_and_ assumes peculiar and recondite learning. That long title
"Longueruana" sounds like the devil and all! You will be surprised
to hear that the reference is to a rubbishy book of guess-work, with
no pretence to historical value, run together by a Frenchman of the
eighteenth century; from this Frenchman did Gibbon take the absurdity
of St. George originating with George of Cappadocia. I was at the
pains of looking this up--perhaps the first, and certainly the last, of
my generation to do so.
Another vice of the footnote (equally illustrated in that lie of
Gibbon's about St. George) is what I may call its use as the "footnote
of exception." It is universal to-day. You say something which is false
and then you quote in a footnote one or more authorities supporting
it. Any one can do it: and if the reader is reasonably ignorant of
the subject the trick always succeeds. Thus, one might say that the
earth was flat and put in a footnote two or three references to the
flat-earth pamphlets of which I have a little collection at home. I
am told that a wealthy lady, the widow of a brewer, supported the
Flat-Earth society which published these tracts and that upon her death
it collapsed. It may be so.
The next step of the footnote in iniquity was when it became a mask.
Who started this I know not, but I should imagine that the great German
school which remodelled history in the nineteenth century was to blame.
At any rate their successors the French are now infinitely worse. I
have seen a book purporting to be a history in which of every page
not more than a quarter was text, and the rest a dreary regiment of
references. There is no doubt at all about the motives, mixed though
they are. There is the desire of the fool to say "Though I can't digest
the evidence, yet I _know_ it. Here it is." There is the desire of the
timid man to throw up fortification. There is the desire of the pedant
to show other pedants as well as the general reader (who, by the way,
has almost given up reading such things, they have become so dull) that
he also has been in Arcadia.
I notice that when anything is published without such footnotes, the
professional critic--himself a footnoter of the deepest dye--accuses
the author of romancing. If you put in details of the weather, of
dress and all the rest of it, minutely gathered from any amount of
reading, but refuse to spoil a vivid narrative with the snobbery and
charlatanism of these perpetual references, the opponent takes it for
granted that you have not kept your notes and cannot answer him; and
indeed, as a rule, you have not kept your notes and you cannot answer
him.
For the most part, these enormous, foolish, ill-motived accretions
are honest enough in their actual references, for the greater part of
our modern historians who use them are so incapable of judgment and
so lacking in style, so averse from what Rossetti called "fundamental
brain-work," that they have not the power to do more than shovel all
their notes on you in a lump and call it history. But now and then this
temptation to humbug produces its natural result, and the references
are false.
The late Mr. Andrew Lang used to say that the writer who writes under
the pseudonym of "Anatole France" must have had his footnotes for
his _Life of Joan of Arc_ done by contract. The idea opens up a wide
horizon. A man of name would sit down to write a general history
of something of which he had a smattering, and would then turn it
over to a poor man who would hack for him in the British Museum and
find references--and they could always be found--for pretty well any
statement he had chosen to make.
At any rate, in this particular case of Anatole France's _Joan of Arc_,
Andrew Lang amply proved that the writer had never read his original
authorities, though he quoted them in heaps.
And that reminds me of another footnote vice (the subject is a perfect
jungle of vices!), which is the habit of copying other people's
footnotes. I did it myself when I was young; I was lured into it by
Oxford and I ask pardon of God and man. It is very common, and a little
ingenuity will hide one's tracks. A learned man who was also civilised
and ironical--but much too sparing in wine--told me once this amusing
story.
He was reading up an economic question, and he found himself
perpetually referred to a pamphlet of the late seventeenth century
wherein was a certain economic statement upon the point of his
research. Book after book referred him to this supposed statement,
but he being, as I have said, a learned, civilised, and ironical man
(though too sparing in wine) concluded from his general knowledge--and
very few learned men have general knowledge--that, in the words of
the Old Kent Road murderer, "There must be some mistake." He couldn't
believe any seventeenth-century pamphlet had said what this oft-quoted
pamphlet was made responsible for.
He proceeded to look up the pamphlet, the references to which followed
him about like a dog through all his research. He found there were two
copies--and only two. One was in a certain public library, the other
in a rich man's house. The public library was far off, and the rich
man was nearer by--an hour's journey in the train. So he wrote to the
rich man and asked him whether he might look at this pamphlet in the
library which his ancestors had accumulated, but to which the rich man
had added nothing, being indeed indifferent to reading and writing. The
rich man very politely answered that his library had unfortunately been
burnt down, and that the pamphlet had been burnt with it. Whereupon
the learned man was at the pains of taking a long journey to consult
the copy kept in the public library. He discovered two things: (_a_)
that the copy had never been used at all--it was uncut; (_b_) that the
references always given had hardly any relation to the actual text.
Then did he, as is the habit of all really learned people, go and
waste a universe of energy in working out the textual criticism of the
corruption, and he proved that the last time any one had, with his own
eyes, really seen that particular passage, instead of merely pretending
that he had seen it, was in the year 1738--far too long ago! Ever
since then the reference had been first corrupted and then copied and
recopied its corrupted form by the University charlatans.
But I myself have had a similar experience (as the silent man said
when his host had described at enormous length his adventure with the
tiger). I was pursued for years by a monstrous piece of nonsense about
some Papal Bull forbidding chemical research: and the footnote followed
that lie. It was from Avignon that the thing was supposed to have come.
It seemed to me about as probable as that Napoleon the Third should
have forbidden the polka. At last--God knows how unwillingly!--I looked
the original Bull up in the big collection printed at Lyons. It was
as I had suspected. The Bull had nothing whatever to do with chemical
experiments. It said not a word against the honest man who produces a
poison or an explosive mixture to the greater happiness of the race. It
left the whole world free to pour one colourless liquid into another
colourless liquid and astonish the polytechnic with their fumes. What
it _did_ say was that if anybody went about collecting lead and brass
under the promise of secretly turning them into silver and gold, that
man was a liar and must pay a huge fine, and that those whom he had
gulled must have their metal restored to them--which seems sound
enough.
Here you will say to me what is said to every reformer: "What would you
put in its place if you killed the little footnote, all so delicate and
compact? How could you replace it? How can we know that the historian
is telling the truth unless he gives us his references? It is true that
it prevents history from being properly written and makes it, to-day,
unreadable. It is true that it has become charlatan and therefore
historically almost useless. But you must have some guarantee of
original authority. How will you make sure of it?"
I should answer, let a man put his footnotes in very small print indeed
at the end of a volume, and, if necessary, let him give specimens
rather than a complete list. For instance, let a man who writes history
as it should be written--with all the physical details in evidence, the
weather, the dress, colours, everything--write on for the pleasure of
his reader and not for his critic. But let him take sections here and
there, and in an appendix show the critic how it is being done. Let him
keep his notes and challenge criticism. I think he will be secure. He
will not be secure from the anger of those who cannot write clearly,
let alone vividly, and who have never in their lives been able to
resurrect the past, but he will be secure from their destructive effect.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] I should have said, _nothing_.
[2] This is a good opportunity, observe:--Gibbon, _Dec. and Fall of
Rom. Emp._, Ed. 1831 (Cassell), Chap. XXIII, Par. 27, n. 125. Does it
not look impressive?
A FEW KIND WORDS TO MAMMON
A friend of mine once wrote a parable ("and if these words should meet
his eye," etc.). I have not seen it written down. It may have been
written down. But in its verbal form it was something like this (as it
was told to me).
A number of candidates were offered what they would choose. But they
could choose only one thing each. The first chose health. And the
second, beauty. And the third, virtue. And the fourth, form. And the
fifth, ticklishness, which means an active sense. And the sixth,
forgetfulness. And the seventh, honesty. And the eighth, immunity from
justice. And the ninth, courage. And the tenth, experience. And the
eleventh, the love of others for him. And the twelfth, his love for
others. But the thirteenth (they were thirteen, including Judas) chose
_money_. And he chose wisely, for in choosing this, all the others were
added unto him.
If ever I complete that book which I began in the year 1898 called
"Advice to a Young Man" (I was twenty-eight years of age at the moment
I undertook it) it will there be apparent by example, closely reasoned
argument, and (what is more convincing than all) rhetoric, that money
is the true source of every delight, satisfaction, and repose.
Do not imagine that, upon this account, I advise the young to seek
money in amounts perpetually extending. Far from it! I advise the young
(in this my uncompleted book) to regulate their thirst for money most
severely.
"Great sums of money" (said I, and say I) "are only to be obtained by
risking ruin, and of a hundred men that run the risk ninety-nine get
the ruin and only one the money." But money as a solid object; money
pursued, accumulated, possessed, enjoyed, bearing fruit: that is the
captain good of human life.
When people say that money is only worth what it will purchase, and
that it will purchase only certain things, they invariably make a
category of certain material things which it will purchase, and imagine
or hope that it will purchase no more. And these categories, remember,
are drawn up always by unmoneyed men. For your moneyed man has no need
to work and therefore no need to draw up categories, which is a very
painful form of toil. They say money will purchase motor-cars and
bathrooms--several bathrooms--and foods and drinks and the rest of
it--and then its power is exhausted.
These fools leave out two enormous chapters--the biggest chapters of
the lot. They leave out the services of other men, always purchasable.
And they leave out the souls of other men often purchasable. With
money in a sufficient amount you can purchase any service, and with
money you can purchase many individual souls.
Now, that is important.
Take the purchasing of services with money. You start a newspaper.
Perhaps you cannot write very well yourself. I have known very many
extremely rich men whose writing was insignificant--never persuasive
or enduring in effect. The greater part of them cannot write for more
than a few minutes without breaking down. Just as an elderly man cannot
play Rugby football for more than a few minutes or so without breaking
down. But they can hire men to write. And they do. They do not exactly
buy the souls of those men they hire. They only buy the services. Often
enough have I had a pleasant talk with one of these serfs in private
when his daily task was done (at from one to three thousand a year)
concerning the vices of his master and the follies which he (the serf)
had had to defend with his pen.
But to be able to purchase the services of men thus (I am only speaking
of my own trade, but all other trades are equally purchasable, and the
lawyers actually _advertise_ that they are purchasable!)--to be able, I
say, to purchase services thus is a category ridiculously neglected by
those who pretend that money brings nothing but material enjoyment.
It brings, for instance, immunity from the criminal law. At least
it does to-day. It did not until modern times even here, but it does
to-day. If you doubt it, take a little bit of paper and mark the men
who have been sent to prison during your own lifetime _while_ possessed
(not _after having been_ possessed) of five thousand a year. It is an
instructive winter game.
But if money can purchase services it can also, with less certitude,
but on a very large scale, purchase those other little things we
noted--the souls of men. Here there is a distinction.
When you purchase a service you do not necessarily purchase a soul. You
only purchase a soul when, by the action of your money, you corrupt
the individual. I do not say "corrupt him beyond all salvation," but,
at any rate, beyond any remaining desire for salvation. When, for
instance, by the possession of money, you acquire the respect of a man,
you are, to a small extent, purchasing his soul. When by the action of
money you make a man fall into certain habits which at last become his
character, you are purchasing a soul.
I keep on saying "you," though I know well enough, wretched reader,
that you are in no position to do all this. In fact, you find it the
devil and all to purchase what is necessary for your household. If you
are a man with a thousand a year, for instance (there have just passed
my window three men with a good deal less, not judged by their clothes
but by my knowledge of them in a countryside), then you are worth what
was called before the war about four hundred pounds a year. Taxation
and Inflation, the twin gods that rhyme, have done for the rest.
If you are what they called before the war a rich man (you will excuse
me, but random essays are read by all sorts of people), if you were,
say, a squire with six thousand a year, you are now worth what your
local scribbler at two thousand a year was worth before the war.
Horrible but true. So when I say "you," I only do so by way of rhetoric
and of shorthand. I cannot be pestered to know what each of you is
exactly worth, and, upon my soul, as things now are, I do not think any
one of you exactly knows.
To return. I say that money, acting thus, purchases souls. It purchases
souls not only in regardant, but in gross. In regardant, I may explain,
means "as regards the particular relation between one soul and its
purchaser," while in gross means "of the world in general."
Thus a man may be a serf regardant when he is a serf to a particular
lord, but not a serf in his general status. Or he may be a serf in
gross, that is, a serf to anybody who comes across him. And in the
same way, there is a cad regardant and a cad in gross, and still more
is there a coward regardant and a coward in gross. For instance, a man
may be a general coward, and that is being a coward in gross, or he may
be a particular coward in the matter of riding a particular horse, and
then he is only a coward regardant.
I say, then, that the power of your money to purchase souls may be in
gross or regardant. It may purchase a particular soul, in which case,
God help you! Or it may have a general effect upon All Souls (I mean
not the College but the generality of mankind, for whom I postulate
souls), and in this case you are not perhaps very much to blame. It is
rather their fault than yours.
When your money has purchased souls in gross--gross souls in gross and
grossly purchased by the gross--it means that you are worshipped for
your money, and this is as common a worship as the worship men give to
their country.
There is a kind of insufficiency--I had almost called it idiocy--which
tries to shuffle out of this valuable truth by pointing to particular
cases (there are perhaps half a dozen at one time in a great community
like ours) of men who, possessing great wealth, are yet not respected.
But you will find that these are exceptions who have deliberately done
all that they could not to be respected. The ruck of men with large
fortunes are respected for all those things which money is supposed to
bring--justice, kindliness, humour, temperance, courage and judgment.
And even the very few rich men who are not respected are still admired
for some mystical quality. "There must have been something in the man
for him to have made half a million before he was forty."
I should have said, "There must have been something lacking in other
men for this guttersnipe to have got so much out of them," but I am
here deliberately the devil's advocate, and I know that I have not a
leg to stand on.
If you are possessed of great wealth ... (Digression: Little wealth is
disgusting, like mediocrity in verse. If you are going in for being
wealthy you must be very wealthy or not wealthy at all. Anywhere
in a plutocracy may you see the very wealthy hobnobbing with poor
hack-writers and versifiers and essay writers and such, but never with
the quarter-wealthy or the eighth-wealthy) ... if you are possessed
of great wealth, I say you are, in a plutocracy, a great man. You are
both loved and feared; everywhere respected and also admired. Your good
qualities are as enduring as stone; your evil qualities are either
transformed into something slight and humorous or sublimated till they
disappear.
There is more than this. Something goes on within yourself. Because
you are respected and admired you become more solid. You envisage your
faults sanely. You are far from morbid. If you have the manhood to
correct your failings, you correct them temperately. You have poise
and grasp. If, more wisely, you indulge your foibles--why, that is
a pardonable recreation. Your judgments are well-founded. You are
tempted to nothing rash or perilous. You may be led, for the relief of
tedium, into some slight eccentricity or other, but that will give you
the more initiative and a strong personality: not exactly genius, for
genius is a zigzag thing, burning and darting, unsuited to the true
greatness of wealth. It has not enough ballast and repose.
What is most important of all, those whose permanent affection you
ardently desire, those whose good you crave, those whose respect you
hunger for like food, will all of them at once respond to your desire
if money backs it. You can give them what they really need, and you
can give it them unexpectedly when they really need it. Thus do they
associate you with happiness. You, meanwhile, can behave with the
leisure that produces their respect. Gratitude will do the rest, or, at
any rate, security, and the habit of knowing that from _you_ proceeds
so much good.
Thus does dear Mammon give us half a Paradise on earth and a fine
security within. Mammon is an Immediate Salvation. And the price you
pay for that Salvation is not so very heavy after all: only a creeping
gloom; a despair, turning iron and threatening to last for ever.
So the whole thing may be summed up in a sentence that runs in my
head more or less like this: "Make unto you friends of the Mammon
of iniquity that they may receive you into their _everlasting_
habitations." My italics.
ON TREVES
As I stood in Treves Market Place the other day after an absence
of seven years (and the war in between) I could not but wonder
whether--since the tide in Europe has turned--the city would not
recover what is, if they only knew it, the glory of these German
towns: its individual tradition; its private excellence; its pride in
antiquity.
Treves as an outer frontier thing is unworthy of its history. Treves
was never meant to be a dependency of vulgar Prussia. It is as old as
Europe. It has, like all those towns of the Rhine basin--of which it
is the last Western example--a faculty for preserving what is old and
an active tradition within it of the Roman Empire. It was a provincial
capital of that Empire just at the moment of the transition before
the central government broke down, and the story of it from that time
onwards has never been interrupted. There are many modern authorities
who pretend (basing their thesis upon guesswork) that Treves and this
lower valley of the Moselle was once Celtic--or, as we say to-day,
French--that it was just like Toul, or Metz, or Verdun, but that the
district was later overflowed by German speech; that it was invaded.
There is no real or certain evidence for any change in the boundaries
of German speech towards the West within recorded time. The various
German dialects (which were, of course, not original at the beginning
of our recorded history, but were already more than half Latin in their
wording) reached to a certain limit which they have not overpassed
in two thousand years, but from which also they have not receded.
Treves, I take it, was what to-day we call _German_ just as much when
Priscillian was there condemned as it is to-day.
The stamp of Rome is set upon it very largely, as it is upon everything
German west of the central forests and the waste Baltic land. And
Treves has the good fortune to have preserved great monuments of that
time. The Black Gate is the most famous of them. But I am not sure that
the restored Basilica, though most of its bricks are new, does not
affect the traveller more.
You might come upon that Basilica of Treves in Ravenna, and it would
not be out of place. By a nice irony, its strict, solemn simplicity,
its high, blind arches, regular and repetitive, its vast blank of
wall, and all that reminds you of the later Cæsars, were given over
for use as a garrison church to dull Pomeranium men from hundreds of
miles away, a garrison which has now disappeared. By a nice irony,
this astounding thing, instinct with Rome, was used for the artificial
parade of Prussians who were as little native to Treves as one breed
of similarly speaking men could be to another. This great church and
the Black Gate at the other end of the town, piled up enormous above
the market centre, are the chief standing recollections of that moment
when the Empire had just settled into its Christian mould. They saw
St. Martin coming in, as Milan had seen him. They saw the crowds that
besieged the Imperial Courts when the Spanish bishop was condemned.
They saw the procession that moved out to his beheading.
And there is a third point in Treves which arrests one still more,
although it is broken to an old ruin, and that is the remaining decayed
defence of the old palace. It has been built up, and rebuilt up with
rough stone, through the Dark Ages, so that now you look at the rude
courses and the rough, half-buried arches as you look at a piece of
Pevensey or Richborough. But the very fact of its continuous decline in
grandeur recalls its continuous use, and you can stand in a roofless
room which held in turn the Apostate and the giant Maximin, and which
heard the high, piping voice of Charlemagne, incongruous with his tall
presence and dignity.
All that great transition from the pagan to the mediæval Europe one
feels more at Treves even than one does at Aix; and this, I suppose, is
because the roots of Treves go deeper; but partly, also, because Treves
is more of a border town.