the wood was empty. The offer did not come. The moment was lost.
The five volumes will hardly now be written. In place of them I offer
poor this, which you may take or leave. But I beg leave, before I end,
to cite certain words very nobly attached to that great inn, The
Griffin, which has its foundation set far off in another place, in the
town of March, in the sad Fen-Land near the Eastern Sea:
"England my desire, what have you not refused?"
XXIX
A CONVERSATION IN ANDORRA
The other day--indeed some months ago--I was in the company of two men
who were talking together and were at cross-purposes. The one was an
Englishman acquainted with the Catalonian tongue and rather proud of
knowing it; the other was a citizen of the Republic of Andorra.
The first had the advantage of his fellow in world-wide travel, the
reading of many newspapers and (beside his thorough knowledge of
Catalonian) a smattering of French, German, and American.
I was touched to see the care and deference and good-fellowship which
the superior extended to the inferior in this colloquy.