anywhere, given only that there is sufficient arable land near by, a
river that will afford power, and a site with some elements of natural
beauty. They will grow from small beginnings,--a few families and
individuals at first, though the number must be sufficient to establish
the identity and the autonomy of the group. The members will be those
for whom the present type of social life is not good enough, either in
fact or in promise; men and women who think alike on a few essential
matters, who still maintain the standard of comparative values of the
world before modernism, and who wish to live simply, as happily as
possible, and to restore the lost ideals of justice, honour, chivalry
and brotherly coöperation. While fulfilling all their obligations to
government as it is now established--paying taxes, rendering military
service and jury duty, and voting in those occasional cases when there
is a remote chance of its doing any good--they will yet set up for
themselves a community, self-supporting in so far as this is possible,
with its own government, its educational system, its social organism
and its regulations controlling the mode of life of its members to the
extent that is necessary to carry out the fundamental principles of the
association.
The phrase “Walled Towns” is symbolical only; it does not imply the
great ramparts of masonry with machicolated towers, moats, drawbridges
and great city gates such as once guarded the beautiful cities of the
Middle Ages. It might, of course; there is no reason why a city should
not so protect itself from the world without, if its fancy led in this
pictorial direction; and after all, anyone who has been so fortunate
as to live for a time in an ancient walled town, even under modernism,
knows how potent is the psychological force of grey, guarding walls,
with the little city within, and beyond the gates not only the fields
and orchards and vineyards as they were in the old days, but also,
and kept aloof by the ancient walls, the railways and factories of
an inclement modernism. No, the adjective is symbolical merely, and
indicates the fact that around these communities there is drawn a
definite inhibition that absolutely cuts off from the town itself and
“all they that dwell therein” those things from the assault of which
refuge has been sought. I could easily imagine that these inhibitions
might vary more or less as between one Walled Town and another,
although certain general principles would be preserved everywhere,
since these would be implied in the very movement itself.
Here are certain examples of what I mean. The antithesis between
capital and labour would be impossible. Some form of a restored guild
system would be the only workable basis. Production would be normally
for use, not profit; and advertising or exploitation of any kind, or
any other form of “creating markets,” would be rigidly tabooed. Every
family would hold land sufficient for its own maintenance so far
as possible farm and garden products are concerned. Certain large,
expensive machines, by their nature not always in use, would be owned
by the community, while the transportation of surplus produce to
outside markets, the maintenance of a dairy and a canning plant,
possibly also a mill and bakery, would be communally undertaken.
As joyful living through that simplicity which follows from the
elimination of unwholesome desires is a fundamental principle, it
follows that in every case there would be a revival of the old
principle of sumptuary laws, certain things being excluded as vicious
in themselves, others as poisoning in their influence. Of course
there is great danger here, since there is the constant menace of a
pernicious infringement on that personal liberty which is an essential
of all right living. The fact is incontestable, however, that our
present intolerable social condition which seems to focus at one
point in the “high cost of living” is due to two things: first, the
multiplication during the last forty years of an incalculable number
of foolish luxuries and “amenities of life” we were far happier
without, but which now through familiarity we look on as indispensable;
second, the fact I already have referred to that more than half the
labour expended today goes to produce utterly useless, grossly ugly,
or vitiatingly luxurious commodities, while half the cost of this
ridiculous mass of superfluities goes to the tout, the drummer, the
tradesman and the advertiser. In some way the balance must be restored,
and this can be accomplished partly by regulations formally set forth,
partly by the moral force of a better type of life actually put in
process and exerting its silent influence over the people themselves.
To a great extent it would be a case of “local option” extended to
more than the question of drink. It would be neither useful nor wise
(indeed it might be actionable) for me to attempt a list of the things
we should be better off without. Each one can make his list to suit
himself, and he will be surprised, if he deals with the question
frankly, at the length of the schedule.
There is no way in which life can be brought back to a sane
and wholesome and noble basis except through the recovery of a
right religion and a right philosophy, the establishing of a new
industrial and commercial system as radically opposed to the
insanities of Bolshevism as it is to the sinister efficiency of the
capitalist-proletarian _régime_, and by the elimination of the
useless and crushing impedimenta that have been heaped upon us by
“labour-saving” machines, the craft and ingenuity of misguided
inventors, and the monumental ability of the system of advertising.
Within the deadly coil of life as it is now irrevocably fixed by the
society of today, there is no possibility of escape (barring the
threatened success of Marxian socialism as this has taken shape in
internationalism and Bolshevism), for the individual is helpless,
bound hand and foot by the forces of custom, public opinion, lethargy
and luxury, and by what Dr. Jacks so well calls “the tyranny of mere
things.” So the real men felt in the time of St. Benedict, and of St.
Odo of Cluny and St. Robert of Molesmes, of St. Norbert and St. Francis
and St. Dominic and St. Bruno. They left the world in order that they
might regain it, even though their eyes were fixed on a heavenly
country. For themselves and their followers they gained a better type
of life than the world could then offer, and their deeds lived after
them in centuries of a regenerated life.
It is our habit of mind to think of the period of decline and
catastrophe that intervenes between one era and the next as something
awful and ominous, when the whole world realizes the horror of change
and is sunk in black despair. In this we are undoubtedly as wrong as
we are in the case of our interpretation of history. St. Augustine
and St. Jerome saw the significance of the fall of the Roman Empire,
but such other documentary evidence as exists would indicate that the
Romans as a whole took it much as a matter of course, with little
sense of the vastness of the catastrophe and the plenitude of the
humiliation. In the ninth century men were so steeped in the universal
sin and corruption they ceased to retain any perspective whatever.
Very likely while Marozia and her clan were turning Rome and the
Church into a monstrous offence against decency, the general public,
as well as the world-wide corrupting influences themselves, thought
that their “civilization” was really not so bad after all. The same is
true of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the beginnings
of the Renaissance dazzled man’s eyes to the tragedy of the ending
of Mediævalism and the fast growing profligacy in act and thought.
We ourselves are in similar case. We are so near the events that
are bringing modernism to an end that we can estimate them not at
all in their true nature. Read any newspaper of today, talk with any
“practical business man,” or indeed almost any clergyman, educator or
professed “philosopher,” and you will find the attitude of mind that
looks on the war and the current beginnings of social revolution as
untoward episodes, the insane creations of froward men, that only need
time and patience for the crushing, to permit the world to go on again
just as before, only faster and more gloriously, towards the iridescent
apotheosis of democratic politics, imperial business, scientific
acquisition, and the reign of reason. The incubus of the thing-that-is
cannot be shifted and, as so many times before, it is only ruthless
catastrophe that can bring it to an end.
Similarly we do not realize how new a thing is this tyranny of the
material product, this obsession of the machine and the things it
produces, the ideas and habits and superstitions it generates. I am
not so old a man, as lives run, but I can still remember the old
patriarchal life of the New England countryside before the juggernaut
that crushed wholesome society and sane living had begun its fatal
course. In the year 1880, when I first knew a great city, there were
only three forces then in operation which differentiated its growth
that had not existed in the time of Cæsar--steam as power, the electric
telegraph and the elevator, the last a novelty of less than ten years’
existence. The great forces that were to transform society had been in
existence for varying periods: some from the Renaissance, some from the
Reformation, some from the Civil Wars in England, some from the French
Revolution, some from the mechanical discoveries between 1767 and 1830,
some from our own Civil War. It is not until the latter date, however,
that they became fully operative; and the incubus we would now remove,
if we could, and if we fully realized its nature, is actually the
creation of the last fifty years.
I have said above that I clearly remember the old _régime_ as it stood
at the opening of this fifty-year period of monstrous aggregation,
exaggeration and acceleration, and this memory, together with some
thirty years of study of Mediæval civilization, has much to do with
the conviction that man cannot be free or sane or reasonably happy
until he forcibly tears himself (or forcibly is torn) from the deadly
evil of modernism in which he is enmeshed. The positive memory may help
to show something of that to which I conceive we must return.
In the year 1870 my grandfather’s place was to all intents and purposes
what it had been since the first portion of the old house was built
during the reign of William and Mary. He was “The Squire” in his
family and over the community, as his fathers had been before him for
two centuries. If wills were to be drawn, land surveyed, property
transferred, family quarrels adjusted, the duty fell upon him. From
a material point of view the house and the farm and the way of life
were as they had been. There was, I think, a mechanical corn-sheller,
but I remember no other new-fangled mechanical device. The wheat for
flour was grown on the place and ground at a near-by mill. Until but
a few years before, the wool and flax for clothing and linen were
also of home production, while the great loom was still in its place
in the dim attic with its odour of thyme and beeswax. In addition
to all the necessary fruits and vegetables, all the butter, cheese,
bacon, hams came from the estate. So of course did the honey and the
metheglyn, or honey-wine as you read of it in Chaucer, which, I verily
believe, was made there last of all places in the world. To a great
extent the life was still communal. For mowing, planting, harvesting,
shearing, husking, the farmers came together to work in common, while
the disability of one brought the others together to do his work.
Communal also in a sense was the household. Many a time have I awakened
as a boy, between lavender-scented homespun sheets, and beneath a
wonderful woven coverlet, to dress in the early dawn and go down to the
long kitchen with its eight-foot fireplace, to find all the feminine
portion of the household preparing such a breakfast as the present
day cannot afford; and later I have watched the neighbors gathered in
the “east room” ingeniously “drawing in” rugs and mats of marvellous
(if not strictly artistic) design and colour. As was the custom in
that country, the house was double, the eldest son occupying the new
wing until in time he removed to the old part and his son in turn
took the new. It was a place of tradition, of immemorial custom, of
self-respecting because arduous life, and every inch of ancient house,
of vast and rambling barns, even of the fields and pastures, gardens
and orchards and woodland, was redolent of old history, of permanence,
of stability, of dignity and of a vivid liberty.
Here was no telephone, no automobile, no elaborate collection of
complicated and costly machines, no flood of cheap newspapers,
magazines or other “literature,” no weekly expedition to the “movies,”
no ready-made clothes that must be constantly replaced or that annually
went out of fashion, no pianola or graphophone, no “art-furniture,” no
candy and cheap drinks and fruit out-of-season. Neither was there any
labour problem, or strikes or poverty or high-cost-of-living.
“A hard life”? Yes, in a way, but its hardness was more than balanced
by what it gave: self-respect, liberty, freedom from the tyranny and
oppression of outside forces; above all, _character_, and of a strength
and simplicity and fineness it would be hard to match today. I do not
doubt that country and village life as it was then in the North, and
had been in the South until ten years before (not as it had become in
another twenty years when the new forces had begun to seep in), was
more productive of real happiness and of sterling character than has
been any form of life that has developed since.
Of course there was the other side to the case. Life then, good as
it was, lacked some of the qualities that existed in the Middle
Ages, the loss of which was a serious handicap. There was a hard and
unlovely religion, the arts had wholly disappeared, and the exquisite
environment man had always made for himself had vanished from life. The
stimulus and the vital communal sense of the old guilds, the games,
the merrymaking, the living religious practices, had faded into a
colder and more austere neighbourliness. The comradeship of pilgrimage
and common adventure and “church ales” had vanished utterly, and in
every way life was becoming more drab and colourless. Much remained,
however, though in a vanishing estate, of the clean and simple and
wholesome life of a dead past, and in comparison with the common life
of today, on the farm, in the factory, in village or great city, it
must commend itself in such degree that many sacrifices are worth while
if we can win it back. Win it back, but not as it stood then. Out of
a farther past must come many things to enrich its content and make
more beautiful its condition. Out of the present must come much also.
An archæological or artificial restoration would be as undesirable as
it is impossible. What modernism has given--or sold--that is in itself
good, must be retained, and this is much. The trouble is the good is
so intricately mixed with the bad that the untangling seems almost
hopeless. Since our standard of comparative values is so distorted we
have no sound basis from which we can set to work. Only through the
process of what is really a new spiritual enlightenment, manifesting
itself through both religion and philosophy, can the task be
accomplished, for no ingenious engine, no clever device, no political
panacea will prove even of temporary value. Probably the control of
this spiritual stimulus is out of our hands; it usually is, being
granted to men at times, at other times withheld. While we await the
issue we can at least try humbly, and perhaps doubtfully, if we cannot
take the first steps towards earning the indispensable boon, and it may
be the first step will be into Walled Towns.
IV
Beaulieu is a Walled Town and it lies about forty miles from one of the
largest cities of New England. The forty-mile road is in all things
about what such a road is today; the same industrial suburbs, with
the further fringe of slate-grey tenements in their dreary and dirty
yards, then the subsidiary towns of dull or flamboyant cottages, barren
railway stations, third-rate shops, harsh factories, each separated
from the next by marshes or barrens where refuse is dumped, and
speculative roads and house-lots cry their unsavoury wares. Little by
little decent residences crop up and so the ring of reasonable opulence
is reached,--now as then good so far as nature is let alone, bad where
the architect and landscapist and gardener exercise their ingenuity.
Farms follow, and pasture and woodland, unkempt but inoffensive,
sometimes even beautiful when the hand of man has been withheld.
Three or four ambitious and growing towns break the good country,
each contributing of its own in the shape of mills, slums, wastes,
commercial architecture, gaudy signs, hurry, noise, dust and bad
smells. After the last there is an interval of comparative quiet and
decency while the road runs through a respectable forest, rising as it
enters among low hills, with a glimpse of water here and there, a small
lake, a brook, and at last a fairly wide view.
On the bridge the view changes. There is something different in the
lands beyond, though the difference is at first intangible. It is
farming land for some two or three miles in front and reaching in a
wide sweep right and left, while beyond the land rises swiftly with a
rather thick growth of large trees above which lift two or three grey
stone towers, and a silvery spire, very delicate and lofty; a view that
might be in any English county or in France or the Rhineland. The farms
are evidently under high cultivation, divided into rather small fields
by hedgerows marked by an unusual number of well-kept trees. There
are few farmhouses but many large barns of stone somewhat suggesting
those of western Pennsylvania. Such houses as there are, are also
of stone in great part, with brick here and there and considerable
white plaster. The well-built road is, as before, crowded with motor
vehicles, but two things have wholly ceased at the river--advertising
signs and smoking factory chimney; as far as the eye can see neither is
visible.
The zone of farms is quickly passed and then comes a space of orchards
and vineyards; the highway divides, one branch to the right, another
to the left, and at the fork stands a stone shrine with the figure of
St. Christopher; practically all the motors go to the right, but we
take the road to the left, which curves sharply after a few hundred
yards, crosses a stone bridge of a single arch over a narrow but swift
river, and is intercepted by a long, irregular mass of stone buildings
with many mullioned windows, and a lofty tower something like that of
St. John’s College in Cambridge, with a broad, high, pointed arch, and
a chain reaching from side to side, blocking the way to all wheeled
traffic. This is the Bar Gate of the Walled Town of Beaulieu, and here
all automobiles must stop, for they are not permitted within the town.
There is a good garage on one side; a sort of inn and a livery stable
on the other, where one may hire a carriage or saddle horses, which
alone are allowed inside the gates.
The rambling grey-stone building, which in parts rises sheer from the
river’s edge and is not unlike Warwick Castle, serves many purposes.
The octroi is strict and all goods brought into the town for sale
must pay a varying _ad valorem_ tax, while the “liberty of the town”
is granted to outsiders only on payment of a small fee. No one can
sell in the town without a license, while some things are wholly
prohibited, such, for example, as those things that would compete with
native products, whether of food-stuffs, manufacture or artisanship,
and those articles which the town has prohibited as deleterious or as
“useless luxuries.” A bailiff and council of three sit here in a fine
stone-vaulted room opening off the great gate, for three hours each
morning, to issue their licenses or prohibitions. Here also are the
town telephones and telegraphs, for while these as well as motor cars
are recognized as necessities on emergency occasions, they are held to
be “useless luxuries” as private possessions and are forbidden within
the walls. There is nothing to prevent a townsman owning and using
a motor car or private telephone beyond the town walls, if he likes,
though this is looked on with disfavour, and as a matter of fact is
unusual. In the early days of this, as of all Walled Towns, and to some
extent thereafter, those who became townsmen continued their business
or professions “in the world outside the walls,” that is to say in
some neighboring city, and the jurisdiction of the Walled Town did not
extend beyond its own precincts and lands. Usually in a few years’
time these men adapted themselves to the town life and law, giving up
their outside interests and becoming “Burgesses of the Free City” with
their interests and material activities concentrated within its limits.
Conduct of government is wholly within the hands of these burgesses.
As for the town telephones and motor cars, their use is free to all
townsmen in cases of illness or other recognized emergency.
Over the gate-tower floats the big banner of the town, above the arch
is its coat of arms emblazoned in colour and gold, and within the
gate are always two halberdiers on guard. This is not affectation
or a wilful mediævalism, but because all the Walled Towns know the
value of symbolism and use it universally and intelligently. All civic
ceremonials, indeed all the common acts of the town officials, are
carried out with much show and dignity and magnificence. There are
fine robes of office, precise etiquette, elaborate functions; nothing
is done casually or haphazard, but with dignity, beauty and a real
pride in the nobility of the communal life. Long before the founding
of the first Walled Town it was generally known that the depravity,
or at least the incompetence, that had become chronic in civic life,
was partially due to the false “democracy” which had shorn it of every
vestige of dignity, of ceremonial, of difference from the common
affairs of business life, and the potency of symbolism was one of the
original elements in the great revolution which brought the Walled
Towns into existence.
Passing now under the great echoing vault of the Bar Gate, we come at
once into the town itself. There is first of all a small square or
market-place with rather thickly set, stone-built and gabled house,
with glimpses between, and through occasional archways, into gardens
behind. On one side is the Exchange, a considerable building with an
open arcade along its front; it is here that the surplus products
of the town are sold--grain and farm produce, cloth, or whatever it
may be that is paid through the tax in kind or placed in the hands
of the Exchange officials for sale outside the community. The main
street leads from the square and curves up a slight grade. Here the
houses are well separated, with garden walls between, sometimes
pierced by grated openings that give more glimpses of gardens around
and behind. As in the old days, these houses are mostly workshops
and salesrooms as well as residences, for this is the street of
craftsmen of all sorts--workers in metals, wood, leather; potters,
embroiderers, tailors; carvers in stone, painters, makers of musical
instruments. Every craft and art that is needed by the townspeople
is found here, for one of the foundation stones of the Walled Towns
is self-sufficiency; that is to say, everything ordinarily needful
is produced by the town for the town, the necessities that cannot be
furnished because of physical and climatic difficulties being reduced
to the smallest number. Coffee and tea, a few spices, tropical fruits,
rice, tobacco, cotton, silk and certain wines are beyond the contriving
of a Walled Town in the north temperate zone and must be imported; but
this is done by town officials, who are paid salaries, and the goods
are resold at a standard advance on the wholesale cost. Everything
that is possible is produced within the town itself, and either by
individual craftsmen or, where bulk products are necessary, in the
workshops maintained by the community under the charge of a special and
salaried group of officials.