grudge against the Professor. For it was a stiff climb to the Villa of
Tiberius, and I wanted something to show for it. It was difficult to
adjust one's mind to the fact that nothing had happened there which
might not have happened in any well-conducted country house.
I like to contrast this with our experience in Algiers. We knew
beforehand what Algiers was like in the days of its prime. It had been
the nest of as desperate pirates as ever infested the seas. For
generations innocent Christians had been carried hither to pine in
doleful captivity. But the French, we understood, had built a miniature
Paris in the vicinity and were practicing liberty, fraternity, and
equality on the spot dedicated to gloomily romantic memories. We feared
the effect of this civilization. We had our misgivings. Perhaps Algiers
might be no longer worth visiting.
Luckily our steamer was delayed till sunset. We were carefully
shepherded, so that we hardly noticed the French city. We were hurried
through the darkness into old Algiers. Everything was full of sinister
suggestion. The streets were as narrow and perilous as any which Haroun
Al Raschid explored on his more perilous nights. Here one could believe
the worst of his fellow men. Suspicion and revenge were in the air. We
were not taking a stroll, we were escaping from something. Mysterious
muffled figures glided by and disappeared through slits in the walls.
There were dark corners so suggestive of homicide that one could hardly
think that any one with an Oriental disposition could resist the
temptation. In crypt-like recesses we could see assassins sharpening
their daggers or, perhaps, executioners putting the finishing touches on
their scimitars. There were cavernous rooms where conspirators were
crouched round a tiny charcoal fire. Groups of truculent young Arabs
followed us shouting objurgations, and accepting small coins as ransom.
We had glimpses of a mosque, the outside of a prison, and the inside of
what once was a harem. On returning to the steamer one gentleman fell
overboard and, swimming to the shore, was rescued by a swarthy ruffian
who robbed him of his watch and disappeared in the darkness. When the
victim of Algerian piracy stood on the deck, dripping and indignant, and
told his tale of woe, we were delighted. Algiers would always be
something to remember. It was one of the places that had not been
spoiled.
I am afraid that the sunlight might have brought disillusion. Some of
the stealthy figures which gave rise to such thrilling suspicions may
have turned out to be excellent fathers and husbands returning from
business. As it is, thanks to the darkness, Algiers remains a city of
vague atrocities. It does not belong to the commonplace world; it is of
such stuff as dreams, including nightmares, are made of.
It is not without some compunction of conscience that I recall two
historical pilgrimages, one to Assisi, the other to Geneva. Assisi I
found altogether rewarding, while in Geneva I was disappointed. In each
case my object was purely selfish, and had nothing in common with the
welfare of the present inhabitants. I wanted to see the city of St.
Francis and the city of John Calvin.
In Assisi one may read again the Franciscan legends in their proper
settings. I should like to think that my pleasure in Assisi arose from
the fact that I saw some one there who reminded me of St. Francis. But
I was not so fortunate. If one is anxious to come in contact with the
spirit of St. Francis, freed from its mediæval limitations, a visit to
Hull House, Chicago, would be more rewarding.
But it was not the spirit of St. Francis, but his limitations, that we
were after. Assisi has preserved them all. We see the gray old town on
the hillside, the narrow streets, the old walls. We are beset by swarms
of beggars. They are not like the half-starved creatures one may see in
the slums of northern cities. They are very likable. They are natural
worshipers of my Lady Poverty. They have not been spoiled by commonplace
industrialism or scientific philanthropy. One is taken back into the
days when there was a natural affinity between saints and beggars. The
saints would joyously give away all that they had, and the beggars would
as joyously accept it. After the beggars had used up all the saints had
given them, the saints would go out and beg for more. The community, you
say, would be none the better. Perhaps not. But the moment you begin to
talk about the community you introduce ideas that are modern and
disturbing. One thing is certain, and that is that if Assisi were more
thrifty, it would be less illuminating historically.
St. Francis might come back to Assisi and take up his work as he left
it. But I sought in vain for John Calvin in Geneva. The city was too
prosperous and gay. The cheerful houses, the streets with their
cosmopolitan crowds, the parks, the schools, the university, the little
boats skimming over the lake, all bore witness to the well-being of
to-day. But what of yesterday? The citizens were celebrating the
anniversary of Jean Jacques Rousseau. I realized that it was not
yesterday but the day before yesterday that I was seeking. Where was the
stern little city which Calvin taught and ruled? The place that knew him
knows him no more.
Disappointed in my search for Calvin, I sought compensation in Servetus.
I found the stone placed by modern Calvinists to mark the spot where the
Spanish heretic was burned. On it they had carved an inscription
expressing their regret for the act of intolerance on the part of the
reformer, and attributing the blame to the age in which he lived. But
even this did not satisfy modern Geneva. The inscription had been
chipped away in order to give place I was told, to something more
historically accurate.
But whether Calvin was to blame, or the sixteenth century, did not seem
to matter. The spot was so beautiful that it seemed impossible that
anything tragical could ever have happened here. A youth and maiden were
sitting by the stone, engaged in a most absorbing conversation. Of one
thing I was certain, that the theological differences between Calvin and
Servetus were nothing to them. They had something more important to
think about--at least for them.
II
After a time one comes to have a certain modesty of expectation. Time
and Space are different elements, and each has its own laws. At the
price of a steamship ticket one may be transported to another country,
but safe passage to another age is not guaranteed. It is enough if some
slight suggestion is given to the imagination. A walk through a pleasant
neighborhood is all the pleasanter if one knows that something memorable
has happened there. If one is wise he will not attempt to realize it to
the exclusion of the present scene. It is enough to have a slight flavor
of historicity.
It was this pleasure which I enjoyed in a ramble with a friend through
the New Forest. The day was fine, and it would have been a joy to be
under the greenwood trees if no one had been before us. But the New
Forest had a human interest; for on such a day as this, William Rufus
rode into it to hunt the red deer, and was found with an arrow through
his body. And to this day no man knows who killed William Rufus, or why.
Though, of course, some people have their suspicions.
Many other things may have happened in the New Forest in the centuries
that have passed, but they have never been brought vividly to my
attention. So far as I was concerned there were no confusing incidents.
The Muse of History told one tragic tale and then was silent.
On the other side of the Forest was the Rufus stone marking the spot
where the Red King's body was found. At Brockenhurst we inquired the
way, which we carefully avoided. The road itself was an innovation, and
was infested with motor-cars, machines unknown to the Normans. The Red
King had plunged into the Forest and quickly lost himself; so would we.
There were great oaks and wide-spreading beeches and green glades such
as one finds only in England. It was pleasant to feel that it all
belonged to the Crown. I could not imagine a county council allowing
this great stretch of country to remain in its unspoiled beauty through
these centuries.
We took our frugal lunch under a tree that had looked down on many
generations. Then we wandered on through a green wilderness. We saw no
one but some women gathering fagots. I was glad to see that they were
exercising their ancestral rights in the royal domain. They looked
contented, though I should have preferred to have their dress more
antique.
All day we followed William Rufus through the Forest. I began to feel
that I had a real acquaintance with him, having passed through much the
same experience. The forest glades have been little changed since the
day when he hunted the red deer. Nature is the true conservative, and
repeats herself incessantly.
Toward evening my friend pointed out the hill at the foot of which was
the Rufus stone. It was still some two miles away. Should we push on to
it?
What should we see when we got there? The stone was not much. There was
a railing round it as a protection against relic-hunters. And there was
an inscription which, of course, was comparatively modern. That settled
it. We would not go to the stone with its modern inscription. The
ancient trees brought us much nearer to William Rufus. Besides, there
was just time, if we walked briskly, to catch the train at Brockenhurst.
III
A week which stands out in my memory as one of perfect communion with
the past was spent with another English friend in Llanthony Abbey, in
the Vale of Ewyas, in the Black Mountains of Wales. We had gone prepared
for camping with a tent of ethereal lightness, which was to protect us
from the weather.
For the first night we were to tarry amid the ruins of the
twelfth-century abbey, some parts of which had been roofed over and used
as an inn. When we arrived, the rain was falling in torrents. Soon after
supper we took our candles and climbed the winding stone stairs to our
rooms in the tower. The stones were uneven and worn by generations of
pious feet. Outside we could see the ruined nave of the church, with all
the surrounding buildings. We were in another age.
Had the sun shined next morning we should have gone on our gypsy
journey, and Llanthony Abbey would have been only an incident. But for
five days and five nights the rain descended. We could make valiant
sallies, but were driven back for shelter. Shut in by "the tumultuous
privacy of storm," one felt a sense of ownership. Only one book could be
obtained, the "Life and Letters" of Walter Savage Landor. I had always
wanted to know more of Landor and here was the opportunity.
A little over a hundred years ago he came to the vale of Ewyas and
bought this estate, and hither he brought his young bride. They occupied
our rooms, it appeared. In 1809, Landor writes to Southey, "I am about
to do what no man hath ever done in England, plant a wood of cedars of
Lebanon. These trees will look magnificent on the mountains of
Llanthony." He planted a million of them, so he said. How eloquently he
growled over those trees! He prophesied that none of them would live.
After reading, I donned my raincoat and started out through the driving
storm to see how Landor's trees were getting on. It seemed that it was
only yesterday that they were planted. It was worth going out to see
what had become of them. They were all gone. I felt that secret
satisfaction which all right-minded persons feel on being witnesses to
the fulfilment of prophecy.
And then there was the house which Landor started to build when he and
his wife were living in our tower. "I hope," he writes, "before the
close not of the next but of the succeeding summer, to have one room to
sit in with two or three bedrooms." Then he begins to growl about the
weather and the carpenters. After a while he writes again of the house:
"It's not half finished and has cost me two thousand pounds. I think
seriously of filling it with straw and setting fire to it. Never was
anything half so ugly."
I inquired about the house and was told that it was not far away on the
hillside, and was yet unfinished. I was pleased with this, and meant to
go up and see it when the spell of bad weather of which Landor
complained had passed by.
Beside Landor there was only one other historic association which one
could enjoy without getting drenched--that was St. David. In wading
across the barnyard, I encountered "Boots," an intelligent young man
though unduly respectful. He informed me that the old building just
across from the stable was the cell of St. David.
I was not prepared for this. All I knew was that St. David was the
patron saint of Wales and had a cathedral and a number of other churches
dedicated to him. Without too grossly admitting my ignorance, I tried to
draw out from my mentor some further biographical facts that my
imagination might work on during my stay. He thought that St. David was
some relation to King Arthur, but just what the relation was, and
whether he was only a relative by marriage, he didn't know. It wasn't
very much information, but I was profoundly grateful to him.
I have since read a long article on St. David in the "Cambrian
Plutarch." The author goes into the question of the family relations
between King Arthur and St. David with great thoroughness, but what
conclusion he comes to is not quite evident. He thinks that the people
are wrong who say that St. David was a nephew, because he was fifty
years older than Arthur. That would make him more likely his uncle.
But as he admits that King Arthur may possibly be another name for the
constellation Ursa Major, it is difficult to fix the dates exactly.
At any rate, the "Cambrian Plutarch" is sure that King Arthur was a
Welshman and a credit to the country--and so was St. David. The author
was as accurate in regard to the dates as the nature of his subject
would allow. He adds apologetically, "It will appear that the life of
St. David is rather misplaced with respect to chronological order. But
as he was contemporary with all those whose lives have already been
given, the anachronism, if such it may be called, can be of no great
importance."
That is just the way I feel about it. After living for a whole week
in such close contact with the residence of St. David, I feel a real
interest in him. Just who he was and when he lived, if at all, is a
matter of no great importance.
* * * * *
Yet there are limits to the historical imagination. It must have
something to work on, even though that something may be very vague. We
must draw the line somewhere in our pursuit of antiquity. A relic may be
too old to be effective. Instead of gently stimulating the imagination
it may paralyze it. What we desire is not merely the ancient but the
familiar. The relic must bring with it the sense of auld lang-syne. The
Tory squire likes to preserve what has been a long time in his family.
The traveler has the same feeling for the possessions of the family of
humanity.
The family-feeling does not go back of a certain point. I draw the line
at the legendary period when the heroes have names, and more or less
coherent stories are told of their exploits, People who had a local
habitation, but not a name, seem to belong to Geology only. For all
their flint arrow-heads, or bronze instruments, I cannot think of them
as fellow men.
It was with this feeling that I visited one of the most ancient places
of worship in Ireland, the tumulus at Newgrange. It was on a day filled
with historic sight-seeing. We started from Drogheda, the great
stronghold of the Pale in the Middle Ages, and the scene of Cromwell's
terrible vengeance in 1649. Three miles up the river is the site of the
Battle of the Boyne. It was one of the great indecisive battles of the
world, it being necessary to fight it over again every year. The Boyne
had overflowed its banks, and in the fields forlorn hay-cocks stood like
so many little islands. We stopped at the battle monument and read its
Whiggish inscription, which was scorned by our honest driver. We could
form some idea of how the field appeared on the eventful day when King
William and King James confronted each other across the narrow stream.
Then the scene changed and we found ourselves in Mellefont Abbey, the
first Cistercian monastery in Ireland, founded by St. Malachy, the
friend of St. Bernard of Clairvaux. King William and King James were at
once relegated to their proper places among the moderns, while we went
back to the ages of faith.
Four miles farther we came to Monasterboice, where stood two great
Celtic crosses. There are two ruined churches and a round tower. Here
was an early religious establishment which existed before the times of
St. Columba.
This would be enough for one day's reminiscence, but my heart leaped up
at the sight of a long green ridge. "There is the hill of Tara!"
Having traversed the period from King William to the dwellers in the
Halls of Tara, what more natural than to take a further plunge into the
past?
We drive into an open field and alight near a rock-strewn hill. Candles
are given us and we grope our way through narrow passages till we come
to the centre of the hill. Here is a chamber some twenty feet in height.
On the great stones which support the roof are mystic emblems. On the
floor is a large stone hollowed out in the shape of a bowl. It suggests
human sacrifices. My guide did not encourage this suggestion. There was,
he thought, no historical evidence for it. But it seemed to me that if
these people ever practised such sacrifices this was the place for them.
A gloomier chamber for weird rites could not be imagined.
Who were the worshipers? Druids or pre-Druids? The archæologists tell us
that they belonged to the Early Bronze period. Now Early Bronze is a
good enough term for articles in a museum, but it does not suggest a
human being. We cannot get on terms of spiritual intimacy with the Early
Bronze people. We may know what they did, but there is no intimation of
"the moving why they did it." What spurred them on to their feats of
prodigious industry? Was it fear or love? First they built their chapel
of great stones and then piled a huge hill on top of it. Were they still
under the influence of the glacial period and attempting to imitate the
wild doings of Nature? The passage of the ages does not make these men
seem venerable, because their deeds are no longer intelligible.
Mellefont Abbey is in ruins, but we can easily restore it in
imagination. We can picture the great buildings as they were before the
iconoclasts destroyed them. The prehistoric place of worship in the
middle of the hill is practically unchanged. But the clue to its meaning
is lost.
I could not make the ancient builders and worshipers seem real. It was
a relief to come up into the sunshine where people of our own kind had
walked, the Kings of Tara and their harpers, and St. Patrick and St.
Malachy and Oliver Cromwell and William III. After the unintelligible
symbols on the rocks, how familiar and homelike seemed the sculptures on
the Celtic crosses. They were mostly about people, and people whom we
had known from earliest childhood. There were Adam and Eve, and Cain
slaying Abel, and the Magi. They were members of our family.
But between us and the builders of the under-ground chapel there was a
great gulf. There was no means of spiritual communication across the
abyss. A scrap of writing, a bit of poetry, a name handed down by
tradition, would have been worth all the relics discovered by
archæologists.
There is justification for the traveler's preference for the things he
has read about, for these are the things which resist the changes of
time. Only he must remember that they are better preserved in the book
than in the places where they happened. The impression which any
generation makes on the surface of the earth is very slight. It cannot
give the true story of the brief occupancy. That requires some more
direct interpretation.
The magic carpet which carries us into any age not our own is woven by
the poets and historians. Without their aid we may travel through Space,
but not through Time.
THE OBVIOUSNESS OF DICKENS
In the college world it is a point of honor for the successive classes
to treat each other with contumely. The feud between freshman and
sophomore goes on automatically. Only when one has become a senior may
he, without losing caste, recognize a freshman as a youth of promise,
and admit that a sophomore is not half bad. Such disinterested criticism
is tolerated because it is evidently the result of the mellowing
influence of time.
The same tendency is seen in literary and artistic judgments. It is
never good taste to admit the good taste of the generation that
immediately precedes us. Its innocent admirations are flouted and its
standards are condemned as provincial. For we are always emerging from
the dark ages and contrasting their obscurity with our marvelous light.
The sixteenth century scorned the fifteenth century for its manifold
superstitions. Thomas Fuller tells us that his enlightened contempories
in the seventeenth century treated the enthusiasms of the sixteenth
century with scant respect. The price of martyrs' ashes rises and falls
in Smithfield market. At a later period Pope writes,--
"We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow:
Our wiser sons, perhaps, will think us so."
He need not have put in the "perhaps."
The nineteenth century had its fling at the artificiality of the
eighteenth century, and treated it with contempt as the age of
doctrinaires. And now that the twentieth century is coming to the age of
discretion, we hear a new term of reproach, Mid-Victorian. It expresses
the sum of all villainies in taste. For some fifty years in the
nineteenth century the English-speaking race, as it now appears, was
under the sway of Mrs. Grundy. It was living in a state of most
reprehensible respectability, and Art was tied to the apron-strings of
Morality. Everybody admired what ought not to be admired. We are only
now beginning to pass judgment on the manifold mediocrity of this era.
All this must, for the time, count against Dickens; for of all the
Victorians he was the midmost. He flourished in that most absurd period
of time--the time just before most of us were born. And how he did
flourish! Grave lord chancellors confessed to weeping over Little Nell.
A Mid-Victorian bishop relates that after administering consolation to
a man in his last illness he heard him saying, "At any rate, a new
'Pickwick Paper' will be out in ten days."
Everywhere there was a wave of hysterical appreciation. Describing his
reading in Glasgow, Dickens writes: "Such pouring of hundreds into a
place already full to the throat, such indescribable confusion, such
rending and tearing of dresses, and yet such a scene of good humor, I
never saw the slightest approach to.... Fifty frantic men got up in all
parts of the hall and addressed me all at once. Other frantic men made
speeches to the wall. The whole B family were borne on the top of a wave
and landed with their faces against the front of the platform. I read
with the platform crammed with people. I got them to lie down upon it,
and it was like some impossible tableau, or gigantic picnic,--one pretty
girl lying on her side all night, holding on to the legs of my table."
In New York eager seekers after fiction would "lie down on the pavement
the whole of the night before the tickets were sold, generally taking up
their position about ten." There would be free fights, and the police
would be called to quell the riot.
Such astonishing actions on the part of people who were unfortunate
enough to live in the middle of the nineteenth century put us on our
guard. It could not have been a serious interest in English literature
that evoked the mob spirit. Dickens must have been writing the kind of
books which these people liked to hear read. We remember with some
misgivings that in the days of our youth we wept over Little Nell, just
as the lord chancellor did. The question which disturbs us is, Ought we
to have done so?