Chapter VII (1)

Text size

EXTRACT FROM A LECTURE DELIVERED BY A PROFESSOR OF MILITARY HISTORY
ONE HUNDRED YEARS LATER, IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LIMA.

“Among the minor factors of this complicated situation was the permanent quarrel between Patagonia and Utopia, and though it has been much neglected by historians, and is, indeed, but a detail upon the flank of the great struggle of the coalition, a few moments must be given to the abortive operations in the Tusco Valley. They appear to have been conducted without any grasp of the main rules of strategy, each party advancing in a more or less complete ignorance of the position of the other, their communications parallel, their rate of advance deplorably slow, and neither possessing the information nor the initiative to strike at his opponent during a three-weeks’ march, at no point of which was either army so much as fifty miles from the other. These farcical three weeks ended in a sort of skirmish difficult to describe, and apparently confined to the extreme left of the Patagonian forces. The Utopians here effected some sort of confused advance, which was soon checked. At the other end of the line they retired before a partial movement of the enemy, effected without any apparent object, and certainly achieving no definite result. The total losses in killed and wounded were less than seven per cent of those engaged. The next day negotiations were entered into between the two generals; their weary discussion occupied a whole week, during which hostilities were suspended. The upshot of the whole thing was the retirement of the Patagonian Army under guarantees, and in consideration of the acceptation of the old frontier by the Utopian Government. Politically the campaign is beneath notice, as both territories were absorbed six months after in the recasting of the map after the Treaty of Lima, and the policing of them handed over to the now all-conquering Northern Power. Even as military history the operations deserve little more than passing notice, save, perhaps, as an example of the gross yet ever recurrent folly of placing numerically large commands in the hands of aged men. Mitza, upon the occasion of this fiasco, was over seventy-five years of age and long in his dotage, while the Prince of the Blood who had been chosen to lead (nominally, at least) the Patagonian Army was, apart from his increasing years, a notorious drunkard, and what is perhaps worse from a military point of view, daily subject to long and complete lapses of memory.”

A Descendant of William Shakespeare

It was during the early months of 1909 that I first became acquainted with a descendant of William Shakespeare the great dramatist, who happened at that moment to be in London.

This gentleman (for he was of the male sex) was one of our American visitors, and was stopping at the Carlton Hotel. His name, as he assured me, Charlemagne K. Hopper. He resided, when he was at home, in the rapidly rising township of Bismarckville, Mo., where he added to a considerable private income the profits of an extensive corn business, dealing in wheat both white and red, and of both spring and autumn varieties, maize or Indian corn, oats, rye, buckwheat of every variety, seed corn, and bearded barley; indeed, no kind of cereal was unfamiliar to this merchant. His quick eye for the market and the geniality of his character had (he convinced me) made him friends in every circle. He has the entrée to the most exclusive coteries of Albany and Buffalo, and he had that season been received by the patrons of literature in Park Lane, Clarges Street, and Belgrave Square.

Mr. Hopper’s descent from the Bard of Avon has been established but quite recently: these lines are perhaps the first to lay it before the public, and the discovery is an excellent example of the way in which two apparently insignificant pieces of evidence may, in combination, suggest an historical discovery of capital importance.

It is, of course, common knowledge that Lady Barnard of Abington was a lineal descendant of William Shakespeare. She died (without issue, as was until recently supposed) at the end of the seventeenth century. But two almost simultaneous finds made in the early part of the present year have tended to modify the old-established conviction that this lady was the last descendant of the poet.

The first of these finds was made by Mr. Vesey, of the British Museum, well known for his monograph on _The Family of Barnard of Abington_. It consisted in a small diary or notebook belonging to the Lady Barnard in question, in which, among other entries, was the record of the payment of twenty guineas made to a “Mrs. M.” just before Christmas of the year 1678. Mr. Vesey published this document in pamphlet form at the beginning of March, 1908.

In the April number of _Cambridgeshire Notes and Queries_ Major Pepper, of Bellevue Villa, Teversham (not far from the Gog Magog Hills), published, as a matter of curiosity, a letter which he had purchased in a sale of MSS., but only so published on the chance that it might have an interest for those who follow the history of the county. It was a letter from one Joan Mandrell, the governess of Anne Hall, praying her correspondent to send “twenty guineas for the payment of rent.” The interest of this document to the students of local history lay in the fact that this Anne Hall was the ancestress of the Pooke family. Joan Mandrell’s letter was addressed upon the back of the sheet, though the name of the addressee was no longer decipherable, but the letters “...bington Hall” were, and are, clearly legible, as also the date. The letter further contains a minute description of Anne Hall’s return to London from a foreign school and of the writer’s devotion to the addressee, whom she treats throughout as mother of the young woman committed to her care. This Anne Hall later married Henry Pooke, whose son Charles made his fortune in politics under Walpole’s administration, founding the family and estate of Understoke, which is so familiar to every Cambridgeshire man.

More than one student noted the coincidence between these two publications appearing but a fortnight apart; and at the end of May a paper was already prepared to be read to the Genealogical Society showing that the lineage of the poet had been continued in the Pookes.

So far the matter was of merely antiquarian interest, for Charles Pooke’s great grandson, General Sir Arthur Pooke, had died in 1823 at Understoke without issue. It was, however, of some importance to all those who care for the literary history of their country to know that the blood of the poet could be traced so far.

Just before the paper was read a further discovery came in to add a much greater and more living interest to the matter.

Mr. Cohen, a charming and cultivated genealogist, whose business is mainly with America and the Colonies, had been for some months actively engaged for Mr. Hopper in tracing the arms of his, Mr. Hopper’s, maternal grandfather--a Mr. Pooke. When Mr. Cohen became acquainted with the facts mentioned above he cabled to Mr. Hopper, who sent by return of post copies of certain family documents which clearly proved that this Mr. Pooke was identical with a younger brother of Sir Arthur. This younger brother was an erratic and headstrong lad who had enlisted in early youth under Cornwallis, and had been killed, as it was believed, at Yorktown. He was as a fact wounded and made prisoner; he was not killed. He was released at the Peace of 1783, preferred remaining in the New World to facing his creditors in the Old, married the daughter of Peter Kymers, of Orange, N.J., and soon afterwards went West. In 1840 his only daughter Cassiopea, who was then keeping a small store in Cincinnati, married the Rev. Mr. Aesop Hopper, a local minister of the Hicksite persuasion. Charlemagne K. Hopper is the only issue of that marriage.

The genealogy stands thus:

This family tree is now so well established that a full publication of the lineage, with a commentary upon the whole romantic story, is about to appear in one of the reviews from the pen of “Thersites,” a pseudonym which, as many of our readers are aware, barely hides the identity of one of our best-known experts upon Foreign Affairs.[1]

Mr. Hopper did not remain in London beyond the close of the season. He had proposed to leave for Biskra a week or so after I made his acquaintance, but the change in the weather decided him to go no farther south than Palermo, whence he will return by Naples, Rome, Assisi, Genoa, and Boulogne, visiting on the way the quaint old city of Strasbourg. He will reach England again some time in the month of April, 1910, and on his return he proposes to devote some part of his considerable fortune to the erection of a suitable monument at Stratford-on-Avon in memory of his great ancestor. This generous gift will be accompanied by certain conditions, but there is little doubt that the town will accept the same, and that a fine fountain surrounded with symbolical figures of Justice, Prudence, and Mercy, and adorned with medallions of Queens Elizabeth and Victoria, George Washington and President Roosevelt, will soon adorn the quiet little Warwickshire town.

Mr. Hopper also proposes to found a Shakespeare Scholarship at Sidney-Sussex College in Cambridge, and another at Wadham College in Oxford, each of the value of £300 a year, on the model of the Rhodes Scholarships, such scholarships to be granted not merely for book work but for business capacity and physical development. He has also planned a Chair for the propagation of Shakespearean knowledge in Glasgow, and he will endow a Reader in Shakespeare to the University of Aberdeen.

Mr. Hopper is himself no mean _littérateur_, though a characteristic modesty has hitherto restrained him from publishing his verse, whether rhyme, blank, or in sonnet form. It is possible that now he is acquainted with his great descent his reluctance may be overcome and he may think better of this decision. I may add that Mr. Hopper places no credence in the Baconian theory, and hopes by diligent search among his family papers to prove the authenticity of at least the five major tragedies and _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_.

Mr. Hopper is a total abstainer; he neither smokes nor chews; his religious views, always broad and tolerant, incline him strongly towards the New Theology, and, in common with many other men of exceptional intelligence, he has been profoundly affected by the popular translation of Dr. Haeckel’s _Riddle of the Universe_.

Though delighting in social intercourse, Mr. Hopper has the true gentleman’s instinct against being lionised, and in particular stands in dread of the Duchess of Dundee. He has therefore begged me to insist as little as possible on his identity in anything I thought it my duty to record in print upon so interesting a matter, and I have so far acceded to his request as to have refrained from publishing these lines until he had left our shores; but I make little doubt that on his return in the spring this missing link between the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon kin cannot but receive the public recognition he deserves.

On the Approach to Western England

How difficult it is to say what one really feels about the landscapes and the countrysides and the subtle souls of Europe! I think that all men who are of European blood feel those countrysides and the soul of them very strongly; but I think that they feel as I feel now, as I write, a difficulty of expression. There is something in it like the difficulty of approaching a personality. One may admire, or reverence, or even love, but the personality is different from one’s own; it has a chastity of its own that must be respected, it has its boundaries and its honour, and one always fears that one will transgress such boundaries if one so much as speaks of the new thing one has come upon and desired to describe.

With distant travel it is not so. One comes far over seas to a quite strange land and one treats it brutally. One’s appreciation is a sort of conquest; and you will note that those who speak of the Colonies, or of America, or of Africa, or of Asia speak of them with a hard intolerance as of something quite alien, or with a conventional set of phrases, as of something not worth the real expression of emotion. Now it is not so with our ancient provinces of Europe.

A man coming out of the Cis-Alpine Gaul into old Italy across the Apennines feels something; indeed he feels it! What it is he feels very few men have written down; none has said it fully. You get out of one thing into something other when you climb up out of the Valley of the Parma and cross the High Apennines and look southward into the happy Garfagnana, and hear the noise of the little Serchio beginning in its meads. In the same way no one has described (to my knowledge at least) that shock of desolation and yet of mystery which comes upon a man when he crosses the River Couesnon and passes from Normandy into Brittany. Normandy is rich, Brittany is poor. Normandy loves ritual, Brittany religion. Normandy can make things, Brittany prayers. Normandy lives by Brittany in the matter of the soul, Brittany not by Normandy in the matter of the body. What Norman ever gave a Breton anything? You cross that river and everything changes. The men and women have dreamier eyes, the little children play more wonderfully, everybody is poor.

Or, again, the passage from the hard industry of the Lancashire Plain suddenly on to the moors, where the farming men and women are so quiet and silent and self-respectful and seem so careful rather to preserve what they own than to add to it. Or, again, the startling passage over Carter Fell from the Englishmen of Rede-Dale to the Scotchmen of Jedburgh; or the sharp passage from the violent, active, sceptical, cruel, courageous, well-fed, ironical Burgundians into the gentle Germans of the Vosges: here is a boundary which is not marked in any political way, and yet how marked it is!

Now in England we have many such approaches and surprises. I will not speak of that good change which comes upon a man as he travels south from Victoria Station and hears, almost at the same time that he first smells earth, the South Country tongue; nor will I speak of that other change which perhaps some of my readers know very well, the change from the active and grasping Cockney into the quiet tenacity of East Anglia. It is not my province--but if I am not wrong one strikes it within half an hour in the fast expresses--these people push with quants, they sail in wherries, they inhabit flat tidal banks, they are at peace. Nor will I here speak of the Marches and how, between a village and a village, one changes from the common English parish with the Squire’s house and the church and the cottages and all, into the hard slate roofs and the inner flame of Wales. Rather I would speak of something the boundary of which has never yet been laid down, but which people call (I think) “The West Country.”

* * * * *

One never knows, when one is tackling a thing like this, where one should first begin to tackle it, or by what end one should take it. Every man according to his own study, every man according to his own bent or accident of experience, takes it by his own handle, and the one man speaks of the language, the other of the hills, another of the architecture, another of the names. For my part I would desire to speak of all.

When one gets over a certain boundary one is in a peculiar district of this world, a special countryside of Europe, a happy land with a conviction and a tradition of its own which may not have a name, but which is in general the West Country, and which by its hills and by its men and women convinces any true traveller at once of its personality. More than one man after a dreary wandering southwards through the Midlands has walked by night up one of its fresh streets to an inn and cried: “What! Have I come upon Paradise?” And this feeling comes also when one has climbed up the Cotswold through the little places of stone and suddenly sees the valley floor of the Severn so full of orchards, or has come over the flat deserts of the Upper Thames and had revealed to him the Golden Valley; or, after plodding through Wiltshire, has smelt an air which told him that not far off were the heavy tides of that haunted sea which runs between the Welsh hills and the peninsula of Cornwall and Devon. Men are lost in these seas and are saved in them perpetually as by miracles: I can appeal, in this print, to how many? They have been saved by the miracle of that water. Here Arthur was cast up by the waves: on to that flat salt, in its calm, full of mists, looked out those who gave us our legend of his Court.

The boundary into this particular land is not only fetched by men on foot; in no matter what kind of travel one pursues, one recognises that boundary in a flash as one traverses it. It is not only the orchards, nor the abrupt and pointed hills, nor those domestic towns, happy with memories, nor those clear waters, nor those meadows, bounded by careful walls of stone, but something much more which tells one that one has got into the enchanted land. That spirit in it which made the stuff of our early history, which gave us the landing of Joseph of Arimathea and the glorious bush of Glastonbury and the cycle of the Round Table and those good verses with regard to passion unrestrained:

... well you wot that of such life
There comes but sore battaille and strife
And blood of men and hard Travail....

And the prophecies of Merlin, and the story of Tristan and Iseult and all the vision of immortality and of resurrection inhabits it still.

I never can believe (I speak for myself alone) that man can be dissociated from his earth any more than I can believe that the soul can be dissociated from the body. When men say to me that there is no soul, they can go on saying. But when men say that the soul can neglect the body then there is matter for argument; and when the argument is finished one finds it is not so. Now thus it is with the earth that breeds us and into which if we are content to die at home (and since we must die somewhere, better die there) we should at last return. The landscapes of Europe make European men, and it is not for nothing that the climate and the shapes of the hills and the nature of the building stuff change just where man changes.

There is enchantment upon every high place of England, but the enchantment of the Devonshire Moors and of the Tors to the North and upwards from them is different from the enchantment of the Downs. There is a great delight in the proper fireplaces of the English people, but who, thoroughly alive, could mistake a fireplace in the West Riding for a fireplace on the Western Rother or either of these for a fireplace a little before Sherborne in the tumbles and the hollows where Dorset and Somerset meet? There is a richness of the speech and a contentment of the tongue which any man from the new countries might think common to all English agricultural men: yet there was a man from Sussex who, hearing the Sussex tongue in the Choughs at Yeovil, felt himself indeed come home. Our provinces differ very much.

I have sometimes wondered whether in the process of time these little intimate differences of ours will survive. I wish they would! I wish they would, by the Lord! The Greeks were a little people, yet their provinces have survived, and the contempt that Aspasia felt for the Peloponnesus is (or should be) yet recorded. The hill tribes behind the Phoenician coast were a little people, but the fame of their religion, of their civil wars, has survived that of the merchants of Tyre. Rome, Veii, and the others were little places like Arundel and Pulborough, quite close together; but they were talked of, and men know much of them to-day.

I could wish the differences of this island were so known and that people coming from a long way off would be humble and learn those differences. Surely a nation grows great in this way, by many provinces reacting one upon the other, recognised by the general will, sometimes in conflict with it. At any rate the West Country is a province of Europe; no one can get into it without touching his youth again and putting his fingers to earth, and getting sustenance from it, as a man does when he turns at the turning point of a race and touches earth with his fingers and is strong again to spring forward.

The Weald

Among the changes that have come upon England with the practice and facility for rapid travel many would put first the conquest (some would call it the spoiling) of little-known and isolated stretches of English landscape; and men still point out with a sort of jealous pride those districts, such as the upper Cotswolds, which modern travel has not disturbed. It seems to me that there is another feature attaching to the facility for travel, and that is this, that men can now tell other men what their countrysides are like; men can now compare one part of England with another in a way that once they could not do, and this facility in communication which so many deplore has so much good about it at least, in that it permits right judgments. There have been men in the past who have travelled widely for the mere pleasure of seeing many parts of their own country--Cobbett was one--but they were rare. As the towns grew, commercial travelling led men only to the towns, but now the thing is settling down. Men travel everywhere, all kinds of men, and no part of England remains of which a man can say that he loves it without knowing why he loves it, or that its character is indefinable. So it is with the Weald.

All that roll of land which lies held between and above the chalk of South-Eastern England, the clay and the sand, and the uncontinuous short trees, the muddy little rivers, the scattered homesteads, the absence of levels, and almost the absence of true hills, the distant prospects northwards and southwards of quite another land, the blue lines and naked heights a day’s journey away against the sky--all that is the Weald. And it runs from the place where the two lines of chalk meet in Hampshire beyond Selborne, and beyond Petersfield, right away to the sea which it sweeps upon in a grand curve, between Pevensey (which was once the chief port of the Weald) and the heights round Hastings: for though these heights are in a manner part of the Weald, yet between them and the chalk again by Folkestone no true Wealden country lies.

Unless a man understands the Weald he cannot easily write about the beginnings of England, and yet historians have not understood it. Only the men mixed into it and married with it or born upon it have understood it, and these, I say, until lately were not permitted by constant travel that judgment by analogy and by contrast which teaches us the true meaning of things that we had hitherto only instinctively known. Now a Wealden man can say certain things about his countryside which are of real value to history and perhaps to politics as well; at any rate, to politics in that larger sense of patriotism intelligently appreciating the future of one’s own land. Thus the Wealden man, now that he knows so much else in England, can tell the historian that the Weald was never the impenetrable forest which historians would make of it. It lay in a barrier between the ports of the Channel and the Thames Valley. But the barrier was not uninhabited; it was not impassable. Its scattered brushwood was patchy, its soil never permanently marshy nor ever for long distances difficult for a mounted man or a man on foot. The Weald from the very beginning had homesteads in it, but it had not agglomerations of houses, nor had it parishes save in very few places. If you look at the map now you can see how the old parishes stretch northward and southward in long strips from the chalk and loam country up towards the forest ridge which is the centre of the Weald. Those long strips were the hunting rights of the village folk and their lords. Of some parishes carved out of the central Weald we can accurately tell the origin. We know that they were colonised as it were, cleared, and had their church built for them in the great spurt of civilisation which marked the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Men would understand the early history of the Weald better, and with it the early military history of South-Eastern England, if they would take one of the old forest paths--as that from Rusper, for instance, which works its way down, now as a metalled road, now as a green lane, now as a mere footpath with right of way, past the two old “broad” fords on the upper Arun and the marshy land east of Pulborough until it gets to Roundabout, and so to Storrington. All the history of communications in the Weald is exemplified in such a journey--and it is a journey which, though it is little more than twenty miles in length, takes quite a day. You have the modern high road, the green lane of the immediate past, and in places a mere track of remote antiquity. You see just how difficult it is to traverse the clay, how the occasional knobs of sand relieve your going; you can notice the character of the woodland where it is still untouched, and if you are wise you will notice one thing above all, and that is the character of the water. Now it is this which explains the Weald. Many bad bits of clay in Europe have formed highways for armies--for instance, all that rotten land in the great bend of the Loire which the Romans called the _Solitarium_, and which the French called the _Sologne_. But the Weald differs from most others in this, that good and plentiful water is hard to find. It is not the muddiness of the streams that is the chief defence of the place against human travel and habitation; it is the way in which, when rain has fallen and when water is plentiful, going is difficult, and the way in which, when a few days of dry weather come, the going becomes easy, but the water in the little streams disappears. There is evidence that the Romans, when they built their great military road--perhaps their only purely military road in Britain--across the Weald skipped one intervening station which should, upon the analogy of others, have been present upon it in the heart of the Weald, and pressed the march in this place to nearly double its usual length. The French armies do precisely the same thing in the bad lands of the Plain of Chalons to-day. Wherever there is ancient habitation in the Weald, or rather upon the fringes of the Weald, there is good, plentiful, and perennial water; elsewhere the Weald is still what it has been throughout history--a great rolling place, not deserted, not lonely, and yet not humanised. It is exactly the place for a seclusion from men, for you can see some men, but not too many of them; and I have always thought that King wise, who, when his enemies desired to kill him, wandered in the Andredsweald. The historians say that he took refuge in the impassable thickets of the forest. This is bosh. No man can sleep out in this climate for a season round, nor can any man live without cooked meat, nor do I see an Anglo-Saxon king living without wine and a good deal of pomp into the bargain. As to the wine, men might argue, but as to the pomp, they cannot. I will tell you what this King did without any doubt. He went from steading to steading and was royally entertained, and if you ask why it was a refuge for him the answer is that it was a refuge against the pursuit of many men.

The Weald is a refuge against the pursuit of many men. It was so then: it is so now.

And this leads me to my conclusion. The Weald will never be conquered. It will always be the Weald. To be conquered is to suffer the will of another: the Weald will suffer no will but its own. The men of the Weald drive out men odious to them in manner sometimes subtle, sometimes brutal, always in the long run successful. Economics break against the Weald as water breaks against stone. It is not a long walk from London. Your Londoner in summer comes and builds in it. So foreign birds their nests. But unlike the foreign birds, he does not return with each returning spring. For the Weald will welcome the bird for the pleasure the bird gives it, and drive it out when the pleasure is done. Now it welcomes the Londoner for his money, and this feature in the Londoner is not recurrent with the seasons.

Here is some Latin which I am assured is grammatical and correctly spelled as well:

Stat et stabit: manet et manebit, spectator orbis.

She stands and still shall stand; she remains and shall remain: a watcher of the generations.

On London and the Houses in it

The aspect of London, as the man who knows it grows older, begins to take on characters of permanence and characters of change, both of which are comparable to those of a human life. It is perceived that certain qualities in the great soul of the place are permanent, and that the memories of many common details merge after the passage of years into a general picture which is steadfast and gives unity to the whole.

This is especially true of the London skies, and more true, I think, of the London skies in autumn than at any other season of the year. Men go home from the City or from the Courts westward at an hour which is that of sunset, when the river catches more light than at any other time: the mixture of mist and smoke and of those shapes in our clouds, beyond the reek of the town, which are determined by the south-west wind blowing up the line of the valley, make together an impression which is the most lasting of the landscapes in which we live. These it was which inspired Turner when he drew them from the deserted room in the tower of Battersea Church, or from that corner house over the River, whence he could watch evening after evening the heavy but transparent colours which enter into the things he painted. Many foreigners, caught by the glamour of that artist, have missed the source whence his mellow and declining sunlight was inspired; its source was in these evening and autumn skies of London. There is a permanence also in the type of home which London built for more than two centuries, and which was laid down after the Great Fire, and there is a permanence in the older stonework. It is difficult or impossible to define what there is in common between the brown stock brick of London, which is the stuff of all its background whether of large houses or mean, and the black and white weathering of Portland stone. Perhaps the unity which seems to bind them is wholly in the mind, and depends merely upon association, but it is very strong upon anyone who has grown up from childhood into middle age surrounded by the vision of this town; and it would seem as though London was only London because of those rough surfaces of soft stonework, streaked with white wedges, scaling off the grime of St. Martin’s, or St. Clement Dane’s, or the fine front of the Admiralty, and standing out clear against the general brown mass of the streets. The quite new things have no character at all. One wonders what cosmopolitan need can have produced them. London never produced them, with their stone that so often is plaster, and their alien suggestion of whatever is least national in Paris or New York. London never produced them.

The noise of the streets in spite of every change remains the same, it is the same comforting and distant roar, like the roar of large waters among hills, which every visitor has noticed, with its sharp contrast to the rattle and cries of other great capitals. Why it should be so no one, I think, has discovered, though many have described it, but it remains an unmistakable thing, and if a London man, who had travelled and was far away, should be set down by a spirit in London, not knowing where he was, when he heard through a window high above the street this distant and continuous roar, he would know that he had come home. It should surely in theory have disappeared, this chief physical characteristic of the great place, yet neither the new electricity and the hissing of the wires, nor the new paving, nor even the new petrol seem to change it. It is still a confused and powerful and subdued voice, like a multitude undecided. The silence also does not change. The way in which in countless spots you pass through an unobserved low passage, or through an inconspicuous narrow turning, and find yourself in a deserted place, from which the whole life of London seems blanketed out, has been to every traveller and to every native part of the charm and surprise of London. Dickens knew it very well, and makes of it again and again a dramatic something in his work which stamps it everywhere with the soul of London. In every decade men growing older deplore the disappearance of this or that sanctuary of isolation and silence, but in the aggregate they never disappear; something in the very character of the people reproduces them continually, and if any man will borrow the leisure--even a man who knows his London well--to peer about and to explore for one Saturday afternoon in one square mile of older London, how many such unknown corners will he not find! The populace also upon whom all this is founded remain the same.

What changes in London are the things that also change in the life of a man, and nothing more than the relationship of particular spots and particular houses to our own lives. There is perhaps no city in the world where, under the permanence of the general type, there is so perpetual a flow and disturbance of association. It has even become normal to the life of the citizens, and the conception of a fixed home has left them. Here and there--but more and more rarely with every year--you may point out a great house which some wealthy family has chosen to inhabit for some few generations; but fixity of tenure, tradition, family tradition at least, and sacred hereditary things, either these were never proper to London or they have gone; it is this which overspreads a continued knowledge of London with an increasing loneliness and with memories that find no satisfaction or expression, but re-enter the heart of a man and do a hurt to him there.

There are so many strange doors that should be familiar doors. Turning sometimes into some street where one has turned for years to find at a very well-known number windows of a certain aspect and little details in the drab exterior of the house, every one of which was as familiar as a smile, one is (by the mere association of years and of a gesture repeated a thousand times) in the act of coming to the steps and of seeking an entry. The whole place is as much one’s friend and as much indicative of one’s friend as would be his clothes or his voice or any other external thing. He is not there, and the house is worse than empty. London grows full of such houses as a man grows older. Most of us have other losses sharper still, which men of other cities know less well, for most of us pass and repass the house where we were born, or where as children we gathered all the strongest impressions of life. It is impossible to believe that other souls are inheriting the effect of those familiar rooms. It is worse than a death; it is a kind of treason.

I know a house in Wimpole Street of which every part is as familiar quite as the torn leaves of the old books of childhood, but I have passed it and repassed it for how many years, forbidden an entrance, and finding that ancient and fixed friend in league, so to speak, with strangers. Or, in another manner, which of us does not know a house like any other house, amid the thousand unmarked houses in the better streets of the town, but to us quite individual because there met within it once so many who were for us the history of our time? It was in that room (where are the three windows) that she received her guests, retaining on into the last generations of a worse and degraded time the traditions of a better society. Here came men who could discuss and reveal things that are now distorted legends, and whose revelations were real because they came as witnesses: soldiers of the Crimea, of India, of Italy, and of Algiers, or men who remembered great actions within the State: actions that were significant through conviction, before we became what we are. Here was breeding; here were the just limits of tone and emphasis and change, and here was that type of intercourse which was surely as great and as good a thing as Europe or England has known. Who sees that room to-day? What taste has replaced her taste? What choice of stuff or colour mars the decoration on the walls? What trash or alien thing takes the place of that careful elaborate womanly work in which her travels throughout the world were recorded, and in which the excellent modesty of an art sufficient for her purpose reproduced in line and in colour the ironic nobility of her mind and the wide expanse of her learning? We do not know and we cannot know. The house is neither ours nor hers. To whomever it has passed it has turned traitor to us who knew.

It is better, I think, for those who have such memories when the material things that enshrine them wholly disappear, for then there is no jar, no agony of contrast between that society which once was and this which now is, with its quality of wealth and of the uses to which wealth is put to-day. If we must suffer the intolerable and clumsy presence of accidental power--power got suddenly, got anyhow, got by chance, untrained and unworthy--at least may we suffer such things in their own surroundings, in huge conservatories, with loud music, with an impression of partial drunkenness all around, and a certainty all around of intellectual incompetence and of sprawling bodies and souls. It is better to suffer these new things in such surroundings as may easily let one believe that one is not in London at all, but on the Riviera; and let the heat be excessive, and let there be a complete ignorance of all wine except champagne, and let it be a place where champagne is supposed to be one wine. Then the frame will suit the picture, and there will at least be no desecration of material things by human beings unworthy of the bricks and mortar. I say it is much better when the old houses disappear, at least the old houses in which we knew and loved the better people of a better time:--and yet the youth or childhood in which so many of us saw the last of it is not thirty years, is barely twenty years dead!

On Old Towns

Every man who has a civilised backing behind him, every man, that is, born to a citizenship which has history to nourish it, knows, loves, desires to inhabit, and returns to, the Old Towns; but the more one thinks of it the more difficult one finds it to determine in what this appetite consists.

The love of a village, of a manor, is one thing. You may stand in some place where you were born or brought up, especially if it be some place in which you passed those years in which the soul is formed to the body, between, say, seven years of age and seventeen, and you may look at the landscape of it from its height, but you will not be able to determine how much in your strong affection is of man and how much of God. True, nearly everything in a good European landscape has been moulded, touched, coloured, and in a sense made by Christian men. It is like a sort of tapestry which man has worked upon the stuff that God gave him; but, still, any such landscape from the height of one of our villages has surely more in it of God than of man. For one thing there is the sky; and then it must be admitted that the lines of the hills were there before man touched them, and though the definite outline of the woods, the careful thinning of them which allows great trees to grow, the noble choice and contrast of foliage, the sharp edge of cultivated against forest land, the careful planting of the tallest kinds of things, pine trees and elms, are all man’s work; and though the sights of water in between are usually man’s work also, yet in the air that clothes the scene and in all its major lines, man did not make it at all: he has but used it and improved it under the inspiration of That which made the whole.

But with the Old Towns it is not so. They please us in proportion to their apparent intensity of effort; the more man has worked the more can we embed ourselves within them. The more different is every stone from another, and the more that difference is due to the curious spirit of man the more are we pleased. We stand in little lanes where every single thing about us, except the strip of sky overhead, is man’s work, and the strip of sky overhead becomes what all skies are in all pictures--something subordinate to man, an ornament.

One could make a list of the Old Towns and go on for ever: the sea-light over the red brick of King’s Lynn from the east, and the other sea-light from the south over that other King’s town, Lyme Regis; the curious bunch of Rye; the hill of Poitiers all massed up with history, and in whose uneven alleys all the armies go by, from the armies of the Gauls to the army that makes a noise about them to-day: the hill of Lincoln, where one looks up from the Roman Gate to the towers completing the steep hill; the two hills of Cassel and of Montreuil, similarly packed with all that men are, have been, and remain; the quadrated towns, some surely Roman, some certainly so; Chichester, Winchester, Horsham, Oxford, Chester, and a hundred others--England is most fruitful in these; the towns that draw their life from rivers and have high steep walls of stone or brick going right down into the waters, Albi, Newcastle as it once was; in its own small way Arundel as it still is; the towns of the great flats, where men for some reason can best give rein to their fancy, Delft, Antwerp (that part of it which counts), Bruges, Louvain; Ypres also where the cooking is so vile.

One might continue for ever this futile list of towns--this is in common to them all, that wherever men come across them in travel they have a sense of home and the soul reposes.

Nowhere have I found this more than in the curious and to some the disappointing town of Arles. Arles has about it, more than any other town I know, the sentiment of protracted human experience. They dig and find stone tools and weapons. They dig again and find marks of log huts, bronze pins, and the arms of the Gauls. And then, apparent to the eye and still living as it were, and still breathing, as it were, the upper air which is also ours, not buried away like dead things, but surviving, is Greece, is Rome, is the Dark Ages, is the Middle Ages, is the Renaissance, is the religious quarrel, is the Eighteenth Century, is the Revolution, is to-day. I have sometimes thought that if a man should go to Arles with the desire deliberately to subject himself at once to the illusion and to the reality of the past, here he could do so. He could look curiously for a day at the map and see how the Rhone had swept the place for thousands upon thousands of years, making it a sort of corner at the head of its great estuary, and later of its delta; then he might spend the day wondering at the flints and the way they were chipped, and getting into the minds of the men that made them. Then he should spend a day with bronze, and then a day with the Gaulish iron. After that, for as many weeks as he chose, let him study the stones which Greece and which Rome have still left in the public places of the city; the half of the frontal of the great temple built into his hotel; the amphitheatre upon which he suddenly comes as he wanders up a narrow modern street; the Arenæ. The Dark Ages, which have left so little in Europe, have here left massive towers in which the echoes of the fighting linger, and huge rough stones which the Dark Ages did not quarry but which they moved from the palaces of the Romans to their own fortresses, and which by their very presence so removed bring back to one the long generations in which Europe slept healthily and survived.

St. Trophime is all the Middle Ages. You may walk quietly round its cloister and see those ten generations of men, from the hugeness of the Crusades to the last delicacies of the fifteenth century. The capitals of the columns go in order, the very earliest touch on that archaic grotesque which underlies every civilisation, the latest in their exact realism and their refinement, prove the decline of a whole period of the soul. Lest Arles should take up too much of this short space, I would remind the reader only of this ironical and striking thing: that on its gates as you go out of the city northward, you may see sculptured in marble what the Revolution but--a century ago--took to be a primal truth common to all mankind. It concerns the sanctity of property. Consider that doctrine to-day!

But not Arles, though it is so particular an example, not Delft, not the old English seaports which so perfectly enshrine our past, not Coutances which everyone should know, alone explain what the Old Towns are, but rather a knowledge of them all together explains it.

The Old Towns are ourselves; they are mankind. In their contortion, in their ruined regularity, in their familiar oddities, and in their awful corners of darkness, in their piled experience of the soul which has soaked right into their stone and their brick and their lime, they are the caskets of man. Note how the trees that grow by licence from the crevices of their battlements are a sort of sacramental saving things, exceptional to the fixed lines about them, and note how the grass which grows between the setts of their paving stones comes up ashamedly and yet universally, as good memories do in the oldness of the human mind, and as purity does through the complexity of living.

Which reminds me: Once there was a band of men, foolish men, Bohemian men, indebted men, who went down to paint in a silly manner, and chose a town of this sort which looked to them very old and wonderful; and there they squatted for a late summer month and talked the detestable jargon of their trade. They talked of tones and of values and of the Square Touch, and Heaven knows what nonsense, the meanwhile daubing daub upon daub on to the canvas; praising Velasquez (which after all was right) and ridiculing the Royal Academy. They ridiculed the Royal Academy.

Well, now, these men were pleased to see in autumn grass growing between the setts of the street, especially in one steep street where they lived. It rejoiced their hearts; they said within themselves, “This is indeed an Old Town!” But the Town Council of that town had said among themselves, “What if it become publicly known that grass grows in our streets? We shall be thought backward; the rich will not come to visit us. We shall not make so much money, and our brothers-in-law and others indebted to us will also grow impoverished. Come! Let us pull up this grass.”

So they paid a poor man, who would otherwise have starved, the amount of his food on the condition that he should painfully pull up all the grass, which he did.

Then the artists, seeing him at work, paid him more not to pull it up. Then the Town Council, finding out this, dismissed him from their employ, and put upon the job a distant man from some outlandish county, and had him watched, and he pulled up all the grass, every blade of it, by night, but thoroughly. The next morning the artists saw what had been done, and they went out by train to another town, and bought grass seed and also a little garden soil, and the next night they scattered the soil carefully between the stones and sowed the grass seed; and the comedy is not yet ended.

There is a moral to this, but I will not write it down, for in the first place it may not be a good moral, and in the second place I have forgotten what it was.

A Crossing of the Hills

When it was nearly noon my companion said to me:

“By what sign or track do you propose to cross the mountains?” For the mountains here seem higher than any of highest clouds: the valley beneath them is broad and full of fields: beyond, a long day off, stands in a huge white wall the Sierra del Cadi. Yet we must cross these hills if ever we were to see the secluded and little-known Andorrans. For the Andorrans live in a sort of cup fenced in on every side by the Pyrenees; it was on this account that my companion asked me how I would cross over to their land and by what sign I should find my way.

When I had thought a little I answered:

“By none. I propose to go right up at them, and over unless I find some accident by which I am debarred.”

“Why, then,” said he, “let us strike up at once, walking steeply until we come into a new country.”

This advice was good, and so, though we had no longer any path, and though a mist fell upon us, we began walking upwards, and it was like going up a moor in the West Riding, except that it went on and on and on, hour after hour, and was so steep that now and then one had to use one’s hands.

Previous Next

Comments

On EverythingChapter VII (1)

0%37 min left in chapter