Chapter XL: On Dropping Anchor 344 (5)

The Dupe has his habitat, but that not easily defined, as in the suburbs of great cities, and in those towns called residential, where the leisured and the inane make their lives seem so much longer than those of others. But there are exceptions also to this, and the Dupe will sometimes migrate in vast numbers from one spot to another in such few years as wholly to discomfit the calculations of the Knaves. Some of these have been found to stand up in public halls before numbers whom they had thought to be Dupes (seeing that the locality was Little Partington) but only to discover a great boiling of Anti-Dupes, men working with their hands or what-not, quite undeceivable, as often as not Atheist, and ready to storm the platform and tear the Knave alive.

The Dupe loves courtesy and, as has been said above, will tolerate no hint of impatience. On the other hand, he needs no breaking in and will carry upon the back from his earliest years. It is incredible to travellers when they first come across the Dupe what burdens he will bear in this fashion, so that sometimes the whole Plain appears to be a moving mass of gold bags, public salaries, contracts, large houses, yachts, motor-cars, opera houses, howdahs sheltering masters and mistresses, cases of wine, rich foods, and charitable institutions, all as it were endowed with a motion of their own until you stoop down and perceive that the whole of this vast weight sways securely upon the backs of an enormous migratory body of Dupes upon the trek for a Better Land.

The Dupe also differs from other creatures in that he will sleep comfortably with such things upon his back, nor ever roll over upon them, and that he will bear them to a great old age and even to death itself without dispute. Indeed the Dupe unburdened has about him a forlorn and naked feeling to which it were a pity to condemn him. His food must be ample, but there is no need to prepare it carefully, and he will eat almost anything that is given him, except a leek, which he will not touch unless he be told that it is an onion. Of wheat he takes very little, but he insists that a great portion be put before him, that he may munch and trample upon it. Why he manifests this appetite is not known, but upon any attempt to lessen the ration he will kick, buck, and rear, and behave in a manner altogether out of his nature.

The Dupe must be given drink at irregular intervals, but he loves to treat it shyly, and to flirt with it as it were. There is no prettier sight than to see a number of Dupes met together arching and curvetting, side-glancing and denying, before they plunge their heads and manes into the life-giving liquid.

It is the reward of the Dupe that he is all his life very consistently happy, and on this account many not born Dupes, imitate the Dupes and would be of them, in which they fail, for the Dupe is God's creature and not man's, and proceeds by moral generation as has already been affirmed.

XXVI

THE LOVE OF ENGLAND

Love of country is general to mankind, yet is not the love of country a general thing to be described by a general title. Love changes with the object of love. The country loved determines the nature of its services.

The love of England has in it the love of landscape, as has the love of no other country: it has in it as has the love of no other country, the love of friends. Less than the love of other countries has it in it the love of what may be fixed in a phrase or well set down in words. It lacks, alas, the love of some interminable past nor does it draw its liveliness from any great succession of centuries. Say that ten centuries made a soil, and that in that soil four centuries more produced a tree, and that that tree was England, then you will know to what the love of England is in most men directed. For most men who love England know so little of her first thousand years that when they hear the echoes of them or see visions of them, they think they are dealing with a foreign thing. All Englishmen are clean cut off from their long past which ended when the last Mass was sung at Westminster.

The love of England has in it no true plains but fens, low hills, and distant mountains. No very ancient towns, but comfortable, small and ordered ones, which love to dress themselves with age. The love of England concerns itself with trees. Accident has given to the lovers of England no long pageantry of battle. Nature has given Englishmen an appetite for battle, and between the two men who love England make a legend for themselves of wars unfought, and of arms permanently successful; though arms were they thus always successful would not be arms at all.

The greatness of the English soul is best discovered in that strong rebuke of excesses, principally of excess in ignorance, which a minority of Englishmen perpetually express, but which has not sufficed as yet to save the future of England. In no other land will you so readily discover critics of that land ready to bear all for their right to doubt the common policy; but though you will nowhere discover such men so readily, nowhere will you discover them so impotent or so few.

The love of England breeds in those who cherish it an attachment to institutions which is half reverential, but also half despairing. In its reverence this appetite produces one hundred living streams of action and of vesture and of custom. In its despair, in its refusal to consider upon what theory the institution lies, it permits the institution to sterilise with age and to grow fantastic.

The love of England has never destroyed, but at times, and again at closer and at closer times (while we have lived) it has failed to save. Yet it will save England in the end. Men are more bound together by this music in their souls than by any other, wherever England is or is spoken of by Englishmen. Here you may discover what religion has been to many, and also you may discover here how legend and how epics arise. In men cut off from England, the love of England grows into a set repetitive thing, a thing of peculiar strength yet almost barren. Nourished and exampled by England, flourishing upon the field of England, the love of England is a love of the very earth: of the smell of growing things and of certain skies, and of tides in river-mouths, and of belts of sea.

If a man would understand this great thing England which is now in peril and which has so worked throughout the world, he must not consider the accident of England's success and failure, nor certain empty lands filled without battle, nor others ruined by folly, nor certain arts singularly discovered and perfected by England, nor other arts as singularly neglected and decayed. Nor must he contrast the passionate love of England with some high religion of which it takes the place, nor with some active work in contrast with which it seems so empty and unproducing a thing. He must not set it against a creed (it is not so high as that), nor against a conquest or a true empire such as Spain and Rome possessed.

If a man would understand the love of England he must do what hardly any one would dare to do: that is, he must clearly envisage England defeated in a final war and ask himself, "What should I do then?"

XXVII

THE STORM

There is a contemptible habit of mind (contemptible in intellect, not in morals) which would withdraw from the mass of life the fecundity of perception.

The things that we see are, according to the interpretation of the mystics, every one of them symbols and masks of things unseen. The mystics have never proved their theory true. But it is undoubtedly true that the perception of things when it is sane is manifold; it is true that as we grow older the perception of things is increasingly manifold, and that one perception breeds one hundred others, so that we advance through life as through a pageant enjoying in greater and greater degree day by day (if we open ourselves to them) the glorious works of God.

There is a detestable habit of mind, which either does not understand, or sneers at, or despises, or even wholly misses--when it is persisted in--this faculty for enjoyment, which even our gross senses endow us with. This evil habit of the mind will have us neglect first colour for form, then form for mere number. It would have us reject those intimations of high and half-remembered things which a new aspect of a tree or house or of a landscape arouses in us. It would compel us to forget, or to let grow stale, the pleasure with which the scent of woods blest us in early youth. Perpetually this evil habit of the mind would flatten the diversity of our lives, suck out the sap of experience, kill humour and exhaust the living spring. It whispers to us the falsehood that years in their advance leave us in some way less alive, it adds to the burden upon our shoulders, not a true weight of sad knowledge as life, however well lived, must properly do, but a useless drag of despair. It would make us numb. In the field of letters it would persuade us that all things may be read and known and that nothing is worth the reading or the knowing, and that the loveliest rhythms or the most subtle connotations of words are but tricks to be despised. In the field of experience it would convince us that nothing bears a fruit and that human life is no more than anarchy or at best an unexplained fragment. Even in that highest of fields, the field of service, it would persuade us that there is nothing to serve. And if we are convinced of that, then every faculty in us turns inward and becomes useless: may be called abortive and fails its end.

These thoughts arose in me as I watched to-day from the platform of my Mill the advance of a great storm cloud; for in the majestic progress which lifted itself into the sky and marched against the north from the Channel I perceived that which the evil, modern, drying habit of thought would neglect and would attempt to make material, and also that which I very well knew was in its awfulness allied to the life of the soul.

For very many days the intense heat had parched the Weald. The leaves dropped upon the ash and the oak, the grass was brown, our wells had failed. The little river of the clay was no more than several stagnant pools. We thought the fruits would wither; and our houses, not built for such droughts and such an ardent sun, were like ovens long after the cool of the evening had come.

At the end of some days one bank of cloud and then another had passed far off east or far to the west, over the distant forest ridge or over Egdean Side, missing us. We had printed stuff from London telling us how it had rained in London--as though rain falling in London ever fell upon earth or nourished fruits and men!

We thought that we were not to be allowed any little rain out of Heaven. But to-day the great storm came up, marching in a dark breastplate and in skirts of rain, with thunders about it; and it was personal. It came right up out of the sea. It walked through the gate which the River Adur has pierced, leaving upon either side the high chalk hills; the crest of its helmet carried a great plume of white and menacing cloud.

No man seeing this creature as it moved solemn and panoplied could have mistaken the memory or the knowledge that stirred within him at the sight. This was that great master, that great friend, that great enemy, that great idol (for it has been all of these things), which, since we have tilled the earth, we have watched, we have welcomed, we have combated, we have unfortunately worshipped. This was that God of the Storm which has made such tremendous music in the poets.

The Parish Church, which had seemed under the hard blue sky of the early morning a low brown thing, with its square tower of the Templars and of the Second Crusade, stood up now white, menacing, and visionary against the ink of the cloud. The many trees of the rich man's park beyond were taller, especially the elms. They stood absolutely and stubbornly still, no leaves upon them moving at all. The Downs an hour away first fell dull, low, and leaden. These were but half seen, and at last faded altogether into the gloom. The many beasts round about were struck with silence. The fowls nestled together, and the only sign that animate nature gave of an approaching stroke was the whinny of a horse in a stable where the door was left wide open to the stifling air, and the mad circling and swooping of a bird distracted by the change in the light.

For the sun was now blotted out, and the enormous thing was upon us like a foe. First I saw from the high platform of my Mill a sort of driving mist or whirl, which at first I thought to be an arrow-shoot of rain; but looking again I saw it to be no more than the dust of many parched fields and lanes, driving before the edge of the thunder. There was a wind preceding all this like a herald. In a moment the oppressive air grew cool. It grew cool by a leap. It was like the descent into a cellar; it was like the opening of a mine door to a draft. The vigour of the mind, dulled by so many days of heat and nights without refreshment, leaped up to greet this change, which, though it came under a solemn and uncomforting aspect, gave breath and expansion. One might for some five minutes have imagined as the dust clouds advanced and the furious shaking of the trees and hedges a mile away began to be heard as well as seen, that the call of coolness for work had come. Then that wall of wind hit the two great oaks of my neighbour next to my own frontier trees. The fan of the Mill groaned, turning a little; it turned furiously, and the strength of the storm was upon us. It lightened, single and double and fourfold. The blinding fire sprang from arch to arch of an incredible architecture, higher than anything you might dream of, larger than the mountains of other lands. The thunder ran through all this, not very loud but continuous, and a sweep of darkness followed like a train after the movement of the cloud. White wreaths blown out in jets as though by some caprice in wilful shapes showed here and there, and here and there, against such a blackness, grey cloudlets drifted very rapidly, hurrying distracted left and right without a purpose. All the while the rain fell.

The village and the landscape and the Weald, the Rape, the valley, all my county you would have said, was swallowed up, occupied, and overwhelmed. It was more majestic than an army; it was a victory more absolute than any achievement of arms, and while it flashed and poured and proclaimed itself with its continual noise, it was itself, as it were, the thing in which we lived, and the mere earth was but a scene upon which the great storm trod for the purpose of its pageant.

When the storm had passed over northward to other places beyond, and when at evening the stars came out very numerous and clear in a sky which the thunder had not cooled, and when the doubtful summer haze was visible again very low upon the distant horizon, over the English sea, the memory of all this was like the memory of a complete achievement. No one who had seen the storm could doubt purpose or meaning in the vastness of things, nor the creative word of Almighty God.

XXVIII

THE VALLEY

Everybody knows, I fancy, that kind of landscape in which hills seem to lie in a regular manner, fold on fold, one range behind the other, until at last, behind them all, some higher and grander range dominates and frames the whole.

The infinite variety of light and air and accident of soil provide all men, save those who live in the great plains, with examples of this sort. The traveller in the dry air of California or of Spain, watching great distances from the heights, will recollect such landscapes all his life. They were the reward of his long ascents, and they were the sunset visions which attended his effort when at last he had climbed to the utmost ridge of his day's westward journey. Such a landscape does a man see from the edges of the Guadarrama, looking eastward and south toward the very distant hills that guard Toledo and the ravines of the Tagus. Such a landscape does a man see at sunrise from the highest of the Cevennes looking right eastward to the dawn as it comes up in the pure and cold air beyond the Alps, and shows you the falling of their foothills, a hundred miles of them, right down to the trench of the Rhone. And by such a landscape is a man gladdened when, upon the escarpments of the Tuolumne, he turns back and looks westward over the Stockton plain towards the coast range which guards the Pacific.

The experience of such a sight is one peculiar in travel, or, for that matter, if a man is lucky enough to enjoy it near his home, insistent and reiterated upon the mind of the home-dwelling man. Such a landscape, for instance, makes a man praise God if his house is upon the height of Mendip, and he can look over falling hills right over the Vale of Severn toward the rank above rank of the Welsh solemnities beyond, until the straight line and height of the Black Mountain against the sky bounds his view and frames it.

It is the character of these landscapes to suggest at once a vastness, a diversity, and a seclusion. When a man comes upon them unexpectedly he can forget the perpetual toil of men and imagine that those who dwell below in the nearer glens before him are exempt from the necessities of this world. When such a landscape is part of a man's dwelling place, though he well knows that the painful life of men within those hills is the same hard business that it is throughout the world, yet his knowledge is modified and comforted by the permanent glory of the thing he sees.

The distant and high range that bounds his view makes a sort of wall, cutting the country off and guarding it from whatever may be beyond. The succession of lower ranges suggests secluded valleys, and the reiterated woods, distant and more distant, convey an impression of fertility more powerful than that of corn in harvest upon the lowlands.

Sometimes it is a whole province that is thus grasped by the eye; sometimes in the summer haze of Northern lands, a few miles only; always this scenery inspires the onlooker with a sense of completion and of repose, and at the same time, I think, with worship and with awe.

Now one such group of valleys there was, hill above hill, forest above forest, and beyond it a great, noble range, unwooded and high against Heaven, guarding all the place, which I for my part knew from the day when first I came to know anything of this world. There is a high place under fir trees; a place of sand and bracken in South England, whence such a view was always present to my eye in childhood, and "There," said I to myself (even in childhood) "a man should make his habitation. In those valleys is the proper settling place for a man."

And so there was. There was a steading for me in the midst of those hills.

It was a little place which had grown up as my county grows, the house throwing out arms and layers, and making itself over ten generations of men. One room was panelled in the oak of the seventeenth century--but that had been a novelty in its time, for the walls upon which the panels stood were of the late fifteenth, oak and brick intermingled. Another room was large and light, built in the manner of one hundred and fifty years ago, which people call Georgian.

It had been thrown out South--and this is quite against our custom; for our older houses looked east and west to take all the sun and to present a corner to the south-west and the storms. So they stand still.

It had round it a solid cornice which the modern men of the towns would have called ugly, but there was ancestry in it. Then, further on this house had modern roominess stretching in one new wing after another; and it had a great set of byres and barns, and there was a copse and some six acres of land. Over a deep gully stood over against it the little town that was the mother of the place; and altogether this good place was enclosed, silent, and secure.

"The fish that misses the hook regrets the worm." If this is not a Chinese proverb it ought to be. That little farm and steading and those six acres, that ravine, those trees, that aspect of the little mothering town; the wooded hills fold above fold, the noble range beyond--all these were not, and for ever will not be mine.

For all I know some man quite unacquainted with that land took the place, grumbling, for a debt; or again, for all I know it may have been bought by a blind man who could not see the hills, or by some man who, seeing them perpetually, regretted the flat marshes of his home. To-day, this very day, up high on Egdean Side, not thinking of such things, through a gap in the trees, I saw again after so many years, set one behind the other, the woods, wave upon wave, the summer heat, the high, bare range guarding all; and in the midst of that landscape, set like a toy, the little Sabine farm.

Then, said I, to this place I might not know, "Continue. Go and serve whom you will. You were not altogether mine because you would not be, and to-day you are not mine at all. You will regret it perhaps, and perhaps you will not. There was verse in you perhaps, or prose, or, much better still (for all I know), contentment for a man. But you refused. You lost your chance. Good-by," and with that I went on into the wood and beyond the gap and saw the sight no more.

It was ten years since I had seen it last, the little Sabine farm. It may be ten years before I see it again, or it may be for ever. But as I went through the woods saying to myself:

"You lost your chance, my little Sabine farm, you lost your chance!" another part of me at once replied:

"Ah, and so did you!"

Then, by way of riposte, I answered in my mind:

"Not at all, for the chance I never had; all I have lost is my desire--no more."

"No, not only your desire," said the voice to me within, "but the fulfilment of it." And when that reply came I naturally turned, as all men do on hearing such interior replies, to a general consideration of regret, and was prepared, if any honest publisher should have come whistling through that wood, with an offer proper to the occasion to produce no less than five volumes on the Nature of Regret, its mortal sting, its bitter-sweetness, its power to keep alive in man the pure passions of the soul, its hint at immortality, its memory of Heaven.

But the wood was empty. The offer did not come. The moment was lost. The five volumes will hardly now be written. In place of them I offer poor this, which you may take or leave. But I beg leave, before I end, to cite certain words very nobly attached to that great inn, The Griffin, which has its foundation set far off in another place, in the town of March, in the sad Fen-Land near the Eastern Sea:

"England my desire, what have you not refused?"

XXIX

A CONVERSATION IN ANDORRA

The other day--indeed some months ago--I was in the company of two men who were talking together and were at cross-purposes. The one was an Englishman acquainted with the Catalonian tongue and rather proud of knowing it; the other was a citizen of the Republic of Andorra.

The first had the advantage of his fellow in world-wide travel, the reading of many newspapers and (beside his thorough knowledge of Catalonian) a smattering of French, German, and American.

I was touched to see the care and deference and good-fellowship which the superior extended to the inferior in this colloquy.

I did not hear the beginning of it: it was the early middle part which I came in for; it was conducted loudly and with gestures upon the part of the Andorran, good-humouredly but equally openly on the part of the Englishman, who said:

"I grant you that life is very hard for some of our town dwellers in spite of the high wages they obtain."

To which the Andorran answered: "There is nothing to grant, your Grace, for I would not believe their life was hard; but I was puzzled by what you told me, for I could not make out how they earned so much money, and yet looked so extraordinary." The Andorran showed by this that he had visited England.

At this the Englishman smiled pleasantly enough and said: "Do you think me extraordinary?"

The Andorran was a little embarrassed. "No no," he said, "you do not understand the word I use. I do not mean extraordinary to see, I mean unhappy and lacking humanity."

The Englishman smiled more genially still in his good wholesome beard, and said: "Do I look to you like that?"

"No," said the Andorran gravely, "nor does that gentleman whom you pointed out to me when we left France, your English patron, Mr. Bernstein I think ... you were both well-fed and well-clothed ... and what is more, I know nothing of what you earn. But in Andorra we ask about this man and that man indifferently, and especially about the poorest, and when I asked you about the poorest in your towns you told me that there was not one of them who did not earn, when he was fully working, twenty-five pesetas a week. Now with twenty-five pesetas a week! Oh ...! Why, I could live on five, and five weeks of twenty saved is a hundred pesetas; and with a hundred pesetas ...! Oh, one can buy a great brood sow; or if one is minded for grandeur, the best coat in the world; or again, a little mule just foaled, which in two years, mind you, _in two years_" (and here he wagged his finger) "will be a great fine beast" (and here he extended his arms), "and the _next_ year will carry a man over the hills and will sell for five hundred pesetas. Yes it will!"

The Englishman looked puzzled. "Well," said he, leaning forward, ticking off on his fingers and becoming practical, "there's your pound a week."

The Andorran nodded. He began ticking it off on his fingers also.

"Now of course the man is not always in work."

"If he is lazy," said the Andorran with angry eyes, "the neighbours shall see to that!"

"No," said the Englishman, irritated, "you don't understand; he can't always find some one to _give_ him work."

"But who _gives_ work?" said the Andorran. "Work is not _given_." And then he laughed. "Our trouble is to get the youngsters to do it!" And he laughed more loudly.

"You don't understand," repeated the Englishman, pestered, "he can't work unless some one allows him to work for him."

"Pooh!" said the Andorran, "he could cut down trees or dig, or get up into the hills."

"Why," said the Englishman with wondering eyes, "the perlice would have him then."

The Andorran looked mournful: he had heard the name of something dangerous in this country. He thought it was a ghost that haunted lonely places and strangled men.

"Well then," went on the Englishman in a practical fashion, again ticking on his fingers, "let us say he can work three weeks out of the five."

"Yes?" said the Andorran, bewildered.

"He gets, let us say, three times a week's wage in the five weeks.... I don't mind, call it an average of twenty pesetas if you like, or even eighteen."

"What is an 'average'?" said the Andorran, frowning.

"An average," said the Englishman impatiently, "oh, an average is what he gets all lumped up."

"Do you mean," said the Andorran gravely, "that he gets eighteen pesetas every Saturday?"

"No, _no_, NO!" struck in the Englishman. "Twenty-five pesetas, as you call them, when he can get work, and nothing when he can't."

"Good Lord!" said the Andorran, with wide eyes and crossing himself. "How does the poor fellow know whether perlice will not be at him again? It is enough to break a man's heart!"

"Well, don't _argue_!" said the Englishman, keen upon his tale. "He gets an average, anyhow, of eighteen pesetas, as you call them, a week. Now you see, however wretched he is, five of those will go in rent, and if he is a decent man, seven."

The Andorran was utterly at sea. "But if he is wretched, why should he pay, and if he is decent why should he pay still more?" he asked.

"Why, damn it all!" said the Englishman, exploding, "a man must live!"

"Precisely," said the Andorran rigidly, "that is why I am asking the question. He pays this tax, you say, five pesetas, if he is wretched and seven if he is decent. But a man may be decent although he is wretched, and who is so brutal as to ask a tax of the poor?"

"It isn't a tax," said the Englishman. "He pays it for his house."

"But a man could buy a house," said the Andorran, "with a few payments like that."

The Englishman sighed. "Do listen to my explanation. He's got to pay it anyhow."

"Well," said the Andorran, sighing in his turn, "you must have a wicked King. But, please God, he cannot spend it all on his pleasures."

"It isn't paid to the King, God bless him," said the Englishman. "The man pays it to his landlord."

"And suppose he doesn't?" said the Andorran defiantly.

"Well, the perlice," began the Englishman, and the Andorran's face showed that he was afraid of occult powers.

"So there, you see," went on the Englishman, calculating along with rapid content, "he's only got thirteen."

The Andorran was willing to stretch a point. "Well," said he doubtfully, "I will grant him thirteen, and with thirteen pesetas a man can do well enough. His wife milks, and it does not cost much to put a little cotton on the child, and then, of course, if he is too poor to buy a bed, why there is his straw."

"Straw's not decent, and we don't allow it," said the Englishman firmly; "he doesn't buy a bed always; sometimes he rents it."

"I don't understand," said the Andorran, "I don't understand."

There was a little pause during which neither of the two men looked at the other. The Englishman went on good-naturedly and laboriously explaining:

"Now let's come to bread."

"Yes," said the Andorran eagerly, "man lives by bread and wine."

"Well," said the Englishman, ignoring this interruption, "you see, bread for the lot of them would come to half that money."

"Yes," said the Andorran, nodding, "you are quite right. Bread is a very serious thing." And he sighed.

"Half of it," continued the Englishman, "goes in bread. And then, of course, he has to get a little meat."

"Certainly," said the Andorran.

"Bacon anyhow," the Englishman went on, "and there's boots."

"Oh, he could do without boots," said the Andorran.

"No he can't," said the Englishman, "they all have to have boots; and then you see, there's tea."

The Andorran was interested in hearing about tea. "You Englishmen are so fond of tea," he said, smiling. "I have noticed that you ask for tea. Juan has tea to sell."

The Englishman nodded genially. "I will buy some of him," he said.

"Well, go on," said the Andorran.

"And there's a little baccy, of course"--and he gave the prices of both those articles. "They're a leetle more than you might think," continued the Englishman, a little confused. "They're taxed, you see."

"Taxed again?" said the Andorran.

"Yes," said the Englishman rapidly, "not much; besides which, I haven't said anything was taxed yet: they pay about double on their tea and about four times on the value of the tobacco. But they don't feel it. Oh, if they get regular work they're all right!"

"Then," said the Andorran, summing it all up, "they ought to do very well."

"Yes, they ought," said the Englishman, "but somehow they're not steady of themselves: they get _pauperised_."

"What is that?" said the Andorran.

"Why, they get to expect things for nothing."

"They think," said the Andorran cheerfully, "that good things fall from the sky. I know that sort: we have them." He thought he had begun to understand, and just after he had said this we came to a village.

I must here tell you what I ought to have put at the beginning of these few lines, that I heard this conversation in Andorra valley itself, while four of us, the Andorran guide, the Englishman, myself and an Ironist were proceeding through the mountains, riding upon mules.

We had come to the village of Encamps, and there we all got down to enter the inn. We had a meal together and paid, the four of us, exactly five shillings and threepence all together for wine and bread, cooked meat, plenty of vegetables, coffee, liqueurs and a cigar.

This was the end of the conversation in Andorra: it was my business to return to England after the holiday to write an essay on a point in political economy, to which I did justice; but the conventions of academic writing prevented me from quoting in that essay this remarkable experience.

XXX

PARIS AND THE EAST

One of the things that set a modern man wondering is the nature of the survivor of our time.

It is customary to say that all human things decay and end; and if you will take a period long enough of course it is true, for at last the world itself shall dissolve. But when men point to dead Empires, as Egypt or Assyria are dead, or when they point to a fossilised civilisation, as it seems, according to travellers, that certain civilisations of the East are fossilised, or when they point to little broken cities where once were famous towns, one is tempted to remember that to all these there is an exceptional glorious sort which is ourselves. Atlantic Europe, the Europe that was made by the Christian Faith and in the first four centuries of our era, lives on from change to change in a most marvellous way, and for now two thousand years has not seemed capable of decline. You have in the history of it resurrection after resurrection, and through all those rapid and fantastic developments, transformations far more rapid and far more fantastic than any other of which we have record, a sort of inner fixity of type remains, like the individual soul of the man which makes him always himself in spite of accident and in spite of the process of age; only, Europe differs from such metaphor in this, that it is like some man not subject, it would seem, to mortality.

This thought to which I perpetually return, occurred to me as I handled a book on Paris, the illustrations of which were impressions gathered by a Japanese artist. Such a contrast will call up in the minds of many the contrast between something very old and something very new. A reader might say as he glanced at this book: "Here is one of the most ancient things we have, the Oriental mind, and it is looking at one of the freshest and most modern things we have, modern Paris."

I confess that to me the contrast is of another kind. I should say: "Here is something which is, so far as its inner force goes, immovable, the Oriental mind; and this is how it looks at the most mobile thing on earth, the heart of Gaul--yet the mobile thing has a history almost as long as, and far more full than, the immobile thing."

Upon a central page of this book I found a really splendid bit of drawing. It is an impression of the Statue of the Republic under a cold dawn. Now when one thinks what that statue means, what portion of the stoical philosophy re-arisen after so many centuries it embodies, what furious combats have raged round that idea: I mean combats, not debates: pain, not rhetoric; men dying in great numbers and desiring to kill others as they died. When one considers that statue but the other day, with the raging mob of workmen round it, and when one suddenly remembers that the whole thing is after all only of the last hundred years--what a multiplicity of life this chief of our European cities possesses in one's eyes!

The admirable pictures in this book are drawn as nearly in the European manner as one could expect, but the feeling is an unchanging feeling which we know in Eastern things. The mind is like deep and level water, never stirred by wind: a big lake in a crater of the hills. But the thing drawn is as moving and as living as the air.

I wonder whether this artist, as he stood and drew, felt as a European feels when he stands and draws in any one of our immemorial sites: by the Pool of London, or at the top of the rue St. Jacques, or in the place of the Martyrdom at Toulouse, or looking at the most ancient yellow dusts of Toledo from over the tumbling strength of the Tagus? He may have felt it ... perhaps ... for all his work, even the little introduction that he has written shows that astonishing adaptability and exceedingly rapid intelligence which are the marks of the Japanese to-day. But if he felt it he must have felt it by education. For us it is in our blood. We stand upon those sites and we feel ourself in and part of a stream of life that seems almost incapable of ending. And that brings me back to where I began, How much longer will our civilisation endure?

Will it end? It has many enemies, most of them unconscious, has modern Europe.

It has men within it who imagine that the correction of some large abuse and the withdrawal of some considerable part of its fabric in the correction of that abuse, is a matter concerning only their one generation. These men visibly put in peril the balance of that civilisation by their very enthusiasm.

It has a lesser number of other enemies within itself; enemies more dangerous, who do believe that some quite new thing wholly alien to the soul of Europe can be imposed upon that soul. These men are always for anarchy; they delight in emphasising all that seems to diminish the responsibility and the freedom of citizens, and it is their pleasure to accelerate every tendency which may destroy, from whatever side, our permanent solution of domestic and of natural things: families, properties, armies.

The common faith which was, as it were, the cement of our civilisation has been hit so hard that some do ask themselves openly the question that was only whispered some little time ago--whether the cement still holds. It is quite certain that if that last symbol and reality disintegrates, if the Catholic Church leaves it, Europe has come to an end.

But these questions are not yet to be met by any reply. And when I ask myself those questions, and I always do when I see the Seine going by the walls that were Cæsar's parleying ground with the chiefs, Dionysius's prison, Julian's office, Dagobert's palace, and which have been subject to everything from Charlemagne to the Bourbons, and which have (within the memory of men whom I myself have known) ended the Monarchy and seen passing by a wholly new society--when I ask myself those questions, I answer less and less with every year.

Time was, in the University, say twenty years ago, one would have said: "It is all over. Everything that can destroy us has triumphed." Time was, say ten years ago, in the heat of a particular struggle which raged all over the West, one could have said with the enthusiasm of the fight, that continuity would win. But to-day, whether because one has accumulated knowledge or because things are really more confused, it is difficult to reply.

* * * * *

A man with our knowledge and our experience of what Europe has been and is, standing in the grey and decayed Roman city of the Fifth Century, and watching the little barbarian troop riding into Lutetia, might have said that a gradual darkness would swallow us all, especially since he knew that just beyond the narrow seas in Eastern Britain a dense pall then covered the corpse of the Roman civilisation.

A man working on the Tour St. Jacques, the last of the Gothic, might have seen nothing but anarchy and the end of all good work in the change that was surging round him: the Huguenots, the new Splendour, the cruelty and the making of lies.

Certainly those who were present in Paris _before_ the 10th of August,'92, thought an end had come, and believed the Revolution to be a most unfruitful and tempestuous death; imagining Europe to have no hope but in the possible extinction of the flame.

All three judgments would have been wrong. And when one takes that typical Paris again, and handles it and looks at it and thinks of it as the example and the symbol of all our time; just as one is beginning to say "The thing is dying," the memory of similar deaths that were not deaths in the past returns to one and one must be silent.

Never was Europe less conscious of herself, never did she more freely admit the forces that destroy, than she admits them to-day. Never was evil more insolently or more glaringly in power; never had it less fear of chastisement than in the whirlwind of our time. If that whirlwind is mechanical, and if this vast anarchic commerce, these blaring papers, these sudden fortunes, these frequent and unparalleled huge wars, are the breaking up of all that once made Europe, then the answer to the question is plain: but it may be that these are things not mechanical but organic: seeds surviving in the ruin which will grow up into living forms. We shall see.

XXXI

THE HUMAN CHARLATAN

It is curious that the Scientific Spirit has never tabulated any research, even superficial, upon the human type of charlatan.

It is the essence of a charlatan that he aims at the results of certain excellences in the full consciousness that he does not possess those excellences. The material upon which he works is twofold: the ignorance and the noble appetite for reverence in his fellow men.

Where animals are concerned the Scientific Spirit has tabulated a good deal of careful research in this department. We know fairly well the habits of the Cuckoo. What seemingly harmless organisms are poisonous to us, and why, we have discovered and can catalogue. The successful deception practised for purposes of secrecy or greed by such and such a creature, we can discover in our books. But no one has tabulated the human charlatan.

An admirable example upon which one can test the whole theory of charlatanism is the ridiculous Lombroso.

To begin with you have the name. He was no more of an Italian than Disraeli, or than the present Mayor of Rome: but his Italian name deceives and is intended to deceive, not necessarily that it was assumed, but that it was paraded as national. Hundreds of honest men thought themselves praising the Italian character and Italian civilisation when the newspapers (themselves half duped) had persuaded them to blow the trumpet of Lombroso.

One of the characteristics of the charlatan is that he parades the object with which he desires to dupe you, and simultaneously hides his methods in pushing the thing forward. The purveyor of cheap jewellery in Whitechapel does this. He lets you have the glitter of his article full and strong. Where he got it, of his own connection with it, and what it is, you learn last in the business or not at all. The whole process is one of suggestion, or, as our forefathers called it, "hoodwinking." Lombroso was true to type in this regard.

The European Press was deluged one day with notices, praise, reviews of a book which was called _Degeneration_. It was a tenth-rate book, but we were compelled to hear of it. No words were fine enough to describe its author. We learnt that his name was Nordau. There was no process of logic in the book, there was no labour. Where it asserted (it was a mass of assertions) it usually trespassed on ground which the author could not pretend to any familiarity with. Those who are already alive to the international trick were suspicious and upon their guard from the very moment that they smelt the thing. The infinitely larger number who do not understand the nature of international forces were taken in. For one man who read the farrago a hundred were taught to magnify the name of Nordau. Only when this process of suggestion had well sunk in did the public casually learn that the said Nordau was a connection of Lombroso's.

A book of greater value (which is not saying much) proceeded from the pen of one Ferrero. It proposed an examination of the Roman Empire and the Roman people. Its thesis was, of course, a degradation of both. For one man who so much as saw that book, a hundred went away with the vague impression that a certain great Ferrero dominated European thought. He gave opinions (among other things) upon the polity of England so absurd and ignorant that, had the process of suggestion not run on before, those opinions would only have attained some small measure of notoriety from their very fatuousness. But the international trick had reversed the common and healthy process of human thought. We were not allowed to judge the man by his work; no, we must accept the work on the authority of the man; only after the trick had been successfully worked did it come out that Ferrero was a connection of Lombroso's.

Lombroso's own department of charlatanry was to attack Christian morals in the shape of denying man's power of choice between good and evil.

In another epoch and with other human material to work upon his stock-in-trade would have taken some other form, but Lombroso had been born into that generation immediately preceding our own, whose chief intellectual vice was materialism. A name could be cheaply made upon the lines of materialism, and Lombroso took to it as naturally as his spiritual forerunners took to rationalist Deism and as his spiritual descendants will take to spurious mysticism. We shall have in the near future our Lombrosos of the Turning Table, the Rapping Devil, and the Manifesting Dead Great Aunt--indeed this development coincided with his own old age--but as things were, the easiest charlantry in his years of vigour was to be pursued upon Materialist lines, and on Materialist lines did the worthy Lombroso proceed. His method was childishly simple, and we ought to blush for our time or rather for that of our immediate seniors that it should have duped anybody--but it was far from childishly guileless.

When the laws are chiefly concerned in defending the possessions of those already wealthy, and when society, in the decline or depression of religion, takes to the worshipping of wealth, those whom the laws will punish are generally poor. Such a time was that into which Lombroso was born. No man was executed for treason, few men were imprisoned for it. Cheating on a large scale was an avenue to social advancement in most of the progressive European countries. The purveying of false news was a way to fortune: the forestaller and the briber were masters of the Senate. The sword was sheathed. The popular instinct which would repress and punish cowardice, oppression, the sexual abominations of the rich, and their cruelties, had no outlet for its expression. The prisons of Europe were filled in the main with the least responsible, the weakest willed, and the most unfortunate of the very poor. We owe to Lombroso the epoch-making discovery that the weakest willed, the least responsible, and the most unfortunate of the very poor often suffer from physical degradation. With such an intellectual equipment Lombroso erected the majestic structure of human irresponsibility.

Two hundred men and women are arrested for picking pockets in such and such a district in the course of a year. The contempt for human dignity which is characteristic of modern injustice permits these poor devils to be treated like so many animals, to be thrashed, tortured, caged, and stripped: measured, recorded, dealt with as vile bodies for experiment. Lombroso (or for that matter any one possessed of a glimmering of human reason) can see that of these two hundred unfortunate wretches, a larger proportion will be diseased or malformed, than would be the case among two hundred taken at random among the better fed or better housed and more carefully nurtured citizens. The Charlatan is in clover! He gathers his statistics: twenty-three per cent. squint, eighteen per cent. have lice--what is really _conclusive_ no less than ninety-three per cent. suffer from metagrobolisation of the hyperdromedaries, which is scientist Greek for the consequences of not having enough to eat. It does not take much knowledge of men and things to see what the Charlatan can make of such statistics. Lombroso pumps the method dry and then produces a theory uncommonly comfortable to the well-to-do--that their fellow-men if unfortunate can be treated as irresponsible chattels.

There is the beginning and end of the whole humbug.

With the characteristic lack of reason which is at once the weakness and the strength of this vicious clap-trap, a totally disconnected--and equally obvious--series of facts is dragged in. If men drink too much, or if they have inherited insanity, or are in any other way afflicted, by their own fault or that of others, in the action of the will, they will be prone to irresponsibilities and to follies; and where such irresponsibilities and follies endanger the comfort of the well-to-do, the forces of modern society will be used to restrain them. Their acts of violence or of unrestrained cupidity being unaccompanied by calculation will lead to the lock-up. And so you have another stream of statistics showing that "alcoholism" (which is Scientist for drinking too much) and epilepsy and lunacy do not make for material success.

On these two disparate legs poses the rickety structure which has probably already done its worst in European jurisprudence and against which the common sense of society is already reacting.

Fortunately for men Charlatanry of that calibre has no very permanent effect. It is too silly and too easily found out. If Lombroso had for one moment intended a complete theory of Materialist morals or had for one moment believed in the stuff which he used for self-advertisement, he would have told us how physically to distinguish the cosmopolitan and treasonable financier, the fraudulent company-worker, the traitor, the tyrant, the pornographer, and the coward. These in high places are the curse of modern Europe--not the most wretched of the very poor. Of course Lombroso could tell us nothing of the sort; for there is nothing to tell.