It was in Paris, in his room on the hill of the University, that a
traveller woke and wondered what he should do with his day. In some
way--I cannot tell how--ephemeral things had captured his mind in the
few hours he had already spent in the city. There is no civilisation
where the various parts stand so separate as they do with the French.
You may live in Paris all your life and never suspect that there is a
garrison of eighty thousand men within call. You may spend a year in a
provincial town and never hear that the large building you see daily is
a bishop's palace. Or you may be the guest of the bishop for a month,
and remain under the impression that somewhere, hidden away in the
place, there is a powerful clique of governing atheists whom, somehow,
you never run across. And so this traveller, who knew Paris like his
pocket, and had known it since he could speak plain, had managed to
gather up in this particular visit all the impressions which are least
characteristic of the town. He had dined with a friend at Pousset's; he
had passed the evening at the Exhibition, and he had had a bare touch of
the real thing in the Rue de Tournon; but even there it was in the
company of foreigners. Therefore, I repeat, he woke up next morning
wondering what he should do, for the veneer of Paris is the thinnest in
the world, and he had exhausted it in one feverish day.
Luckily for him, the room in which he lay was French, and had been
French for a hundred years. You looked out of the window into a sky cut
by the tall Mansard roofs of the eighteenth century; and over the stones
of what had been the Scotch College you could see below you at the foot
of the hill all the higher points of the island--especially the Sainte
Chapelle and the vast towers of the Cathedral. Then it suddenly struck
him that the air was full of bells. Now, it is a curious thing, and one
that every traveller will bear me out in, that you associate a country
place with the sound of bells, but a capital never. Caen is noisy enough
and Rouen big enough, one would think, to drown the memory of music; yet
any one who has lived in his Normandy remembers their perpetual bells;
and as for the admirable town of Chinon, where no one ever goes, I
believe it is Ringing Island itself. But Paris one never thinks of as a
place of bells. And yet there are bells enough there to take a man right
into the past, and from there through fairyland to hell and out and back
again.
If I were writing of the bells, I could make you a list of all the
famous bells, living and dead, that haunt the city, and the tale of what
they have done would be a history of France. The bell of the St.
Bartholomew over against the Louvre, the tocsin of the Hotel de Ville
that rang the knell of the Monarchy, the bell of St. Julien that is as
old as the University, the old Bourdon of Notre Dame that first rang
when St. Louis brought in the crown of thorns, and the peal that saluted
Napoleon, and the new Bourdon that is made of the guns of Sebastopol,
and the Savoyarde up on Montmartre, a new bell much larger than the
rest. This morning the air was full of them. They came up to the height
on which the traveller lay listening; they came clear and innumerable
over the distant surge of the streets; he spent an hour wondering at
such an unusual Parliament and General Council of Bells. Then he said to
himself: "It must be some great feast of the Church." He was in a world
he had never known before. He was like a man who gets into a strange
country in a dream and follows his own imagination instead of suffering
the pressure of outer things; or like a boy who wanders by a known river
till he comes to unknown gardens.
So anxious was he to take possession at once of this discovery of his
that he went off hurriedly without eating or drinking, thinking only of
what he might find. He desired to embrace at one sight all that Paris
was doing on a day which was full of St. Louis and of resurrection. The
thoughts upon thoughts that flow into the mind from its impression, as
water creams up out of a stone fountain at a river head, disturbed him,
swelling beyond the possibility of fulfilment. He wished to see at once
the fashionables in St. Clotilde and the Greek Uniates at St. Julien,
and the empty Sorbonne and the great crowd of boys at Stanislas; but
what he was going to see never occurred to him, for he thought he knew
Paris too well to approach the cathedral.
Notre Dame is jealously set apart for special and well-advertised
official things. If you know the official world you know the great
church, and unless some great man had died, or some victory had been
won, you would never go there to see how Paris took its religion. No
midnight Mass is said in it; for the lovely carols of the Middle Ages
you must go to St. Gervais, and for the pomp of the Counter-Reformation
to the Madeleine, for soldiers to St. Augustin, for pilgrims to St.
Etienne. Therefore no one would, ever have thought of going to the
cathedral on this day, when an instinct and revelation of Paris at
prayer filled the mind. Nevertheless, the traveller's feet went, of
their own accord, towards the seven bridges, because the Island draws
all Paris to it, and was drawing him along with the rest. He had meant
perhaps to go the way that all the world has gone since men began to
live on this river, and to follow up the Roman way across the Seine--a
vague intention of getting a Mass at St. Merry or St. Laurent. But he
was going as a dream sent him, without purpose or direction.
The sun was already very hot and the Parvis was blinding with light when
he crossed the little bridge. Then he noticed that the open place had
dotted about it little groups of people making eastward. The Parvis is
so large that you could have a multitude scattered in it and only notice
that the square was not deserted. There were no more than a thousand,
perhaps, going separately to Notre Dame, and a thousand made no show in
such a square. But when he went in through the doors he saw there
something he had never seen before, and that he thought did not exist.
It was as though the vague interior visions of which the morning had
been so full had taken on reality.
You may sometimes see in modern picture galleries an attempt to combine
the story from which proceeds the nourishing flame of Christianity with
the crudities and the shameful ugliness of our decline. Thus, with
others, a picture of our Lord and Mary Magdalen; all the figures except
that of our Lord were dressed in the modern way. I remember another of
our Lord and the little children, where the scene is put into a village
school. Now, if you can imagine (which it is not easy to do) such an
attempt to be successful, untouched by the love of display and
eccentricity, and informing--as it commonly pretends to inform--our time
with an idea, then you will understand what the traveller saw that
morning in Notre Dame. The church seemed the vastest cavern that had
ever been built for worship. Coming in from the high morning, the
half-light alone, with which we always connect a certain majesty and
presence, seemed to have taken on amplitude as well. The incense veiled
what appeared to be an infinite lift of roof, and the third great
measurement--the length of nave that leads like a forest ride to the
lights of the choir--were drawn out into an immeasurable perspective by
reason of a countless crowd of men and women divided by the narrow path
of the procession. So full was this great place that a man moved slowly
and with difficulty, edging through such a mass of folk as you may find
at holiday time in a railway station, or outside a theatre--never surely
before was a church like this, unless, indeed, some very rich or very
famous man happened to be gracing it. But here to-day, for nothing but
the function proper to the feast, the cathedral was paved and floored
with human beings. In the galilee there was a kind of movement so that a
man could get up further, and at last the traveller found a place to
stand in just on the edge of the open gangway, at the very end of the
nave. He peered up this, and saw from the further end, near the altar,
the head of the procession approaching, which was (in his fancy of that
morning) like the line of the Faith, still living and returning in a
perpetual circle to revivify the world. Moreover, there was in the
advent of the procession a kind of climax. As it came nearer, the great
crowd moved more quickly towards it; children were lifted up, and by one
of Sully's wide pillars a group of three young soldiers climbed on a
rail to see the great sight better. The Cardinal-Archbishop, very old
and supported by his priests, half walked and half tottered down the
length of the people; his head, grown weary with age, barely supported
the mitre, from which great jewels, false or true, were flashing. In his
hand he had a crozier that was studded in the same way with gems, and
that seemed to be made of gold; the same hands had twisted the metal of
it as had hammered the hinges of the cathedral doors. Certainly there
here appeared one of the resurrections of Europe. The matter of life
seemed to take on a fuller stuff and to lift into a dimension above that
in which it ordinarily moves. The thin, narrow, and unfruitful
experience of to-day and yesterday was amplified by all the lives that
had made our life, and the blood of which we are only a last expression,
the race that is older even than Rome seemed in this revelation of
continuity to be gathered up into one intense and passionate moment. The
pagan altar of Tiberius, the legend of Dionysius, the whole circle of
the wars came into this one pageant, and the old man in his office and
his blessing was understood by all the crowd before him to transmit the
centuries. A rich woman thrust a young child forward, and he stopped and
stooped with difficulty to touch its hair. As he approached the
traveller it was as though there had come great and sudden news to him,
or the sound of unexpected and absorbing music.
The procession went on and closed; the High Mass followed; it lasted a
very long time, and the traveller went out before the crowd had moved
and found himself again in the glare of the sun on the Parvis.
He went over the bridge to find his eating-shop near the archives, and
eat the first food of that day, thinking as he went that certainly there
are an infinity of lives side by side in our cities, and each ignores
the rest; and yet, that to pass from what we know of these to what we do
not--though it is the most wonderful journey in the world--is one that
no one undertakes unless accident or a good fortune pushes him on. He
desired to make another such journey.
He came back to find me in London, and spoke to me of Paris as of a city
newly discovered: as I listened I thought I saw an arena.
In a plain of the north, undistinguished by great hills, open to the
torment of the sky, the gods had traced an arena wherein were to be
fought out the principal battles of a later age.
* * * * *
Spirits lower than the divine, spirits intermediate, have been imagined
by men wiser than ourselves to have some power over the world--a power
which we might vanquish in a special manner, but still a power. To such
conceptions the best races of Europe cling; upon such a soil are grown
the legends that tell us most about our dark, and yet enormous, human
fate. These intermediate spirits have been called in all the older
creeds "the gods." It is in the nature of the Church to frown upon these
dreams; but I, as I listened to him, saw clearly that plain wherein the
gods had marked out an arena for mankind.
It was oval, as should be a theatre for any show, with heights around it
insignificant, but offering a vantage ground whence could be watched the
struggle in the midst. There was a sacred centre--an island and a
mount--and, within the lines, so great a concourse of gladiatorial souls
as befits the greatest of spectacles. I say, I do not know how far such
visions are permitted, nor how far the right reason of the Church
condemns them; but the dream returned to me very powerfully, recalling
my boyhood, when the traveller told me his story. I also therefore went
and caught the fresh gale of the stream of the Seine in flood, and saw
the many roofs of Paris quite clear after the rain, and read the
writings of the men I mixed with and heard the noise of the city.
* * * * *
It is not upon the paltry level of negations or of decent philosophies,
it is in the action and hot mood of creative certitudes that the French
battle is engaged. The little sophists are dumb and terrified, their
books are quite forgotten. I myself forgot (in those few days by that
water and in that city) the thin and ineffectual bodies of ignorant men
who live quite beyond any knowledge of such fires. The printed things
which tired and poor writers put down for pay no longer even disturbed
me; the reflections, the mere phantasms of reality, with which in a
secluded measure we please our intellect, faded. I was like a man who
was in the centre of two lines that meet in war; to such a man this
fellow's prose on fighting and that one's verse, this theory of
strategy, or that essay upon arms, are not for one moment remembered.
Here (in the narrow street which I knew and was now following) St.
Bernard had upheld the sacrament in the shock of the first awakening--in
that twelfth century, when Julian stirred in his sleep. Beyond the
bridge, in Roman walls that still stand carefully preserved, the Church
of Gaul had sustained Athanasius, and determined the course of the
Christian centuries. I had passed upon my way the vast and empty room
where had been established the Terror; where had been forced by an angry
and compelling force the full return of equal laws upon Europe. Who
could remember in such an air the follies and the pottering of men who
analyse and put in categories and explain the follies of wealth and of
old age?
Good Lord, how little the academies became! I remembered the phrases
upon one side and upon the other which still live in the stones of the
city, carved and deep, but more lasting than are even the letters of
their inscription. I remembered the defiant sentence of Mad Dolet on his
statue there in the Quarter, the deliberate perversion of Plato, "And
when you are dead you shall no more be anything at all." I remembered
the "Ave Crux spes Unica"; and St. Just's "The words that we have spoken
will never be lost on earth"; and Danton's "Continual Daring," and the
scribbled Greek on the walls of the cathedral towers. For not only are
the air and the voice, but the very material of this town is filled with
words that remain. Certainly the philosophies and the negations dwindled
to be so small as at last to disappear, and to leave only the two
antagonists. Passion brooded over the silence of the morning; there was
great energy in the cool of the spring air, and up above, the forms the
clouds were taking were forms of gigantic powers.
I came, as the traveller had come, into the cathedral. It was not yet
within half an hour of the feast. There was still room to be found,
though with every moment the nave and the aisles grew fuller, until one
doubted how at the end so great a throng could be dismissed. They were
of all kinds. Some few were strangers holding in their hands books about
the building. Some few were devout men on travel, and praying at this
great office on the way: men from the islands, men from the places that
Spain has redeemed for the future in the new world. I saw an Irishman
near me, and two West Indians also, half negro, like the third of the
kings that came to worship at the manger where Our Lord was born. For
two hours and nearly three I saw and wondered at that immense concourse.
The tribunes were full, the whole choir was black, moving with the
celebrants, and all the church floor beyond and around me was covered
and dark with expectant men.
The Bourdon that had summoned the traveller and driven mad so many
despairs, sounded above me upon this day with amplitude and yet with
menace. The silence was a solace when it ceased to boom. The Creed, the
oldest of our chaunts, filled and completed those walls; it was as
though at last a battle had been joined, and in that issue a great
relief ran through the crowd.
* * * * *
From such a temple I came out at last. They had thrown the western doors
wide open, the doors whose hinges man scarcely could have hammered and
to whose miracle legend has lent its aid; the midday, now captured by
the sun, came right into the hollow simplicity of the nave, and caught
the river of people as they flowed outwards; but even that and the cry
of the Benediction from the altar gave no greater peace than an appeal
to combat. In the air outside that other power stood waiting to conquer
or to fail.
I came out, as from a camp, into the civilian debate, the atmosphere of
the spectators. The permanent and toppling influence against which this
bulwark of ours, the Faith, was reared (as we say) by God Himself,
shouted in half the prints, in half the houses. I sat down to read and
compare (as it should be one's custom when one is among real and
determining things) the writings of the extreme, that is of the leading
men. I chose the two pamphleteers who are of equal weight in this war,
but of whom one only is known as yet to us in England, and that the
least.
I read their battle-cries. Their style was excellent; their good faith
shone even in their style.
Since I had been upon phrases all these hours I separated and remembered
the principal words of each. One said: "They will break their teeth
against it. The Catholic Church is not to perish, for she has allies
from outside Time." The other said: "How long will the death of this
crucified god linger? How long will his agony crush men with its
despair?"
But I read these two writers for my entertainment only, and in order to
be acquainted with men around me; for on the quarrel between them I had
long ago made up my mind.