RONCESVALLES
Sitting one day in Pampeluna, which occupies the plain just below the southern and Spanish escarpment of the Pyrenees, I and another remembered with an equal desire that we had all our lives desired to see Roncesvalles and the place where Roland died. This town (we said) was that which Charlemagne destroyed upon his march to the Pass, and I, for my part, desired here, as in every other part of Europe where I had been able to find his footsteps, to follow them, and so to re-create his time.
The road leads slantwise through the upper valleys of Navarre, crossing by passes the various spurs of the mountains, but each pass higher than the last and less frequented, for each is nearer the main range. As you leave Pampeluna the road grows more and more deserted, and the country through which it cuts more wild. The advantages of wealth which are conferred by the neighbourhood of the capital of Navarre are rapidly lost as one proceeds; the houses grow rarer, the shrines more ruinous and more aged, until one comes at last upon the bleak valley which introduces the final approach to Roncesvalles.
The wealth and order everywhere associated with the Basque blood have wholly disappeared. This people is not receding--it holds its own, as it deserves to do; but as there are new fields which it has occupied within the present century upon the more western hills, so there are others to the east, and this valley among them, from whence it has disappeared. The Basque names remain, but the people are no longer of the Basque type, and the tongue is forgotten.
So gradual is the ascent and so continual the little cols which have to be surmounted, that a man does not notice how much upward he is being led towards the crest of the ridge. And when he comes at last upon the grove from which he sees the plateau of Roncesvalles spread before him, he wonders that the chain of the Pyrenees (which here lie out along in cliffs like sharp sunward walls, stretching in a strict perspective to the distant horizon) should seem so low. The reason that this white wall of cliffs seems so low is that the traveller is standing upon the last of a series of great steps which have led him up towards the frontier, much as the prairie leads one up towards the Rockies in Colorado. When he has passed through the very pleasant wood which lies directly beneath the cliffs, and reaches the little village of Roncesvalles itself, he wonders still more that so famous a pass should be so small a thing. The pass from this side is so broad, with so low a saddle of grass, that it seems more like the crossing of the Sussex Downs than the crossing of an awful range of mountains. It is a rounded gap, up to which there lifts a pretty little wooded combe; and no one could be certain, during the half-hour spent in climbing such a petty summit, that he was, in so climbing, conquering Los Altos, the high Pyrenees.
But when the summit is reached, then the meaning of the "Imus Pyrenaeus," and the place that passage has taken in history, is comprehended in a moment. One sees at what a height one was in that plain of Roncesvalles, and one sees how the main range dominates the world; for down below one an enormous cleft into the stuff of the mountains falls suddenly and almost sheer, and you see unexpectedly beneath you the approach from France into Spain. The gulf at its narrowest is tremendous; but, more than that, when the floor of the valley is reached, that floor itself slopes away down and down by runs and by cascades towards the very distant plains of the north, upon which the funnel debouches. Moreover, it was up this gulf, and from the north, that the armies came; it was this vision of a precipice that seized them when their leaders had determined to invade the Peninsula. This also was what, for so many generations, so many wanderers must have seen who came to wonder at the place where the rearguard of Charlemagne had been destroyed.
The whole of the slope is covered with an ancient wood, and this wood is so steep that it would be impossible or dangerous to venture down it. The old Carolingian road skirts the mountain-side with difficulty, clinging well up upon its flank; the great modern road, which is excellent and made for artillery, has to go even nearer the summit; below them there falls away a slant or edge to which the huge beech trees cling almost parallel to the steep earth, running their perpendicular lines so high and close against the hill that they look like pines. As you peer down in among the trunks, you see the darkness increasing until the eye can penetrate no more, and dead, enormous trees that have lived their centuries, and have fallen perhaps for decades, lie across the aisles of the wood, propped up against their living fellows; for, by one of those political accidents which are common throughout the whole length of the Pyrenees, both sides of the watershed belong to Spain, so that no Government or modern energy has come to disturb the silence. One would swear that the last to order this wood were the Romans.
I had thought to find so famous a valley peopled, or at least visited. I found it utterly alone, and even free from travellers, as though the wealthier part of Europe had forgotten the most famous of Christian epics. I saw no motor-cars, nor any women--only at last, in the very depths of the valley, a boy cutting grass in a tiny patch of open land. And it was hereabouts, so far as I could make out, that the Peers were killed.
The song, of course, makes them fall on the far side of the summit, upon the fields of Roncesvalles, with the sun setting right at them along the hills. And that is as it should be, for it is evident that (in a poem) the hero fighting among hills should die upon the enemy's side of the hills. But that is not the place where Roland really died. The place where he really died, he and Oliver and Turpin and all the others, was here in the very recess of the Northern Valley. It was here only that rocks could have been rolled down upon an army, and here is that narrow, strangling gorge where the line of march could most easily have been cut in two by the fury of the mountaineers. Also Eginhard says very clearly that they had already passed the hills and seen France, and that is final. It was from these cliffs, then, that such an echo was made by the horn of Roland, and it was down that funnel of a valley that the noise grew until it filled Christendom; and it was up that gorge that there came, as it says in the song--
The host in a tide returning: Charles the King and his Barony.
This was the place. And any man who may yet believe (I know such a discussion is pedantry)--any man who may yet believe the song of Roland to have been a Northern legend had better come to this place and drink the mountains in. For whoever to-day
High are the hills and huge and dim with cloud, Down in the deeps, the living streams are loud,
had certainly himself stood in the silence and majesty of this valley.
It was already nearly dark when we two men had clambered down to that place, and up between the walls of the valley we had already seen the early stars. We pushed on to the French frontier in an eager appetite for cleanliness and human food.
The last Spanish town is called Val Carlos, as it ought to be, considering that Charlemagne himself had once come roaring by. When we reached it in the darkness we had completed a forced march of forty-two miles, going light, it is true, and carrying nothing each of us but a gourd of wine and a sack, but we were very tired. There, at the goal of our effort, one faint sign of Government and of men at last appeared. It was in character with all the rest. One might not cross the frontier upon the road without a written leave. The written leave was given us, and in half an hour Spain was free.
THE SLANT OFF THE LAND
We live a very little time. Before we have reached the middle of our time perhaps, but not long before, we discover the magnitude of our inheritance. Consider England. How many men, I should like to know, have discovered before thirty what treasures they may work in her air? She magnifies us inwards and outwards; her fields can lead the mind down towards the subtle beginning of things; the tiny irridescence of insects; the play of light upon the facets of a blade of grass. Her skies can lead the mind up infinitely into regions where it seems to expand and fill, no matter what immensities.
It was the wind off the land that made me think of all this possession in which I am to enjoy so short a usufruct. I sat in my boat holding that tiller of mine, which is not over firm, and is but a rough bar of iron. There was no breeze in the air, and the little deep vessel swung slightly to the breathing of the sea. Her great mainsail and her baloon-jib came over lazily as she swung, and filled themselves with the cheating semblance of a wind. The boom creaked in the goose-neck, and at every roll the slack of the mainsheet tautened with a kind of little thud which thrilled the deck behind me. I saw under the curve of my headsail the long and hazy line, which is the only frontier of England; the plain that rather marries with than defies her peculiar seas. For it was in the Channel, and not ten miles from the coastline of my own country, that these thoughts rose in me during the calm at the end of winter, and the boat was drifting down more swiftly than I knew upon the ebb of the outer tide. Far off to the south sunlight played upon the water, and was gone again. The great ships did not pass near me, and so I sat under a hazy sky restraining the slight vibration of the helm and waiting for the wind.
In whatever place a man may be the spring will come to him. I have heard of men in prison who would note the day when its influence passed through the narrow window that was their only communion with their kind. It comes even to men in cities; men of the stupid political sort, who think in maps and whose interest is in the addition of numbers. Indeed, I have heard such men in London itself expressing pleasure when a south-west gale came up in April from over the pines of Hampshire and of Surrey and mixed the Atlantic with the air of the fields. To me this year the spring came suddenly, like a voice speaking, though a low one--the voice of a person subtle, remembered, little known, and always desired. For a wind blew off the land.
The surface of the sea northward between me and the coast of Sussex had been for so many hours elastic, smooth, and dull, that I had come to forget the indications of a change. But here and there, a long way off, little lines began to show, which were indeed broad spaces of ruffled water, seen edgeways from the low free-board of my boat. These joined and made a surface all the way out towards me, but a surface not yet revealed for what it was, nor showing the movement and life and grace of waves. For no light shone upon it, and it was not yet near enough to be distinguished. It grew rapidly, but the haze and silence had put me into so dreamy a state that I had forgotten the ordinary anxiety and irritation of a calm, nor had I at the moment that eager expectancy of movement which should accompany the sight of that dark line upon the sea.
Other things possessed me, the memory of home and of the Downs. There went before this breeze, as it were, attendant servants, outriders who brought with them the scent of those first flowers in the North Wood or beyond Gumber Corner, and the fragrance of our grass, the savour which the sheep know at least, however much the visitors to my dear home ignore it. A deeper sympathy even than that of the senses came with those messengers and brought me the beeches and the yew trees also, although I was so far out at sea, for the loneliness of this great water recalled the loneliness of the woods, and both those solitudes--the real and the imaginary--mixed in my mind together as they might in the mind of a sleeping man.
Before this wind as it approached, the sky also cleared: not of clouds, for there were none, but of that impalpable and warm mist which seems to us, who know the south country and the Channel, to be so often part of the sky, and to shroud without obscuring the empty distances of our seas. There was a hard clear light to the north; and even over the Downs, low as they were upon the horizon, there was a sharp belt of blue. I saw the sun strike the white walls of Lady Newburgh's Folly, and I saw, what had hitherto been all confused, the long line of the Arundel Woods contrasting with the plain. Then the boom went over to port, the jib filled, I felt the helm pulling steadily for the first time in so many hours, and the boat responded. The wind was on me; and though it was from the north, that wind was warm, for it came from the sheltered hills.
Then, indeed, I quite forgot those first few moments, which had so little to do with the art of sailing, and which were perhaps unworthy of the full life that goes with the governing of sails and rudders. For one thing, I was no longer alone; a man is never alone with the wind--and the boat made three. There was work to be done in pressing against the tiller and in bringing her up to meet the seas, small though they were, for my boat was also small. Life came into everything; the Channel leapt and (because the wind was across the tide) the little waves broke in small white tips: in their movement and my own, in the dance of the boat and the noise of the shrouds, in the curtsy of the long sprit that caught the ridges of foam and lifted them in spray, even in the free streaming of that loose untidy end of line which played in the air from the leach, as young things play from wantonness, in the rush of the water, just up to and sometimes through the lee scuppers, and in the humming tautness of the sheet, in everything about me there was exuberance and joy. The sun upon the twenty million faces of the waves made, music rather than laughter, and the energy which this first warmth of the year had spread all over the Channel and shore, while it made life one, seemed also to make it innumerable. We were now not only three, the wind and my boat and I; we were all part (and masters for the moment) of a great throng. I knew them all by their names, which I had learnt a long time ago, and had sung of them in the North Sea. I have often written them down. I will not be ashamed to repeat them here, for good things never grow old. There was the Wave that brings good tidings, and the Wave that breaks on the shore, and the Wave of the island, and the Wave that helps, and the Wave that lifts forrard, the kindly Wave and the youngest Wave, and Amathea the Wave with bright hair, all the waves that come up round Thetis in her train when she rises from the side of the old man, her father, where he sits on his throne in the depth of the sea; when she comes up cleaving the water and appears to her sons in the upper world.
The Wight showed clear before me. I was certain with the tide of making the Horse Buoy and Spithead while it was yet afternoon, and before the plenitude of that light and movement should have left me. I settled down to so much and such exalted delight as to a settled task. I lit my pipe for a further companion (since it was good to add even to so many). I kept my right shoulder only against the tiller, for the pressure was now steady and sound. I felt the wind grow heavy and equable, and I caught over my shoulder the merry wake of this very honest moving home of mine as she breasted and hissed through the sea.
Here, then, was the proper end of a long cruise. It was springtime, and the season for work on land. I had been told so by the heartening wind. And as I went still westward, remembering the duties of the land, the sails still held full, the sheets and the weather shrouds still stood taut and straining, and the little clatter of the broken water spoke along the lee rail. And so the ship sailed on.
[Greek: 'En d thnemos prêsen mxson istion, thmphi de kuma] [Greek: Sseirê porphureon megal' iache, nêos iousês.]
THE CANIGOU
A man might discuss with himself what it was that made certain great sights of the world famous, and what it is that keeps others hidden. This would be especially interesting in the case of mountains. For there is no doubt that there is a modern attraction in mountains which may not endure, but which is almost as intense in our generation as it was in that of our fathers. The emotion produced by great height and by the something unique and inspiring which distinguishes a mountain from a hill has bitten deeply into the modern mind. Yet there are some of the most astounding visions of this sort in Europe which are, and will probably remain, unemphasised for travellers.
The vision of the Berenese Oberland when it breaks upon one from the crest of Jura has been impressed--upon English people, at least--in two fine passages: the one written by Ruskin, the other, if I remember right, in a book called A Cruise upon Wheels. The French have, I believe, no classical presentment of that view, nor perhaps have the Germans. The line of the Alps as one sees it upon very clear days from the last of the Apennines--this, I think, has never been properly praised in any modern book--not even an Italian. The great red mountain-face which St. Bruno called "the desert" I do not remember to have read of anywhere nor to have heard described; for it stands above an unfrequented valley, and the regular approach to the Chartreuse is from the other side. Yet it is something which remains as vivid to those few who have suddenly caught sight of it from a turn of the Old Lyons road as though they had seen it in a fantastic dream. That astonishing circle of cliffs which surrounds Bourg d'Oisans, though it has been written of now and then, has not, so to speak, taken root in people's imagination.
Even in this country there are twenty great effects which, though they have, of course, suffered record, are still secure from general praise; for instance, that awful trench which opens under your feet, as it were, up north and beyond Plynlimmon. It is a valley as unexpected and as incredible in its steepness and complete isolation as any one may see in the drawings of the romantic generation of English water-colour, yet perhaps no one has drawn it; there is certainly no familiar picture of it anywhere.
When one comes to think of it, the reason of such exceptions to fame as are these is usually that such and such an unknown but great sight lies off the few general roads of travel. It is a vulgar reason, but the true one. Unless men go to a mountain to climb because it is difficult to climb, or unless it often appears before them along one of their main journeys, it will remain quiet. Among such masses is the Canigou.
Here is a mountain which may be compared to Etna. It is lower, indeed, in the proportion of nine to eleven; but when great isolated heights of this sort are in question, such a difference hardly counts. It can be seen, as Etna can, from the sea, though it stands a good deal more inland; it dominates, as Etna does, a very famous plain, but modern travel does nothing to bring it into the general consciousness of the world. If Spain were wealthy, or if the Spanish harbours naturally led to any place which all the rich desired to visit, the name of the Canigou would begin to grow. Where the railway skirts the sea from Narbonne to Barcelona, it is your permanent companion for a good hour in the express, and for any time you like in the ordinary trains. During at least three months in the year, its isolation is peculiarly relieved and marked by the snow, which lies above an even line all along its vast bulk. It is also one of those mountains in which one can recognise the curious regularity of the "belts" which text-books talk of. There are great forests at the base of it, just above the hot Mediterranean plain; the beech comes higher than the olive, the pines last of all; after them the pastures and the rocks. In the end of February a man climbs up from a spring that is as southern as Africa to a winter that is as northern as the highlands of Scotland, and all the while he feels that he is climbing nothing confused or vague, but one individual peak which is the genius of the whole countryside.
This countryside is the Roussillon, a lordship as united as the Cerdagne; it speaks one language, shows one type of face, and is approached by but a small group of roads, and each road passes through a mountain gap. For centuries it went with Barcelona. It needed the Revolution to make it French, and it is full of Spanish memories to this day.
For the Roussillon depends upon the Canigou just as the Bay of Syracuse depends upon Etna, or that of Naples upon Vesuvius, and its familiar presence has sunk into the patriotism of the Roussillon people, as those more famous mountains have into the art and legends of their neighbours. There are I know not how many monographs upon the Canigou, but not one has been translated, I would wager, into any foreign language.
Yet it is the mountain which very many men who have hardly heard its name have been looking for all their lives. It gives as good camping as is to be had in the whole of the Pyrenees. I believe there is fishing, and perhaps one can shoot. Properly speaking, there is no climbing in it; at least, one can walk up it all the way if one chooses the right path, but there is everything else men look for when they escape from cities. It is so big that you would never learn it in any number of camps, and the change of its impressions is perpetual. From the summit the view has two interests--of colour and of the past. You have below you a plain like an inlaid work of chosen stones: the whole field is an arrangement of different culture and of bright rocks and sand; and below you, also, in a curve, is all that coast which at the close of the Roman Empire was, perhaps, the wealthiest in Europe. In the extreme north a man might make out upon a clear day the bulk of Narbonne. Perpignan is close by; the little rock harbour of Venus, Port Vendres, is to the south. From the plain below one, which has always been crammed with riches, sprang the chief influences of Southern Gaul. It was here that the family of Charlemagne took its origin, and it was perhaps from here that he saw, through the windows of a palace, that fleet of pirates which moved him to his sad prophecy. That plain, moreover, will re-arise; it is still rich, and all the Catalan province of Spain below it, of which it is the highway and the approach, must increase in value before Europe from year to year. The vast development of the French African territory is reacting upon that coast: all it needs is a central harbour, and if that harbour were formed it would do what Narbo did for the Romans at the end of their occupation;--it would tap, much better than does Cette, the wealth of Gascony, perhaps, also, an Atlantic trade, and its exchanges towards Africa and the Levant. The Mediterranean, which is perpetually increasing in wealth and in importance to-day, would have a second Marseilles, and should such a port arise--then, when our ships and our travellers are familiar with it, the Canigou (if it cares for that sort of thing) will be as happy as the Matterhorn. For the present it is all alone.
THE MAN AND HIS WOOD
I knew a man once that was a territorial magnate and had an estate in the county of Berkshire. I will not conceal his name. It was William Frederick Charles Hermann-Postlethwaite.
On his estate was a large family mansion, surrounded by tasteful gardens of a charming old kind, and next outside these a great park, well timbered. But the thing I am going to talk about was a certain wood of which he was rightly very proud. It stood on the slope of a grass down, just above the valley, and beneath it was a clean white road, and a little way along that a town, part of which belonged to Mr. Hermann-Postlethwaite, part to a local solicitor and moneylender, several bits to a brewer in Reading, and a few houses to the inhabitants. The people in the town were also fond of the wood, and called it "The Old Wood." It was not very large, but, as I have said before, it was very beautiful, and contained all manner of trees, but especially beeches, under which nothing will grow--as the poet puts it in Sussex:
Unner t' beech and t' yow Nowt 'll grow.
Well, as years passed, Mr. Hermann-Postlethwaite became fonder and fonder of the wood. He began towards 1885 to think it the nicest thing on his estate--which it was; and he would often ride out to look at it of a morning on his grey mare "Betsy." When he rode out like this of a morning his mount was well groomed, and so was he, however early it might be, and he would carry a little cane to hit the mare with and also as a symbol of authority. The people who met him would touch their foreheads, and he would wave his hand genially in reply. He was a good fellow. But the principal thing about him was his care for the old wood; and when he rode out to look at it, as I say, he would speak to any one around so early--his bailiff, as might be, or sometimes his agent, or even the foreman of the workshop or the carpenter, or any hedger or ditcher that might be there, and point out bits of the wood, and say, "That branch looks pretty dicky. No harm to cut that off short and parcel and serve the end and cap it with a zinc cap;" or, "Better be cutting the Yartle Bush for the next fallow, it chokes the gammon-rings, and I don't like to see so much standard ivy about, it's the death of trees." I am not sure that I have got the technical words right, but at any rate they were more or less like that, for I have heard him myself time and again. I often used to go out with him on another horse, called Sultan, which he lent me to ride upon.
Well, he got fonder and fonder of this wood, and kept on asking people what he should do, and how one could make most use of it, and he worried a good deal about it. He reads books about woods, and in the opening of 1891 he had down to stay with him for a few days a man called Churt, who had made a great success with woods on the Warra-Warra. But Churt was a vulgar fellow, and so Hermann-Postlethwaite's wife, Lady Gywnnys Hermann-Postlethwaite, would not have him in the house again, which was a bother. Her husband then rode over to see another man, and the upshot of it was that he put up a great board saying "Trespassers in this wood will be prosecuted," and it might as well not have been put up, for no one ever went into the wood, not even from the little town, because it was too far for them to walk, and, anyhow, they did not care for walking. And as for the doctor's son, a boy of thirteen, who went in there with an air-gun to shoot things, he paid no attention to the board.
The next thing my friend did was to have a fine strong paling put all round the wood in March, 1894. This paling was of oak; it was seven feet high; it had iron spikes along the top. There were six gates in it, and stout posts at intervals of ten yards. The boards overlapped very exactly. It was as good a bit of work as ever I saw. He had it varnished, and it looked splendid. All this took two years.
Just then he was elected to Parliament, not for Berkshire, as you might have imagined, but for a slum division of Birmingham. He was very proud of this, and quite rightly too. He said: "I am the one Conservative member in the Midlands." It almost made him forget about his wood. He shut up the Berkshire place and took a house in town, and as he could not afford Mayfair, and did not understand such things very well, the house he took was an enormous empty house in Bayswater, and he had no peace until he gave it up for a set of rooms off Piccadilly; and then his mother thought that looked so odd that he did the right thing, and got into a nice old-fashioned furnished house in Westminster, overlooking the Green Park.
But all this cost him a mint of money, and politics made him angrier and angrier. They never let him speak, and they made him vote for things he thought perfectly detestable. Then he did speak, and as he was an honest English gentleman the papers called him ridiculous names and said he had no brains. So he just jolly well threw the whole thing up and went back to Berkshire, and everybody welcomed him, and he did a thing he had never done before: he put a flag up over his house to show he was at home. Then he began to think of his wood again.
The very first time he rode out to look at it he found the paling had given way in places from the fall of trees, and that some leaned inwards and some outwards, and that one of the gates was off its hinges. There were also two cows walking about in the wood, and what annoyed him most of all, the iron spikes were rusty and the varnish had all gone rotten and white and streaky on the palings. He spoke to the bailiff about this, and hauled him out to look at it. The bailiff rubbed the varnish with his finger, smelt it, and said that it had perished. He also said there was no such thing as good varnish nowadays, and he added there wasn't any varnish, not the very best, but wouldn't go like that with rain and all. Mr. Hermann-Postlethwaite grumbled a good deal, but he supposed the bailiff knew best; so he told him to see what could be done, and for several weeks he heard no more about it.
I forgot to tell you that about this time the South African War had broken out, and as things were getting pretty tangled, Hermann-Postlethwaite went out with his regiment, the eighth battalion, not of the Berkshire, but of the Orkney regiment. While he was out there, his brother, in Dr. Charlbury's home, died, and he succeeded to the baronetcy. As he already had a V.C. and was now given a D.S.O., as well as being one of the people mentioned in dispatches, he was pretty important by the time he came home, when the war was over, just before the elections of 1900.
When he got home he had a splendid welcome, both from his tenants in Berkshire in passing through and from those of his late brother in the big place in Worcestershire. He preferred his Berkshire place, however, and, letting the big place to an American of the name of Hendrik K. Boulge, he went back to his first home. When he got there he thought of the old wood, and went out to look at it. The palings were mended, but they were covered all over with tar! He was exceedingly angry, and ordered them to be painted at once; but the bailiff assured him one could not paint over tar, and so did the carpenter and the foreman. At this he had a fit of rage, and ordered the whole damned thing to be pulled down, and swore he would be damned if he ever had a damned stick or a rail round the damned wood again. He was no longer young; he was getting stout and rather puffy; he was not so reasonable as of old. Anyhow, he had the whole thing pulled down. Next year (that is, in 1901) his wife died.
I wish I had the space to tell you all the other things he did to the wood. How a friend of his having sold a similar wood on the Thames in building lots at £500 an acre, he put up the whole wood at the same rate. How, the whole wood being 200 acres in extent, he hoped to make £100,000 out of it. How he thought this a tidy sum. How he got no offers at this price, nor at £100, nor at £50. How an artist offered him £20 for half an acre to put up a red tin bungalow upon. How he lost his temper with the artist. How at last he left the whole thing alone and tried to forget all about it.
* * * * *
The old wood to-day is just like what it was when I wandered in it as a boy. The doctor's son is a man now, and is keeping a bar in Sydney; so he is gone. The townspeople don't come any more than before. I am the only person who goes near the place. The trees are a trifle grander. I happen now and then, when I visit this Berkshire parish, upon a stump of a post or an old spike in the grass of this wood, but otherwise it is as though all this had not been.
A solemn thought: How enduring are the works of Nature--how perishable those of Man!
THE CHANNEL
Friends of mine, friends all, and you also, publishers, colonials and critics, do you know that particular experience for which I am trying to find words? Do you know that glamour in the mind which arises and transforms our thought when we see the things that the men who made us saw--the things of a long time ago, the origins? I think everybody knows that glamour, but very few people know where to find it.
Every man knows that he has in him the power for such revelations, and every man wonders in what strange place he may come upon them. There are men also (very rich) who have considered all the world and wandered over it, seeking those first experiences and trying to feel as felt the earlier men in a happier time--yet these few rich men have not felt and have not so found the things which they desire. I have known men who have thought to find them in the mountains, but would not climb them simply enough and refused to leave their luxuries behind, and so lost everything, and might as well have been walking in a dirty town at home for all the little good that the mountains did to them. And I know men who have thought to find this memory and desire in foreign countries, in Africa, hunting great beasts such as our fathers hunted; yet even these have not relit those old embers, which if they lie dead and dark in a man make his whole soul dusty and useless, but which if they be once rekindled can make him part of all the centuries.
Yet there is a simple and an easy way to find what the men who made us found, and to see the world as they saw it, and to take a bath, as it were, in the freshness of beginnings; and that is to go to work as cheaply and as hardly as you can, and only as much away from men as they were away from men, and not to read or to write or to think, but to eat and drink and use the body in many immediate ways, which are at the feet of every man. Every man who will walk for some days carelessly, sleeping, rough when he must, or in poor inns, and making for some one place direct because he desires to see it, will know the thing I mean. And there is a better way still of which I shall now speak: I mean, to try the seas in a little boat not more than twenty-five feet long, preferably decked, of shallow draught, such as can enter into all creeks and havens, and so simply rigged that by oneself, or with a friend at most, one can wander all over the world.
Certainly every man that goes to sea in a little boat of this kind learns terror and salvation, happy living, air, danger, exultation, glory, and repose at the end; and they are not words to him, but, on the contrary, realities which will afterwards throughout his life give the mere words a full meaning. And for this experiment there lies at our feet, I say, the Channel.
It is the most marvellous sea in the world--the most suited for these little adventures; it is crammed with strange towns, differing one from the other; it has two opposite people upon either side, and hills and varying climates, and the hundred shapes and colours of the earth, here rocks, there sand, there cliffs, and there marshy shores. It is a little world. And what is more, it is a kind of inland sea.
People will not understand how narrow it is, crossing it hurriedly in great steamships; nor will they make it a home for pleasure unless they are rich and can have great boats; yet they should, for on its water lies the best stage for playing out the old drama by which the soul of a healthy man is kept alive. For instance, listen to this story:--
The sea being calm, and the wind hot, uncertain, and light from the east, leaving oily gaps on the water, and continually dying down, I drifted one morning in the strong ebb to the South Goodwin Lightship, wondering what to do. There was a haze over the land and over the sea, and through the haze great ships a long way off showed, one or two of them, like oblong targets which one fires at with guns. They hardly moved in spite of all their canvas set, there was so little breeze. So I drifted in the slow ebb past the South Goodwin, and I thought: "What is all this drifting and doing nothing? Let us play the fool, and see if there are no adventures left."
So I put my little boat about until the wind took her from forward, such as it was, and she crawled out to sea.
It was a dull, uneasy morning, hot and silent, and the wind, I say, was hardly a wind, and most of the time the sails flapped uselessly.
But after eleven o'clock the wind first rose, and then shifted a little, and then blew light but steady; and then at last she heeled and the water spoke under her bows, and still she heeled and ran, until in the haze I could see no more land; but ever so far out there were no seas, for the light full breeze was with the tide, the tide ebbing out as a strong, and silent as a man in anger, down the hidden parallel valleys of the narrow sea. And I held this little wind till about two o'clock, when I drank wine and ate bread and meat at the tiller, for I had them by me, and just afterwards, still through a thick haze of heat, I saw Gris-nez, a huge ghost, right up against and above me; and I wondered, for I had crossed the Channel, now for the first time, and knew now what it felt like to see new land.
Though I knew nothing of the place, I had this much sense, that I said to myself: "The tide is right-down Channel, racing through the hidden valleys under the narrow sea, so it will all go down together and all come up together, and the flood will come on this foreign side much at the same hour that it does on the home side." My boat lay to the east and the ebb tide held her down, and I lit a pipe and looked at the French hills and thought about them and the people in them, and England which I had left behind, and I was delighted with the loneliness of the sea; and still I waited for the flood.
But in a little while the chain made a rattling noise, and she lay quite slack and swung oddly; and then there were little boiling and eddying places in the water, and the water seemed to come up from underneath sometimes, and altogether it behaved very strangely, and this was the turn of the tide. Then the wind dropped also, and for a moment she lollopped about, till at last, after I had gone below and straightened things, I came on deck to see that she had turned completely round, and that the tide at last was making up my way, towards Calais, and her chain was taut and her nose pointed down Channel, and a little westerly breeze, a little draught of air, came up cool along the tide.
When this came I was very glad, for I saw that I could end my adventure before night. So I pulled up the anchor and fished it, and then turned with the tide under me, and the slight half-felt breeze just barely filling the mainsail (the sheet was slack, so powerless was the wind), and I ran up along that high coast, watching eagerly every new thing; but I kept some way out for fear of shoals, till after three good hours under the reclining sun of afternoon, which glorified the mist, I saw, far off, the roofs and spires of a town, and a low pier running well out to sea, and I knew that it must be Calais. And I ran for these piers, careless of how I went, for it was already half of the spring flood tide, and everything was surely well covered for so small a boat, and I ran up the fairway in between the piers, and saw Frenchmen walking about and a great gun peeping up over its earthwork, and plenty of clean new masonry. And a man came along and showed me where I could lie; but I was so strange to the place that I would not take a berth, but lay that night moored to an English ship.
And when I had eaten and drunk and everything was stowed away and darkness had fallen, I went on deck, and for a long time sat silent, smoking a pipe and watching the enormous lighthouse of Calais, which is built right in the town, and which turns round and round above one all night long.
And I thought: "Here is a wonderful thing! I have crossed the Channel in this little boat, and I know now what the sea means that separates France from England. I have strained my eyes for shore through a haze. I have seen new lands, and I feel as men do who have dreamt dreams."
But in reality I had had very great luck indeed, and had had no right to cross, for my coming back was to be far more difficult and dreadful, and I was to suffer many things before again I could see tall England, close by me, out of the sea.
But how I came back, and of the storm, and of its majesty, and of how the boat and I survived, I will tell you another time, only imploring you to do the same; not to tell of it, I mean, but to sail it in a little boat.
THE MOWING OF A FIELD
There is a valley in South England remote from ambition and from fear, where the passage of strangers is rare and unperceived, and where the scent of the grass in summer is breathed only by those who are native to that unvisited land. The roads to the Channel do not traverse it; they choose upon either side easier passes over the range. One track alone leads up through it to the hills, and this is changeable: now green where men have little occasion to go, now a good road where it nears the homesteads and the barns. The woods grow steep above the slopes; they reach sometimes the very summit of the heights, or, when they cannot attain them, fill in and clothe the coombes. And, in between, along the floor of the valley, deep pastures and their silence are bordered by lawns of chalky grass and the small yew trees of the Downs.
The clouds that visit its sky reveal themselves beyond the one great rise, and sail, white and enormous, to the other, and sink beyond that other. But the plains above which they have travelled and the Weald to which they go, the people of the valley cannot see and hardly recall. The wind, when it reaches such fields, is no longer a gale from the salt, but fruitful and soft, an inland breeze; and those whose blood was nourished here, feel in that wind the fruitfulness of our orchards and all the life that all things draw from the air.
In this place, when I was a boy, I pushed through a fringe of beeches that made a complete screen between me and the world, and I came to a glade called No Man's Land. I climbed beyond it, and I was surprised and glad, because from the ridge of that glade I saw the sea. To this place very lately I returned.
The many things that I recovered as I came up the countryside were not less charming than when a distant memory had enshrined them, but much more. Whatever veil is thrown by a longing recollection had not intensified nor even made more mysterious the beauty of that happy ground; not in my very dreams of morning had I, in exile, seen it more beloved or more rare. Much also that I had forgotten now returned to me as I approached--a group of elms, a little turn of the parson's wall, a small paddock beyond the graveyard close, cherished by one man, with a low wall of very old stone guarding it all round. And all these things fulfilled and amplified my delight, till even the good vision of the place, which I had kept so many years, left me and was replaced by its better reality. "Here," I said to myself, "is a symbol of what some say is reserved for the soul: pleasure of a kind which cannot be imagined save in a moment when at last it is attained."
When I came to my own gate and my own field, and had before me the house I knew, I looked around a little (though it was already evening), and I saw that the grass was standing as it should stand when it is ready for the scythe. For in this, as in everything that a man can do--of those things at least which are very old--there is an exact moment when they are done best. And it has been remarked of whatever rules us that it works blunderingly, seeing that the good things given to a man are not given at the precise moment when they would have filled him with delight. But, whether this be true or false, we can choose the just turn of the seasons in everything we do of our own will, and especially in the making of hay. Many think that hay is best made when the grass is thickest; and so they delay until it is rank and in flower, and has already heavily pulled the ground. And there is another false reason for delay, which is wet weather. For very few will understand (though it comes year after year) that we have rain always in South England between the sickle and the scythe, or say just after the weeks of east wind are over. First we have a week of sudden warmth, as though the south had come to see us all; then we have the weeks of east and south-east wind; and then we have more or less of that rain of which I spoke, and which always astonishes the world. Now it is just before, or during, or at the very end of that rain--but not later--that grass should be cut for hay. True, upland grass, which is always thin, should be cut earlier than the grass in the bottoms and along the water meadows; but not even the latest, even in the wettest seasons, should be left (as it is) to flower and even to seed. For what we get when we store our grass is not a harvest of something ripe, but a thing just caught in its prime before maturity: as witness that our corn and straw are best yellow, but our hay is best green. So also Death should be represented with a scythe and Time with a sickle; for Time can take only what is ripe, but Death comes always too soon. In a word, then, it is always much easier to cut grass too late than too early; and I, under that evening and come back to these pleasant fields, looked at the grass and knew that it was time. June was in full advance: it was the beginning of that season when the night has already lost her foothold of the earth and hovers over it, never quite descending, but mixing sunset with the dawn.
Next morning, before it was yet broad day, I awoke, and thought of the mowing. The birds were already chattering in the trees beside my window, all except the nightingale, which had left and flown away to the Weald, where he sings all summer by day as well as by night in the oaks and the hazel spinneys, and especially along the little river Adur, one of the rivers of the Weald. The birds and the thought of the mowing had awakened me, and I went down the stairs and along the stone floors to where I could find a scythe; and when I took it from its nail, I remembered how, fourteen years ago, I had last gone out with my scythe, just so, into the fields at morning. In between that day and this were many things, cities and armies, and a confusion of books, mountains and the desert, and horrible great breadths of sea.
When I got out into the long grass the sun was not yet risen, but there were already many colours in the eastern sky, and I made haste to sharpen my scythe, so that I might get to the cutting before the dew should dry. Some say that it is best to wait till all the dew has risen, so as to get the grass quite dry from the very first. But, though it is an advantage to get the grass quite dry, yet it is not worth while to wait till the dew has risen. For, in the first place, you lose many hours of work (and those the coolest), and next--which is more important--you lose that great ease and thickness in cutting which comes of the dew. So I at once began to sharpen my scythe.
There is an art also in the sharpening of a scythe, and it is worth describing carefully. Your blade must be dry, and that is why you will see men rubbing the scythe-blade with grass before they whet it. Then also your rubber must be quite dry, and on this account it is a good thing to lay it on your coat and keep it there during all your day's mowing. The scythe you stand upright, with the blade pointing away from you, and you put your left hand firmly on the back of the blade, grasping it: then you pass the rubber first down one side of the blade-edge and then down the other, beginning near the handle and going on to the point and working quickly and hard. When you first do this you will, perhaps, cut your hand; but it is only at first that such an accident will happen to you.
To tell when the scythe is sharp enough this is the rule. First the stone clangs and grinds against the iron harshly; then it rings musically to one note; then, at last, it purrs as though the iron and stone were exactly suited. When you hear this, your scythe is sharp enough; and I, when I heard it that June dawn, with everything quite silent except the birds, let down the scythe and bent myself to mow.
When one does anything anew, after so many years, one fears very much for one's trick or habit. But all things once learnt are easily recoverable, and I very soon recovered the swing and power of the mower. Mowing well and mowing badly--or rather not mowing at all--are separated by very little; as is also true of writing verse, of playing the fiddle, and of dozens of other things, but of nothing more than of believing. For the bad or young or untaught mower without tradition, the mower Promethean, the mower original and contemptuous of the past, does all these things: He leaves great crescents of grass uncut. He digs the point of the scythe hard into the ground with a jerk. He loosens the handles and even the fastening of the blade. He twists the blade with his blunders, he blunts the blade, he chips it, dulls it, or breaks it clean off at the tip. If any one is standing by he cuts him in the ankle. He sweeps up into the air wildly, with nothing to resist his stroke. He drags up earth with the grass, which is like making the meadow bleed. But the good mower who does things just as they should be done and have been for a hundred thousand years, falls into none of these fooleries. He goes forward very steadily, his scythe-blade just barely missing the ground, every grass falling; the swish and rhythm of his mowing are always the same.
So great an art can only be learnt by continual practice; but this much is worth writing down, that, as in all good work, to know the thing with which you work is the core of the affair. Good verse is best written on good paper with an easy pen, not with a lump of coal on a whitewashed wall. The pen thinks for you; and so does the scythe mow for you if you treat it honourably and in a manner that makes it recognise its service. The manner is this. You must regard the scythe as a pendulum that swings, not as a knife that cuts. A good mower puts no more strength into his stroke than into his lifting. Again, stand up to your work. The bad mower, eager and full of pain, leans forward and tries to force the scythe through the grass. The good mower, serene and able, stands as nearly straight as the shape of the scythe will let him, and follows up every stroke closely, moving his left foot forward. Then also let every stroke get well away. Mowing is a thing of ample gestures, like drawing a cartoon. Then, again, get yourself into a mechanical and repetitive mood: be thinking of anything at all but your mowing, and be anxious only when there seems some interruption to the monotony of the sound. In this mowing should be like one's prayers--all of a sort and always the same, and so made that you can establish a monotony and work them, as it were, with half your mind: that happier half, the half that does not bother.
In this way, when I had recovered the art after so many years, I went forward over the field, cutting lane after lane through the grass, and bringing out its most secret essences with the sweep of the scythe until the air was full of odours. At the end of every lane I sharpened my scythe and looked back at the work done, and then carried my scythe down again upon my shoulder to begin another. So, long before the bell rang in the chapel above me--that is, long before six o'clock, which is the time for the Angelus--I had many swathes already lying in order parallel like soldiery; and the high grass yet standing, making a great contrast with the shaven part, looked dense and high. As it says in the Ballad of Val-ès-Dunes, where--
The tall son of the Seven Winds Came riding out of Hither-hythe,
and his horse-hoofs (you will remember) trampled into the press and made a gap in it, and his sword (as you know)
... was like a scythe In Arcus when the grass is high And all the swathes in order lie, And there's the bailiff standing by A-gathering of the tithe.
So I mowed all that morning, till the houses awoke in the valley, and from some of them rose a little fragrant smoke, and men began to be seen.
I stood still and rested on my scythe to watch the awakening of the village, when I saw coming up to my field a man whom I had known in older times, before I had left the Valley.
He was of that dark silent race upon which all the learned quarrel, but which, by whatever meaningless name it may be called--Iberian, or Celtic, or what you will--is the permanent root of all England, and makes England wealthy and preserves it everywhere, except perhaps in the Fens and in a part of Yorkshire. Everywhere else you will find it active and strong. These people are intensive; their thoughts and their labours turn inward. It is on account of their presence in these islands that our gardens are the richest in the world. They also love low rooms and ample fires and great warm slopes of thatch. They have, as I believe, an older acquaintance with the English air than any other of all the strains that make up England. They hunted in the Weald with stones, and camped in the pines of the green-sand. They lurked under the oaks of the upper rivers, and saw the legionaries go up, up the straight paved road from the sea. They helped the few pirates to destroy the towns, and mixed with those pirates and shared the spoils of the Roman villas, and were glad to see the captains and the priests destroyed. They remain; and no admixture of the Frisian pirates, or the Breton, or the Angevin and Norman conquerors, has very much affected their cunning eyes.
To this race, I say, belonged the man who now approached me. And he said to me, "Mowing?" And I answered, "Ar." Then he also said "Ar," as in duty bound; for so we speak to each other in the Stenes of the Downs.
Next he told me that, as he had nothing to do, he would lend me a hand; and I thanked him warmly, or, as we say, "kindly." For it is a good custom of ours always to treat bargaining as though it were a courteous pastime; and though what he was after was money, and what I wanted was his labour at the least pay, yet we both played the comedy that we were free men, the one granting a grace and the other accepting it. For the dry bones of commerce, avarice and method and need, are odious to the Valley; and we cover them up with a pretty body of fiction and observances. Thus, when it comes to buying pigs, the buyer does not begin to decry the pig and the vendor to praise it, as is the custom with lesser men; but tradition makes them do business in this fashion:--
First the buyer will go up to the seller when he sees him in his own steading, and, looking at the pig with admiration, the buyer will say that rain may or may not fall, or that we shall have snow or thunder, according to the time of year. Then the seller, looking critically at the pig, will agree that the weather is as his friend maintains. There is no haste at all; great leisure marks the dignity of their exchange. And the next step is, that the buyer says: "That's a fine pig you have there, Mr. ----" (giving the seller's name). "Ar, powerful fine pig." Then the seller, saying also "Mr." (for twin brothers rocked in one cradle give each other ceremonious observance here), the seller, I say, admits, as though with reluctance, the strength and beauty of the pig, and falls into deep thought. Then the buyer says, as though moved by a great desire, that he is ready to give so much for the pig, naming half the proper price, or a little less. Then the seller remains in silence for some moments; and at last begins to shake his head slowly, till he says: "I don't be thinking of selling the pig, anyways." He will also add that a party only Wednesday offered him so much for the pig--and he names about double the proper price. Thus all ritual is duly accomplished; and the solemn act is entered upon with reverence and in a spirit of truth. For when the buyer uses this phrase: "I'll tell you what I will do," and offers within half a crown of the pig's value, the seller replies that he can refuse him nothing, and names half a crown above its value; the difference is split, the pig is sold, and in the quiet soul of each runs the peace of something accomplished.
Thus do we buy a pig or land or labour or malt or lime, always with elaboration and set forms; and many a London man has paid double and more for his violence and his greedy haste and very unchivalrous higgling. As happened with the land at Underwaltham, which the mortgagees had begged and implored the estate to take at twelve hundred, and had privately offered to all the world at a thousand, but which a sharp direct man, of the kind that makes great fortunes, a man in a motor-car, a man in a fur coat, a man of few words, bought for two thousand three hundred before my very eyes, protesting that they might take his offer or leave it; and all because he did not begin by praising the land.
Well then, this man I spoke of offered to help me, and he went to get his scythe. But I went into the house and brought out a gallon jar of small ale for him and for me; for the sun was now very warm, and small ale goes well with mowing. When we had drunk some of this ale in mugs called "I see you," we took each a swathe, he a little behind me because he was the better mower; and so for many hours we swung, one before the other, mowing and mowing at the tall grass of the field. And the sun rose to noon and we were still at our mowing; and we ate food, but only for a little while, and we took again to our mowing. And at last there was nothing left but a small square of grass, standing like a square of linesmen who keep their formation, tall and unbroken, with all the dead lying around them when the battle is over and done.
Then for some little time I rested after all those hours; and the man and I talked together, and a long way off we heard in another field the musical sharpening of a scythe.
The sunlight slanted powdered and mellow over the breadth of the valley; for day was nearing its end. I went to fetch rakes from the steading; and when I had come back the last of the grass had fallen, and all the field lay flat and smooth, with the very green short grass in lanes between the dead and yellow swathes.
These swathes we raked into cocks to keep them from the dew against our return at daybreak; and we made the cocks as tall and steep as we could, for in that shape they best keep off the dew, and it is easier also to spread them after the sun has risen. Then we raked up every straggling blade, till the whole field was a clean floor for the tedding and the carrying of the hay next morning. The grass we had mown was but a little over two acres; for that is all the pasture on my little tiny farm.
When we had done all this, there fell upon us the beneficent and deliberate evening; so that as we sat a little while together near the rakes, we saw the valley more solemn and dim around us, and all the trees and hedgerows quite still, and held by a complete silence. Then I paid my companion his wage, and bade him a good night, till we should meet in the same place before sunrise.
He went off with a slow and steady progress, as all our peasants do, making their walking a part of the easy but continual labour of their lives. But I sat on, watching the light creep around towards the north and change, and the waning moon coming up as though by stealth behind the woods of No Man's Land.
THE ROMAN ROAD
The other day (it was Wednesday, and the air was very pure) I went into the stable upon my way toward the wood, and there I saw my horse Monster standing by himself, regarding nothingness. And when I had considered what a shame it was to take one's pleasure in a wood and leave one's helpless horse at home, I bridled him and saddled him and took him out, and rode him the way that I had meant to go alone. So we went together along the Stene under the North Wood until we got to the edge of the forest, and then we took the green Ride to the right, for it was my intention to go and look at the Roman road.
Behind my house, behind my little farm, there are as many miles of turf as one cares to count, and then behind it also, but the other way, there goes this deep and lonely forest. It is principally of beech, which is the tree of the chalk, and no one has cut it or fenced it or thought about it (except to love it), since the parts about my village took their names: Gumber and Fairmile Bay Combe, the Nore, and the stretch called No Man's Land.
Into the darkness of these trees I rode very quietly with Monster, my horse, but whether the autumn air were pleasanter to him or to me neither of us could decide, for there is no bridge between two souls. That is, if horses have a soul, which I suppose they have, for they are both stupid and kindly, and they fear death as though a part, and but a part, of them were immortal. Also they see things in the dark and are cognisant of evil.
When I had gone some hundred yards towards the Roman road I saw, bending lower than the rest on the tree from which it hung, a golden bough, and I said to myself that I had had good luck, for such a thing has always been the sign of an unusual experience and of a voyage among the dead. All the other leaves of the tree were green, but the turn of the year, which sends out foragers just as the spring does, marking the way it is to go, had come and touched this bough and changed it, so that it shone out by itself in the recesses of the forest and gleamed before and behind. I did not ask what way it led me, for I knew; and so I went onwards, riding my horse, until I came to that long bank of earth which runs like a sort of challenge through this ancient land to prove what our origins were, and who first brought us merry people into the circuit of the world.
When I saw the Roman road the sharper influence which it had had upon my boyhood returned to me, and I got off my horse and took his bit out of his mouth so that he could play the fool with the grass and leaves (which are bad for him), and I hitched the snaffle to a little broken peg of bough so that he could not wander. And then I looked up and down along the boles of the great North Wood, taking in the straight line of the way.
I have heard it said that certain professors, the most learned of their day, did once deny that this was a Roman road. I can well believe it, and it is delightful to believe that they did. For this road startles and controls a true man, presenting an eternal example of what Rome could do. The peasants around have always called it the "Street." It leads from what was certainly one Roman town to what was certainly another. That sign of Roman occupation, the modern word "Cold Harbour," is scattered up and down it. There are Roman pavements on it. It goes plumb straight for miles, and at times, wherever it crosses undisturbed land, it is three or four feet above the level of the down. Here, then, was a feast for the learned: since certainly the more obvious a thing is, the more glory there must be in denying it. And deny it they did (or at least, so I am told), just as they will deny that Thomas à Becket was a Papist, or that Austerlitz was fought in spite of Trafalgar, or that the Gospel of St. John is the Gospel of St. John.
Here then, sitting upon this Roman road I considered the nature of such men, and when I had thought out carefully where the nearest Don might be at that moment, I decided that he was at least twenty-three miles away, and I was very glad: for it permitted me to contemplate the road with common sense and with Faith, which is Common Sense transfigured; and I could see the Legionaries climbing the hill. I remembered also what a sight there was upon the down above, and I got upon my horse again to go and see it.
When one has pushed one's way through the brambles and the rounded great roots which have grown upon this street--where no man has walked perhaps for about a thousand years--one gets to the place where it tops the hill, and here one sees the way in which the line of it was first struck out. From where one stands, right away like a beam, leading from rise to rise, it runs to the cathedral town. You see the spot where it enters the eastern gate of the Roman walls; you see at the end of it, like the dot upon an "i," the mass of the cathedral. Then, if you turn and look northward, you see from point to point its taut stretch across the weald to where, at the very limit of the horizon, there is a gap in the chain of hills that bars your view.
The strict design of such a thing weighs upon one as might weigh upon one four great lines of Virgil, or the sight of those enormous stones which one comes upon, Roman also, in the Algerian sands. The plan of such an avenue by which to lead great armies and along which to drive commands argues a mixture of unity and of power as intimate as the lime and the sand of which these conquerors welded their imperishable cement. And it does more than this. It suggests swiftness and certitude of aim and a sort of eager determination which we are slow to connect with Government, but which certainly underlay the triumph of this people. A road will give one less trouble if it winds about and feels the contours of the land. It will pay better if it is of earth and broken stones instead of being paved, nor would any one aiming at wealth or comfort alone laboriously raise its level, as the level of this road is raised. But in all that the Romans did there was something of a monument. Where they might have taken pipes down a valley and up the opposing side they preferred the broad shoulders of an arcade, and where a seven-foot door would have done well enough to enter their houses by they were content with nothing less than an arch of fifty. In all their work they were conscious of some business other than that immediately to hand, and therefore it is possible that their ruins will survive the establishment of our own time as they have survived that of the Middle Ages. In this wild place, at least, nothing remained of all that was done between their time and ours.
These things did the sight on either side of the summit suggest to me, but chiefly there returned as I gazed the delicious thought that learned men, laborious and heavily endowed, had denied the existence of this Roman road.
See with what manifold uses every accident of human life is crammed! Here was a piece of pedantry and scepticism, which might make some men weep and some men stamp with irritation, and some men, from sheer boredom, fall asleep, but which fed in my own spirit a fountain of pure joy, as I considered carefully what kind of man it is who denies these things; the kind of way he walks; the kind of face he has; the kind of book he writes; the kind of publisher who chisels him; and the kind of way in which his works are bound. With every moment my elation grew greater and more impetuous, until at last I could not bear to sit any longer still, even upon so admirable a beast, nor to look down even at so rich a plain (though that was seen through the air of Southern England), but turning over the downs I galloped home, and came in straight from the turf to my own ground--for what man would live upon a high road who could go through a gate right off the turf to his own steading and let the world go hang?
And so did I. But as they brought me beer and bacon at evening, and I toasted the memory of things past, I said to myself: "Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, Durham--you four great universities--you terrors of Europe--that road is older than you: and meanwhile I drink to your continued healths, but let us have a little room ... air, there, give us air, good people. I stifle when I think of you."
THE ONION-EATER
There is a hill not far from my home whence it is possible to see northward and southward such a stretch of land as is not to be seen from any eminence among those I know in Western Europe. Southward the sea-plain and the sea standing up in a belt of light against the sky, and northward all the weald.
From this summit the eye is disturbed by no great cities of the modern sort, but a dozen at least of those small market towns which are the delight of South England hold the view from point to point, from the pale blue downs of the island over, eastward, to the Kentish hills.
A very long way off, and near the sea-line, the high faint spire of that cathedral which was once the mother of all my county goes up without weight into the air and gathers round it the delicate and distant outlines of the landscape--as, indeed, its builders meant that it should do. In such a spot, on such a high watch-tower of England, I met, three days ago, a man.
I had been riding my kind and honourable horse for two hours, broken, indeed, by a long rest in a deserted barn.
I had been his companion, I say, for two hours, and had told him a hundred interesting things--to which he had answered nothing at all--when I took him along a path that neither of us yet had trod. I had not, I know; he had not (I think), for he went snorting and doubtfully. This path broke up from the kennels near Waltham, and made for the High Wood between Gumber and No Man's Land. It went over dead leaves and quite lonely to the thick of the forest; there it died out into a vaguer and a vaguer trail. At last it ceased altogether, and for half an hour or so I pushed carefully, always climbing upwards, through the branches, and picked my way along the bramble-shoots, until at last I came out upon that open space of which I had spoken, and which I have known since my childhood. As I came out of the wood the south-west wind met me, full of the Atlantic, and it seemed to me to blow from Paradise.
I remembered, as I halted and so gazed north and south to the weald below me, and then again to the sea, the story of that Sultan who publicly proclaimed that he had possessed all power on earth, and had numbered on a tablet with his own hand each of his happy days, and had found them, when he came to die, to be seventeen. I knew what that heathen had meant, and I looked into my heart as I remembered the story, but I came back from the examination satisfied, for "So far," I said to myself, "this day is among my number, and the light is falling. I will count it for one." It was then that I saw before me, going easily and slowly across the downs, the figure of a man.
He was powerful, full of health and easy; his clothes were rags; his face was open and bronzed. I came at once off my horse to speak with him, and, holding my horse by the bridle, I led it forward till we met. Then I asked him whither he was going, and whether, as I knew these open hills by heart, I could not help him on his way.
He answered me that he was in no need of help, for he was bound nowhere, but that he had come up off the high road on to the hills in order to get his pleasure and also to see what there was on the other side. He said to me also, with evident enjoyment (and in the accent of a lettered man), "This is indeed a day to be alive!"
I saw that I had here some chance of an adventure, since it is not every day that one meets upon a lonely down a man of culture, in rags and happy. I therefore took the bridle right off my horse and let him nibble, and I sat down on the bank of the Roman road holding the leather of the bridle in my hand, and wiping the bit with plucked grass. The stranger sat down beside me, and drew from his pocket a piece of bread and a large onion. We then talked of those things which should chiefly occupy mankind: I mean, of happiness and of the destiny of the soul. Upon these matters I found him to be exact, thoughtful, and just.
First, then, I said to him: "I also have been full of gladness all this day, and, what is more, as I came up the hill from Waltham I was inspired to verse, and wrote it inside my mind, completing a passage I had been working at for two years, upon joy. But it was easy for me to be happy, since I was on a horse and warm and well fed; yet even for me such days are capricious. I have known but few in my life. They are each of them distinct and clear, so rare are they, and (what is more) so different are they in their very quality from all other days."
"You are right," he said, "in this last phrase of yours.... They are indeed quite other from all the common days of our lives. But you were wrong, I think, in saying that your horse and clothes and good feeding and the rest had to do with these curious intervals of content. Wealth makes the run of our days somewhat more easy, poverty makes them more hard--or very hard. But no poverty has ever yet brought of itself despair into the soul--the men who kill themselves are neither rich nor poor. Still less has wealth ever purchased those peculiar hours. I also am filled with their spirit to-day, and God knows," said he, cutting his onion in two, so that it gave out a strong savour, "God knows I can purchase nothing."
"Then tell me," I said, "whence do you believe these moments come? And will you give me half your onion?"
"With pleasure," he replied, "for no man can eat a whole onion; and as for that other matter, why I think the door of heaven is ajar from time to time, and that light shines out upon us for a moment between its opening and closing." He said this in a merry, sober manner; his black eyes sparkled, and his large beard was blown about a little by the wind. Then he added: "If a man is a slave to the rich in the great cities (the most miserable of mankind), yet these days come to him. To the vicious wealthy and privileged men, whose faces are stamped hard with degradation, these days come; they come to you, you say, working (I suppose) in anxiety like most of men. They come to me who neither work nor am anxious so long as South England may freely import onions."
"I believe you are right," I said. "And I especially commend you for eating onions; they contain all health; they induce sleep; they may be called the apples of content, or, again, the companion fruits of mankind."
"I have always said," he answered gravely, "that when the couple of them left Eden they hid and took away with them an onion. I am moved in my soul to have known a man who reveres and loves them in the due measure, for such men are rare."
Then he asked, with evident anxiety: "Is there no inn about here where a man like me will be taken in?"
"Yes," I told him. "Down under the Combe at Duncton is a very good inn. Have you money to pay? Will you take some of my money?"
"I will take all you can possibly afford me," he answered in a cheerful, manly fashion. I counted out my money and found I had on me but 3s.7d. "Here is 3s. 7d.," I said.
"Thank you, indeed," he answered, taking the coins and wrapping them in a little rag (for he had no pockets, but only holes).
"I wish," I said with regret, "we might meet and talk more often of many things. So much do we agree, and men like you and me are often lonely."
He shrugged his shoulders and put his head on one side, quizzing at me with his eyes. Then he shook his head decidedly, and said: "No, no--it is certain that we shall never meet again." And thanking me with great fervour, but briefly, he went largely and strongly down the escarpment of the Combe to Duncton and the weald; and I shall never see him again till the Great Day....
THE RETURN TO ENGLAND
In Calais harbour, it being still very early in the morning, about half-past five, I peered out to see how things were looking, for if that coast corresponded at all to ours, the tide should be making westerly by six o'clock that day--the ebb tide--and it was on the first of that tide that I should make the passage to England, for at sea you never can tell. At sea you never can tell, and you must take every inch the gods allow you. You will need that and more very often before evening. Now, as I put my head out I saw that I could not yet start, for there was a thick white mist over everything, so that I could not even see the bowsprit of my own boat. Everything was damp: the decks smelt of fog, and from the shore came sounds whose cause I could not see. Looking over the iron bulwarks of the big English cargo ship, alongside of which I was moored, was a man with his head upon his folded arms. He told me that he thought the fog would lift; and so I waited, seeking no more sleep, but sitting up there in the drifting fog, and taking pleasure in a bugle call which the French call "La Diane," and which they play to wake the soldiers. But in summer it wakes nobody, for all the world is waking long before.
Towards six the mist blew clean away before a little air from the north-east; it had come sharp over those miles and miles of sand dunes and flats which stretched away from Gris-nez on to Denmark. From Gris-nez all the way to the Sound there is no other hill; but coarse grass, wind-swept and flying sand. Finding this wind, I very quickly set sail, and as I did not know the harbour I let down the peak of the mainsail that she might sail slowly, and crept along close to the eastern pier, for fear that when I got to the open work the westerly tide should drive me against the western pier; but there was no need for all this caution, since the tide was not yet making strongly. Yet was I wise to beware, for if you give the strange gods of the sea one little chance they will take a hundred, and drown you for their pleasure. And sailing, if you sail in all weathers, is a perpetual game of skill against them, the heartiest and most hazardous game in the world.
So then, when I had got well outside, I found what is called "a lump." The sea was jumbling up and down irregularly, as though great animals had just stopped fighting there. But whatever was the cause of it, this lump made it difficult to manage the boat I was in, for the air was still light and somewhat unsteady; sometimes within a point of north, and then again dropping and rising free within a point of east: on the whole, north-east. To windward the sea was very clear, but down towards the land there was a haze, and when I got to the black buoy which is three miles from Calais, and marks the place where you should turn to go into the harbour, I could barely see the high land glooming through the weather, and Calais belfry and lighthouse tower I could not see at all. I looked at my watch and saw it was seven, and immediately afterwards the wind became steady and true, and somewhat stronger, and work began.
She would point very nearly north, and so I laid her for that course, though that would have taken me right outside the Goodwins, for I knew that the tide was making westerly down the Channel, ebbing away faster and faster, and that, like a man crossing a rapid river in a ferry-boat, I had to point up far above where I wanted to land, which was at Dover, the nearest harbour. I sailed her, therefore, I say, as close as she would lie, and the wind rose.
The wind rose, and for half an hour I kept her to it. She had no more sail than she needed; she heeled beautifully and strongly to the wind; she took the seas, as they ran more regular, with a motion of mastery. It was like the gesture of a horse when he bends his head back to his chest, arching his neck with pride as he springs upon our Downs at morning. So set had the surging of the sea become that she rose and fell to it with rhythm, and the helm could be kept quite steady, and the regular splash of the rising bows and the little wisps of foam came in ceaseless exactitude like the marching of men, and in all this one mixed with the life of the sea.
But before it was eight o'clock (and I had eaten nothing) the wind got stronger still, and I was anxious and gazed continuously into it, up to windward, seeing the white caps beginning on the tops of the seas, although the wind and tide were together. She heeled also much more, and my anxiety hardened with the wind, for the wind had strengthened by about half-past eight, so that it was very strong indeed, and she was plainly over-canvased, her lee rail under all the time and all the cordage humming; there it stood, and by the grace and mercy of God the wind increased no more, for its caprice might have been very different.
Then began that excellent game which it is so hard to play, but so good to remember, and in which all men, whether they admit it or not, are full of fear, but it is a fear so steeped in exhilaration that one would think the personal spirit of the sea was mingled with the noise of the air.
For a whole great hour she roared and lifted through it still, taking the larger seas grandly, with disdain, as she had taken the smaller, and still over the buried lee rail the stream of the sea went by rejoicing and pouring, and the sheets and the weather runner trembled with the vigour of the charge, and on she went, and on. I was weary of the seas ahead (for each and individually they struck my soul as they came, even more strongly than they struck the bows--steep, curling, unintermittent, rank upon rank upon rank, as innumerable cavalry); still watching them, I say, I groped round with my hand behind the cabin door and pulled out brandy and bread, and drank brandy and ate bread, still watching the seas. And, as men are proud of their companions in danger, so I was proud to see the admirable lift and swing of that good boat, and to note how, if she slowed for a moment under the pounding, she recovered with a stride, rejoicing; and as for my fears, which were now fixed and considerable, I found this argument against them: that, though I could see nothing round me but the sea, yet soon I should be under the lee of the Goodwins, for, though I could not exactly calculate my speed, and though in the haze beyond nothing appeared, it was certain that I was roaring very quickly towards the further shore.
When, later, the sea grew confused and full of swirls and boiling, I said to myself: "This must be the tail of the Goodwins." But it was, not. For, though I did not know it, the ebb of the great spring tide had carried me right away down Channel, and there was not twelve feet of water under the keel, for the seething of the sea that I noticed came from the Varne--the Varne, that curious, long, steep hill, with its twin ridge close by, the Colbert; they stand right up in the Channel between France and England; they very nearly lift their heads above the waves. I passed over the crest of them, unknowing, into the deep beyond, and still the ship raced on. Then, somewhat suddenly, so suddenly that I gave a cry, I saw right up above me, through what was now a thick haze, the cliffs of England, perhaps two miles away, and showing very faintly indeed, a bare outline upon the white weather. A thought ran into my mind with violence, how, one behind the other, beyond known things, beyond history, the men from whom I came had greeted this sight after winds like these and danger and the crossing of the narrow seas. I looked at my watch; it was ten o'clock, so that this crossing had taken three hours, and to see the land again like that was better than any harbour, and I knew that all those hours my mind had been at strain. I looked again at the vague cliffs narrowly, thinking them the South Foreland, but as they cleared I saw to my astonishment that I had blown all down the Straits, and that Folkestone and the last walls of the chalk were before me.'
The wind dropped; the sea went on uneasily, tumbling and rolling, but within a very little while--before eleven, I think--there was no breeze at all; and there I lay, with Folkestone harbour not a mile away, but never any chance of getting there; and I whistled, but no wind came. I sat idle and admired the loneliness of the sea. Till, towards one, a little draught of air blew slantwise from the land, and under it I crept to the smooth water within the stone arm of the breakwater, and here I let the anchor go, and settling everything, I slept.
It is pleasant to remember these things.
THE VALLEY OF THE ROTHER
There is in that part of England which is very properly called her Eden (that centre of all good things and home of happy men, the county of Sussex), there is, I say, in that exalted county a valley which I shall praise for your greater pleasure, because I know that it is too jealously guarded for any run of strangers to make it common, and because I am very sure that you may go and only make it the more delightful by your presence. It is the valley of the River Rother; the sacred and fruitful river between the downs and the weald.
Now, here many travelling men, bicyclists even and some who visit for a livelihood, will think I mean the famous River Rother that almost reaches the sea. The Rother into which the foreigners sailed for so many hundred years, the River of the Marshes, the river on which stands Rye; the easy Rother along whose deep meadows are the sloping kilns, the bright-tilted towns and the steep roads; the red Rother that is fed by streams from the ironstone. This Rother also all good men know and love, both those that come in for pleasure, strangers of Kent, and those that have a distant birthright in East Sussex, being born beyond Ouse in the Rape of Bramber.
But it is not this Rother that I am telling of, though I would love to tell of it also--as indeed I would love to tell at length of all the rivers of Sussex--the Brede, the Ouse, the Adur, the Cuckmere; all the streams that cut the chalk hills. But for this I have no space and you no patience. Neither can I tell you of a thousand adventures and wonderful hazards along the hills and valley of this eastern Rother; of how I once through a telescope on Brightling Hill saw the meet at Battle, and of how it looked quite near; of how I leapt the River Rother once, landing on the far side safely (which argues the river narrow or the leap tremendous); of how I poached in the wood of a friend who is still my friend; of how I rode a horse into Robertsbridge; of the inn. All these things could I tell with growing fervour, and to all these would you listen with an increasing delight. But I must write of the River Rother under Petworth, the other Rother in the West. Why? Because I started out so to do, and no man should let himself be led away by a word, or by any such little thing.
Let me therefore have done with this eastern river, far away from my home, a river at the end of long journeys, and speak of that other noble Rother, the Rother of quiet men, the valley that is like a shrine in England.
Many famous towns and villages stand in the valley of this river and even (some of them) upon its very banks. Thus there are the three principal towns of this part, Midhurst and Petworth and Pulborough: but these have been dealt with and written of in so many great books and by such a swarm of new men that I have no business further to describe their merits and antiquity. But this I will add to all that is known of them. Midhurst takes its name from standing in the middle, for it is half-way between the open downs and the thick woods on the borders of Surrey. Petworth has a steeple that slopes to one side; not so much as Chesterfield, but somewhat more than most steeples. Pulborough stands upon a hill, and is famous for its corn-market, to which people come from far and near, from as far off as Burpham or as close by as Bury. All these noble towns have (as I said before) been written of in books, only no book that I know puts them all together and calls them "the Valley of the Rother." That is the title that such a book should have if it is to treat of the heart of West Sussex, and I make no doubt that such a book would be read lovingly by many men.
For the Valley of the Rother breeds men and is the cause of many delightful villages, all the homes of men. I know that Cobden was born there, the last of the yeomen: I hope that Cobbett lived here too. Manning was here in his short married life; he lived at Barlton (which foolish men call Barlavington), under the old Downs, where the steep woods make a hollow. In this valley also are Fittleworth (the only place in England that rhymes with Little Worth); Duncton, about which there is nothing to be said; Burton, which is very old and has its church right in the grounds of the house; Westburton, where the racehorses were; Graffham, Bignor, Sutton, and I know not how many delightful hamlets.
In the Valley of the River Rother no hurried men ever come, for it leads nowhere. They cross it now and then, and they forget it; but who, unless he be a son or a lover, has really known that plain? It leads nowhere: to the no man's land, the broken country by Liss. It has in it no curious sight, but only beauty. The rich men in it (and thank Heaven they are few) are of a reticent and homing kind, or (when the worst comes to the worst) they have estates elsewhere, and go north for their pleasure.
Foxes are hunted in the Valley of the Rother, but there are not very many. Pheasants and partridges are shot, but I never heard of great bags; one animal indeed there is in profusion. The rabbit swarms and exults in this life of Southern England. Do you stalk him? He sits and watches you. Do you hunt him with dogs? He thinks it a vast bother about a very little matter. Do you ferret him? He dies, and rejoices to know that so many more will take his place. The rabbit is the sacred emblem of my river, and when we have a symbol, he shall be our symbol. He loves men and eats the things they plant, especially the tender shoots of young trees, wheat, and the choice roots in gardens. He only remains, and is happy all his little life in the valley from which we depart when our boyhood ends.
The Valley of the Rother is made of many parts. There is the chalk of the Southern Down-land, the belt of the loam beneath it; then the curious country of sand, full of dells and dark with pine woods; then the luxurious meadows, which are open and full of cattle, colts, and even sheep; then the woods. It is, in a few miles, a little England. There are also large heaths--larger, you would think, than such a corner of the earth could contain; old elms and oaks; many wide parks; fish ponds; one trout stream and half a score of mills. There are men of many characters, but all happy, honest, good, witty, and hale. And when I have said all I could say of this delightful place (which indeed I think is set apart for the reward of virtue) I should not have given you a tithe of its prosperity and peace and beneficence. There is the picture of the Valley of the River Rother. It flows in a short and happy murmur from the confined hills by Hindhead to the Arun itself; but of the Arun no one could write with any justice except at the expense of far more space and time than I have given me.
If ever again we have a religion in the South Country, we will have a temple to my darling valley. It shall be round, with columns and a wall, and there I will hang a wreath in thanksgiving for having known the river.
THE CORONATION
My companion said to me that there was a doom over the day and the reign and the times, and that the turn of the nation had come. He felt it in the sky.
The day had been troubled: from the forest ridge to the sea there was neither wind nor sun, but a dull, even heat oppressed the fields and the high downs under the uncertain, half-luminous confusion of grey clouds. It was as though a relief was being denied, and as though something inexorable had come into that air which is normally the softest and most tender in the world. The hours of the low tide were too silent. The little inland river was quite dead, the reeds beside it dry and motionless; even in the trees about it no leaves stirred.
In the late afternoon, as the heat grew more masterful, a slight wind came out of the east. It was so faint and doubtful in quantity that one could not be certain, as one stood on the deserted shore, whether it blew from just off the land or from the sullen level of the sea. It followed along the line of the coast without refreshment and without vigour, even hotter than had been the still air out of which it was engendered. It did not do more than ruffle here and there the uneasy surface of our sea; that surface moved a little, but with a motion borrowed from nothing so living or so natural as the wind. It was a dull memory of past storms, or perhaps that mysterious heaving from the lower sands which sailors know, but which no silence has yet explained.
In such an influence of expectation and of presage--an influence having in it that quality which seemed to the ancients only Fate, but to us moderns a something evil--in the strained attention for necessary and immovable things that cannot hear and cannot pity--the hour came for me to reascend the valley to my home. Already upon the far and confused horizon two or three motionless sails that had been invisible began to show white against a rising cloud. This cloud had not the definition of sudden conquering storms, proper to the summer, and leaving a blessing behind their fury. The edge of it against the misty and brooding sky had all the vagueness of smoke, and as it rose up out of the sea its growth was so methodical and regular as to disconnect it wholly in one's mind from the little fainting breeze that still blew, from rain, or from any daily thing. It advanced with the fall of the evening till it held half the sky. There it seemed halted for a while, and lent by contrast an unnatural brightness to the parched hills beneath it; for now the sun having set, we had come north of the gap, and were looking southward upon that spectacle as upon the climax of a tragedy. But there was nothing of movement or of sound. No lightning, no thunder; and soon the hot breath of the afternoon had itself disappeared before the advance of this silent pall. The night of June to the north was brighter than twilight, and still southward, a deliberate spectacle, stood this great range of vague and menacing cloud, shutting off the sky and towering above the downs, so that it seemed permissible to ascribe to those protecting gods of our valley a burden of fear.
Just when all that scene had been arranged to an adjustment that no art could have attained, the first great fire blazed out miles and miles to the west, somewhere above Midhurst: I think near No Man's Land. Then we saw, miles to the east again, a glare over Mount Harry, the signal of Lewes, and one after another all the heights took it up in a chain--above Bramber, above Poynings, above Wiston, on Amberley Mount (I think), certainly on the noble sweep of Bury. Even in those greater distances which the horizon concealed they were burning and answering each other into Hampshire: perhaps on the beaten grass of the high forts above Portsmouth, and to the left away to the flat Rye level, and to the eastern Rother; for we saw the line of red angry upon that cloud which had come to receive it, an endless line which suddenly called up what one had heard old men say of the prairie fires.
It was easy, without covering the face and without abstracting the mind from the whirl of modern circumstance, it was easy, merely looking at the thing, to be seized with an impression of disaster. The stars were so pale on the lingering white light of the pure north, the smoky cloud so deep and heavy and steadfast and low above the hills, the fire so near to it, so sharp against it, and so huge, that the awe and sinister meaning of conflagrations dominated the impression of all the scene. There arose in the mind that memory which associates such a glare and the rising and falling fury of flames with sacrifice or with vengeance, or with the warning of an enemy's approach, or with the mark of his conquest; for with such things our race (for how many thousand years!) has watched the fires upon the hills far off. It touched one as does the reiterated note of a chaunt; if not with an impression of doom, at least with that of calamity.
When the fires had died down to a sullen glow, and the men watching them had gone home under the weight of what they had seen, the storm broke and occupied the whole sky. A very low wind rose and a furious rain fell. It became suddenly cold; there was thunder all over the weald, and the lightning along the unseen crest of the downs answered the lightning above the forest.
THE MAN OF THE DESERT
I lay once alone upon the crest of a range whose name I have never seen spelt, but which is pronounced "Haueedja," from whence a man can see right away for ever the expanse of the Sahara.
It is well known that Mount Atlas and those inhabited lands where there is a sufficient rainfall and every evidence of man's activity, the Province of Africa, the plateaux which are full of the memories of Rome, end abruptly towards the sun, and are bounded by a sort of cliff which falls sheer upon the desert. On the summit of this cliff I lay and looked down upon the sand. It was impressed upon my mind that here was an influence quite peculiar, not to be discovered in any other climate of the world; that all Europe received that influence, and yet that no one in Europe had accepted it save for his hurt.
God forbid that any man should pretend that the material environment of mankind determines the destiny of mankind. Those who say such things have abandoned the domain of intelligence. But it is true that the soul eagerly seeks for and receives the impressions of the world about it, and will be moved to a different creed or to a different poetry, according as the body perceives the sea or the hills or the rainless and inhuman places which lie to the south of Europe; and certainly the souls of those races which have inhabited the great zone of calms between the trade winds and the tropics, those races which have felt nothing beneficent, but only something awful and unfamiliar in the earth and sky, have produced a peculiar philosophy.
It is to be remarked that this philosophy is not atheist; those races called Semitic have never denied either the presence or the personality of God. It is, on the contrary, their boast that they have felt His presence, His unity, and His personality in a manner more pointed than have the rest of mankind; and those of us who pretend to find in the Desert a mere negation, are checked by the thought that within the Desert the most positive of religions have appeared. Indeed, to deny God has been the sad privilege of very few in any society of men; and those few, if it be examined, have invariably been men in whom the power to experience was deadened, usually by luxury, sometimes by distress.
It is not atheist; but whatever it is, it is hurtful, and has about it something of the despair and strength of atheism. Consider the Book of Job; consider the Arab Mohammedan; consider the fierce heresies which besieged the last of the Romans in this Province of Africa, and which tortured the short history of the Vandals; consider the modern tragedies which develop among the French soldiers to the north and to the south of this wide belt of sand; and you will see that the thing which the Sahara and its prolongation produce is something evil, or at least to us evil. There is in the idea running through the mind of the Desert an intensity which may be of some value to us if it be diluted by a large admixture of European tradition, or if it be mellowed and transformed by a long process of time, but which, if we take it at its source and inspire ourselves directly from it, warps and does hurt to our European sense.
It may be taken that whatever form truth takes among men will be the more perfect in proportion as the men who receive that form are more fully men. The whole of truth can never be comprehended by anything finite; and truth as it appears to this species or to that is most true when the type which receives it is the healthiest and the most normal of its own kind. The truth as it is to men is most true when the men who receive it are the healthiest and the most normal of men. We in Europe are the healthiest and most normal of our kind. It is to us that the world must look for its headship; we have the harbours, the continual presence of the sea through all our polities; we have that high differentiation between the various parts of our unity which makes the whole of Europe so marvellous an organism; we alone change without suffering decay. To the truth as Europe accepts it I cannot but bow down; for if that is not the truth, then the truth is not to be found upon earth. But there conies upon us perpetually that "wind of Africa"; and it disturbs us. As I lay that day, a year ago, upon the crest of the mountain, my whole mind was possessed with the influence of such a gale.
Day after day, after day, the silent men of the Desert go forward across its monotonous horizons; their mouths are flanked with those two deep lines of patience and of sorrow which you may note to-day in all the ghettoes of Europe; their smile, when they smile, is restrained by a sort of ironic strength in the muscles of the face. Their eyes are more bright than should be eyes of happy men; they are, as it were, inured to sterility; there is nothing in them of that repose which we Westerners acquire from a continual contemplation of deep pastures and of innumerable leaves; they are at war, not only among themselves, but against the good earth; in a silent and powerful way they are also afraid.
You may note that their morals are an angry series of unexplained commands, and that their worship does not include that fringe of half-reasonable, wholly pleasant things which the true worship of a true God must surely contain. All is as clear-cut as their rocks, and as unfruitful as their dry valleys, and as dreadful as their brazen sky; "thou shalt not" this, that, and the other. Their God is jealous; he is vengeful; he is (awfully present and real to them!) a vision of that demon of which we in our happier countries make a quaint legend. He catches men out and trips them up; he has but little relation to the Father of Christian men, who made the downs of South England and the high clouds above them.
The good uses of the world are forgotten in the Desert, or fiercely denied. Love is impure; so are birth, and death, and eating, and every other necessary part in the life of a man. And yet, though all these things are impure, there is no lustration. We also feel in a genial manner that this merry body of ours requires apology; but those others to south of us have no toleration in their attitude; they are awfully afraid.
I have continually considered, as I have read my history, the special points in which their influence is to be observed in the development of Europe. It takes the form of the great heresies; the denial of the importance of matter (sometimes of its existence); the denial that anything but matter exists; the denial of the family; the denial of ownership; the over-simplicity which is peculiarly a Desert product runs through all such follies, as does the rejection of a central and governing power upon earth, which is again just such a rebellion as the Desert would bring. I say the great heresies are the main signs of that influence; but it is in small and particular matters that you may see its effect most clearly.
For instance, the men of the Desert are afraid of wine. They have good reason; if you drink wine in the Desert you die. In the Desert, a man can drink only water; and, when he gets it, it is like diamonds to him, or, better still, it is like rejuvenation. All our long European legends which denounce and bring a curse upon the men who are the enemies of wine, are legends inspired by our hatred of the thing which is not Europe, and that bounds Europe, and is the enemy of Europe.
So also with their attachment to numbers. For instance, the seventh day must have about it something awful and oppressive; the fast must be seven times seven days, and so forth. We Europeans have always smiled in our hearts at these things. We would take this day or that, and make up a scheme of great and natural complexity, full of interlacing seasons; and nearly all our special days were days of rejoicing. We carried images about our fields further to develop and enhance the nature of our religion; we dedicated trees and caves; and the feasts of one place were not the feasts of another. But to the men of the Desert mere unfruitful number was a god.
Then again, the word, especially the written word, the document, overshadows their mind. It has always had for them a power of something mysterious. To engrave characters was to cast a spell; and when they seek for some infallible authority upon earth, they can only discover it in the written characters traced in a sacred book. All their expression of worship is wrought through symbols. With us, the symbol is clearly retained separate from that for which it stands, though hallowed by that for which it stands. With them the symbol is the whole object of affection.
On this account you will find in the men of the Desert a curious panic in the presence of statues, which is even more severe than the panic they suffer in the presence of wine. It is as though they said to themselves: "Take this away; if you leave it here I shall worship it." They are subject to possession.
Side by side with this fear of the graphic representation of men or of animals, you will find in them an incapacity to represent them well. The art of the iconoclasts is either childish, weak, or, at its strongest, evil.
And especially among all these symptoms of the philosophy from which they suffer is their manner of comprehending the nature of creation. Of creation in any form they are afraid; and the infinite Creator is on that account present to them almost as though He were a man, for when we are afraid of things we see them very vividly indeed. On this account you will find in the legends of the men of the Desert all manner of fantastic tales incomprehensible to us Europeans, wherein God walks, talks, eats, and wrestles. Nor is there any trace in this attitude of theirs of parable or of allegory. That mixture of the truth, and of a subtle unreal glamour which expands and confirms the truth, is a mixture proper to our hazy landscapes, to our drowsy woods, and to our large vision. We, who so often see from our high village squares soft and distant horizons, mountains now near, now very far, according as the weather changes: we, who are perpetually feeling the transformation of the seasons, and who are immersed in a very ocean of manifold and mysterious life, we need, create, and live by legends. The line between the real and imaginary is vague and penumbral to us. We are justly influenced by our twilights, and our imagination teaches us. How many deities have we not summoned up to inhabit groves and lakes--special deities who are never seen, but yet have never died?
To the men of the Desert, doubt and beauty mingled in this fashion seemed meaningless. That which they worship they see and almost handle. In the dreadful silence which surrounds them, their illusions turn into convictions--the haunting voices are heard; the forms are seen.
Of two further things, native to us, their starved experience has no hold; of nationality (or if the term be preferred, of "The City") and of what we have come to call "chivalry." The two are but aspects of one thing without a name; but that thing all Europeans possess, nor is it possible for us to conceive of a patriotism unless it is a patriotism which is chivalric. In our earliest stories, we honour men fighting odds. Our epics are of small numbers against great; humility and charity are in them, lending a kind of magic strength to the sword. The Faith did not bring in that spirit, but rather completed it. Our boundaries have always been intensely sacred to us. We are not passionate to cross them save for the sake of adventure; but we are passionate to defend them. In all that enormous story of Rome, from the dim Etrurian origins right up to the end of her thousand years, the Wall of the Town was more sacred than the limits of the Empire.
The men of the Desert do not understand these things. They are by compulsion nomad, and for ever wandering; they strike no root; their pride is in mere expansion; they must colonise or fail; nor does any man die for a city.
As I looked from the mountain I thought the Desert which I had come so far to see had explained to me what hitherto I had not understood in the mischances of Europe. I remained for a long while looking out upon the glare.
But when I came down again, northward from the high sandstone hill, and was in the fields again near running water, and drinking wine from a cup carved with Roman emblems, I began to wonder whether the Desert had not put before my mind, as they say it can do before the eye of the traveller, a mirage. Is there such an influence? Are there such men?
THE DEPARTURE
Once, in Barbary, I grew tired of unusual things, especially of palms, and desired to return to Europe and the things I knew; so I went down from the hills to the sea coast, and when after two days I had reached the railway, I took a train for Algiers and reached that port at evening.
From Algiers it is possible to go at once and for almost any sum one chooses to any part of the world. The town is on a sharp slope of a theatre of hills, and in the quiet harbour below it there are all sorts of ships, but mostly steamships, moored with their sterns towards the quay. For there is no tide here, and the ships can lie quite still.
I sat upon a wall of the upper town and considered how each of these ships were going to some different place, and how pleasant it was to roam about the world. Behind the ships, along the stone quays, were a great number of wooden huts, of offices built, into archways, of little houses, booths, and dens, in each of which you could take your passage to some place or other.
"Now," said I to myself, "now is the time to be free." For one never feels master of oneself unless one is obeying no law, plan, custom, trend, or necessity, but simply spreading out at ease and occupying the world. In this also Aristotle was misled by fashion, or was ill-informed by some friend of his, or was, perhaps, lying for money when he said that liberty was obedience to a self-made law; for the most distant hint of law is odious to liberty. True, it is more free to obey a law of one's own making than of some one else's; just as if a man should give himself a punch in the eye it would be less hurtful and far less angering than one given by a passer-by; yet to suffer either would not be a benefit of freedom. Liberty cannot breathe where the faintest odour of regulation is to be discovered, but only in that ether whose very nature is largeness. Oh! Diviner Air! how few have drunk you, and in what deep draughts have I!
I had a great weight of coined, golden, metallic money all loose in my pocket. There was no call upon me nor any purpose before me. I spent an hour looking down upon the sea and the steamships, and taking my pick out of all the world.
One thing, however, guided me, which was this: that desire, to be satisfied at all, must be satisfied at once; and of the many new countries I might seek that would most attract me whose ship was starting soonest. So I looked round for mooring cables in the place of anchor chains, for Blue Peter, for smoke from funnels, for little boats coming and going, and for all that shows a steamboat to be off; when I saw, just behind a large new boat in such a condition of bustle, a sign in huge yellow letters staring on a bright black ground, which said, "To the Balearic Islands, eight shillings"; underneath, in smaller yellow letters, was written: "Gentlemen The Honourable Travellers are warned that they must pay for any food they consume." When I had read this notice I said to myself: "I will go to the Balearic Islands, of which the rich have never heard. I, poor and unencumbered, will go and visit these remote places, which have in their time received all the influences of the world, and which yet have no history; for I am tired of this Africa, where so many men are different from me." As I said this to myself I saw a little picture in my mind of three small islands standing in the middle of the sea, quite alone, and inhabited by happy men; but this picture, as it always is with such pictures, was not at all the same as what I saw when next morning the islands rose along the north to which we steered.
I went down to the quay by some large stone steps which an Englishman had built many years ago, and I entered the office above which this great sign was raised. Within was a tall man of doubtful race, smoking a cigarette made of loose paper, and gazing kindly at the air. He was full of reveries. Of this man I asked when the boat would be starting. He told me it started in half an hour, a little before the setting of the sun. So I bought a ticket for eight shillings, upon which it was clearly printed in two languages that I had bound myself to all manner of things by the purchase, and especially that I might not go below, but must sit upon deck all night; nevertheless, I was glad to hold that little bit of printed prose, for it would enable me to reach the Balearic Islands, which for all other men are names in a dream. I then went up into the town of Algiers, and was careful to buy some ham from a Jew, some wine from a Mohammedan, and some bread and chocolate from a very indifferent Christian. After that I got aboard. As I came over the side I heard the sailors, stokers, and people all talking to each other in low tones, and I at once recognised the tongue called Catalan.
I had heard this sort of Latin in many places, some lonely and some populous. I had heard it once from a chemist at Perpignan who dressed a wound of mine, and this was the first time I heard it. Very often after in the valleys of the Pyrenees, in the Cerdagne, and especially in Andorra, hundreds of men had spoken to me in Catalan. At Urgel, that notable city where there is only one shop and where the streets are quite narrow and Moorish, a woman and six or seven men had spoken Catalan to me for nearly one hour: it was in a cellar surrounded by great barrels, and I remember it well. So, also, on the River Noguera, coming up again into the hills, a girl who took the toll at the wooden bridge had spoken Catalan to me. But none of these had I ever answered so that they could understand, and on this account I was very grieved to hear the Catalan tongue, though I remembered that if I spoke to them with ordinary Spanish words or in French with a strong Southern accent they would usually have some idea of what I was saying.
As the evening fell the cables were slipped without songs, and with great dignity, rapidity, and order the ship was got away.
I knew a man once, a seafaring man, a Scotchman, with whom I travelled on a very slow old boat in the Atlantic, who told me that the Northern people of Europe were bravest in a unexpected danger, but the Southern in a danger long foreseen. He said he had known many of both kinds, and had served under them and commanded them. He said that in sudden accident the Northerner was the more reliable man, but that if an act of great danger had to be planned and coolly achieved, then the Southerner was strongest in doing what he had to do. He said that in taking the ground he would rather have a Northern, but in bringing in a short ship a Southern crew.
He was a man who observed closely, and never said a thing because he had read it. Indeed, he did not read, and he had in a little hanging shelf above his bunk only four or five tattered books, and even these were magazines. I remembered his testimony now as I watched these Catalans letting the ship go free, and I believed it, comparing it with history and the things I had myself seen. They did everything with such regularity and so silently that it was a different deck from what one would have had in the heave of the Channel. With Normans or Bretons, or Cornishmen or men of Kent, but especially with men from London river, there would have been all sorts of cursing and bellowing, and they could not have touched a rope without throwing themselves into attitudes of violence. But these men took the sea quite quietly, nor could you tell from their faces which was rich and which was poor.
It was not till the ship was out throbbing swiftly Over the smooth sea and darkness had fallen that they began to sing. Then those of them who were not working gathered together with a stringed instrument forward and sang of pity and of death. One of them said to me, "Knight, can your grace sing?" I told him that I could sing, certainly, but that my singing was unpleasing, and that I only knew foreign songs. He said that singing was a great solace, and desired to hear a song of my own country. So I sang them a song out of Sussex, to which they listened in deep silence, and when it was concluded their leader snapped and twanged at the strings again and began another song about the riding of horses in the hills.
So we passed the short night until the sky upon our quarter grew faintly pale and the little wind that rises before morning awakened the sea.
THE IDEA OF A PILGRIMAGE
A pilgrimage is, of course, an expedition to some venerated place to which a vivid memory of sacred things experienced, or a long and wonderful history of human experience in divine matters, or a personal attraction affecting the soul impels one. This is, I say, its essence. So a pilgrimage may be made to the tomb of Descartes, in Paris, or it may be a little walk uphill to a neighbouring and beloved grave, or a modern travel, even in luxury, on the impulse to see something that greatly calls one.
But there has always hung round the idea of a pilgrimage, with all people and at all times--I except those very rare and highly decadent generations of history in which no pilgrimages are made, nor any journeys, save for curiosity or greed--there has always hung round it, I say, something more than the mere objective. Just as in general worship you will have noble gowns, vivid colour, and majestic music (symbols, but necessary symbols of the great business you are at); so, in this particular case of worship, clothes, as it were, and accoutrements, gather round one's principal action. I will visit the grave of a saint or of a man whom I venerate privately for his virtues and deeds, but on my way I wish to do something a little difficult to show at what a price I hold communion with his resting-place, and also on toy way I will see all I can of men and things; for anything great and worthy is but an ordinary thing transfigured, and if I am about to venerate a humanity absorbed into the divine, so it behoves me on my journey to it to enter into and delight in the divine that is hidden in everything. Thus I may go upon a pilgrimage with no pack and nothing but a stick and my clothes, but I must get myself into the frame of mind that carries an invisible burden, an eye for happiness and suffering, humour, gladness at the beauty of the world, a readiness for raising the heart at the vastness of a wide view, and especially a readiness to give multitudinous praise to God; for a man that goes on a pilgrimage does best of all if he starts out (I say it of his temporal object only) with the heart of a wanderer, eager for the world as it is, forgetful of maps or descriptions, but hungry for real colours and men and the seeming of things. This desire for reality and contact is a kind of humility, this pleasure in it a kind of charity.
It is surely in the essence of a pilgrimage that all vain imaginations are controlled by the greatness of our object. Thus, if a man should go to see the place where (as they say) St. Peter met our Lord on the Appian Way at dawn, he will not care very much for the niggling of pedants about this or that building, or for the rhetoric of posers about this or that beautiful picture. If a thing in his way seem to him frankly ugly he will easily treat it as a neutral, forget it and pass it by. If, on the contrary, he find a beautiful thing, whether done by God or by man, he will remember and love it. This is what children do, and to get the heart of a child is the end surely of any act of religion. In such a temper he will observe rather than read, and though on his way he cannot do other than remember the names of places, saying, "Why, these are the Alps of which I have read! Here is Florence, of which I have heard so many rich women talk!" yet he will never let himself argue and decide or put himself, so to speak, before an audience in his own mind--for that is pride which all of us moderns always fall into. He will, on the contrary, go into everything with curiosity and pleasure, and be a brother to the streets and trees and to all the new world he finds. The Alps that he sees with his eyes will be as much more than the names he reads about, the Florence of his desires as much more than the Florence of sickly-drawing-rooms; as beauty loved is more than beauty heard of, or as our own taste, smell, hearing, touch and sight are more than the vague relations of others. Nor does religion exercise in our common life any function more temporarily valuable than this, that it makes us be sure at least of realities, and look very much askance at philosophies and imaginaries and academic whimsies.
Look, then, how a pilgrimage ought to be nothing but a nobler kind of travel, in which, according to our age and inclination, we tell our tales, or draw our pictures, or compose our songs. It is a very great error, and one unknown before our most recent corruptions, that the religious spirit should be so superficial and so self-conscious as to dominate our method of action at special times and to be absent at others. It is better occasionally to travel in one way or another to some beloved place (or to some place wonderful and desired for its associations), haunted by our mission, yet falling into every ordinary levity, than to go about a common voyage in a chastened and devout spirit. I fear this is bad theology, and I propound it subject to authority. But, surely, if a man should say, "I will go to Redditch to buy needles cheap," and all the way take care to speak no evil of his neighbour, to keep very sober, to be punctual in his accounts, and to say his regular prayers with exactitude, though that would be a good work, yet if he is to be a pilgrim (and the Church has a hundred gates), I would rather for the moment that he went off in a gay, tramping spirit, not oversure of his expenses, not very careful of all he said or did, but illuminated and increasingly informed by the great object of his voyage, which is here not to buy or sell needles, or what not, but to loose the mind and purge it in the ultimate contemplation of something divine.
There is, indeed, that kind of pilgrimage which some few sad men undertake because their minds are overburdened by a sin or tortured with some great care that is not of their own fault. These are excepted from the general rule, though even to these a very human spirit comes by the way, and the adventures of inns and foreign conversations broaden the world for them and lighten their burden. But this kind of pilgrimage is rare and special, having its peculiar virtues. The common sort (which how many men undertake under another name!) is a separate and human satisfaction of a need, the fulfilling of an instinct in us, the realisation of imagined horizons, the reaching of a goal. For whoever yet that was alive reached an end and could say he was satisfied? Yet who has not desired so to reach an end and to be satisfied? Well, pilgrimage is for the most a sort of prefiguring or rehearsal. A man says: "I will play in show (but a show stiffened with a real and just object) at that great part which is all we can ever play. Here I start from home, and there I reach a goal, and on the way I laugh and watch, sing and work. Now I am at ease and again hampered; now poor, now rich, weary towards the end and at last arrived at that end. So my great life is, and so this little chapter shall be." Thus he packs up the meaning of life into a little space to be able to look at it closely, as men carry with them small locket portraits of their birthplace or of those they love.
If a pilgrimage is all this, it is evident that however careless, it must not be untroublesome. It would be a contradiction of pilgrimage to seek to make the journey short and rapid, merely consuming the mind for nothing, as is our modern habit; for they seem to think nowadays that to remain as near as possible to what one was at starting, and to one's usual rut, is the great good of travel (as though a man should run through the Iliad only to note the barbarous absurdity of the Greek characters, or through Catullus for the sake of discovering such words as were like enough to English). That is not the spirit of a pilgrimage at all. The pilgrim is humble and devout, and human and charitable, and ready to smile and admire; therefore he should comprehend the whole of his way, the people in it, and the hills and the clouds, and the habits of the various cities. And as to the method of doing this, we may go bicycling (though that is a little flurried) or driving (though that is luxurious and dangerous, because it brings us constantly against servants and flattery); but the best way of all is on foot, where one is a man like any other man, with the sky above one, and the road beneath, and the world on every side, and time to see all.
So also I designed to walk, and did, when I visited the tombs of the Apostles.
THE ARENA
It was in Paris, in his room on the hill of the University, that a traveller woke and wondered what he should do with his day. In some way--I cannot tell how--ephemeral things had captured his mind in the few hours he had already spent in the city. There is no civilisation where the various parts stand so separate as they do with the French. You may live in Paris all your life and never suspect that there is a garrison of eighty thousand men within call. You may spend a year in a provincial town and never hear that the large building you see daily is a bishop's palace. Or you may be the guest of the bishop for a month, and remain under the impression that somewhere, hidden away in the place, there is a powerful clique of governing atheists whom, somehow, you never run across. And so this traveller, who knew Paris like his pocket, and had known it since he could speak plain, had managed to gather up in this particular visit all the impressions which are least characteristic of the town. He had dined with a friend at Pousset's; he had passed the evening at the Exhibition, and he had had a bare touch of the real thing in the Rue de Tournon; but even there it was in the company of foreigners. Therefore, I repeat, he woke up next morning wondering what he should do, for the veneer of Paris is the thinnest in the world, and he had exhausted it in one feverish day.
Luckily for him, the room in which he lay was French, and had been French for a hundred years. You looked out of the window into a sky cut by the tall Mansard roofs of the eighteenth century; and over the stones of what had been the Scotch College you could see below you at the foot of the hill all the higher points of the island--especially the Sainte Chapelle and the vast towers of the Cathedral. Then it suddenly struck him that the air was full of bells. Now, it is a curious thing, and one that every traveller will bear me out in, that you associate a country place with the sound of bells, but a capital never. Caen is noisy enough and Rouen big enough, one would think, to drown the memory of music; yet any one who has lived in his Normandy remembers their perpetual bells; and as for the admirable town of Chinon, where no one ever goes, I believe it is Ringing Island itself. But Paris one never thinks of as a place of bells. And yet there are bells enough there to take a man right into the past, and from there through fairyland to hell and out and back again.
If I were writing of the bells, I could make you a list of all the famous bells, living and dead, that haunt the city, and the tale of what they have done would be a history of France. The bell of the St. Bartholomew over against the Louvre, the tocsin of the Hotel de Ville that rang the knell of the Monarchy, the bell of St. Julien that is as old as the University, the old Bourdon of Notre Dame that first rang when St. Louis brought in the crown of thorns, and the peal that saluted Napoleon, and the new Bourdon that is made of the guns of Sebastopol, and the Savoyarde up on Montmartre, a new bell much larger than the rest. This morning the air was full of them. They came up to the height on which the traveller lay listening; they came clear and innumerable over the distant surge of the streets; he spent an hour wondering at such an unusual Parliament and General Council of Bells. Then he said to himself: "It must be some great feast of the Church." He was in a world he had never known before. He was like a man who gets into a strange country in a dream and follows his own imagination instead of suffering the pressure of outer things; or like a boy who wanders by a known river till he comes to unknown gardens.
So anxious was he to take possession at once of this discovery of his that he went off hurriedly without eating or drinking, thinking only of what he might find. He desired to embrace at one sight all that Paris was doing on a day which was full of St. Louis and of resurrection. The thoughts upon thoughts that flow into the mind from its impression, as water creams up out of a stone fountain at a river head, disturbed him, swelling beyond the possibility of fulfilment. He wished to see at once the fashionables in St. Clotilde and the Greek Uniates at St. Julien, and the empty Sorbonne and the great crowd of boys at Stanislas; but what he was going to see never occurred to him, for he thought he knew Paris too well to approach the cathedral.
Notre Dame is jealously set apart for special and well-advertised official things. If you know the official world you know the great church, and unless some great man had died, or some victory had been won, you would never go there to see how Paris took its religion. No midnight Mass is said in it; for the lovely carols of the Middle Ages you must go to St. Gervais, and for the pomp of the Counter-Reformation to the Madeleine, for soldiers to St. Augustin, for pilgrims to St. Etienne. Therefore no one would, ever have thought of going to the cathedral on this day, when an instinct and revelation of Paris at prayer filled the mind. Nevertheless, the traveller's feet went, of their own accord, towards the seven bridges, because the Island draws all Paris to it, and was drawing him along with the rest. He had meant perhaps to go the way that all the world has gone since men began to live on this river, and to follow up the Roman way across the Seine--a vague intention of getting a Mass at St. Merry or St. Laurent. But he was going as a dream sent him, without purpose or direction.
The sun was already very hot and the Parvis was blinding with light when he crossed the little bridge. Then he noticed that the open place had dotted about it little groups of people making eastward. The Parvis is so large that you could have a multitude scattered in it and only notice that the square was not deserted. There were no more than a thousand, perhaps, going separately to Notre Dame, and a thousand made no show in such a square. But when he went in through the doors he saw there something he had never seen before, and that he thought did not exist. It was as though the vague interior visions of which the morning had been so full had taken on reality.
You may sometimes see in modern picture galleries an attempt to combine the story from which proceeds the nourishing flame of Christianity with the crudities and the shameful ugliness of our decline. Thus, with others, a picture of our Lord and Mary Magdalen; all the figures except that of our Lord were dressed in the modern way. I remember another of our Lord and the little children, where the scene is put into a village school. Now, if you can imagine (which it is not easy to do) such an attempt to be successful, untouched by the love of display and eccentricity, and informing--as it commonly pretends to inform--our time with an idea, then you will understand what the traveller saw that morning in Notre Dame. The church seemed the vastest cavern that had ever been built for worship. Coming in from the high morning, the half-light alone, with which we always connect a certain majesty and presence, seemed to have taken on amplitude as well. The incense veiled what appeared to be an infinite lift of roof, and the third great measurement--the length of nave that leads like a forest ride to the lights of the choir--were drawn out into an immeasurable perspective by reason of a countless crowd of men and women divided by the narrow path of the procession. So full was this great place that a man moved slowly and with difficulty, edging through such a mass of folk as you may find at holiday time in a railway station, or outside a theatre--never surely before was a church like this, unless, indeed, some very rich or very famous man happened to be gracing it. But here to-day, for nothing but the function proper to the feast, the cathedral was paved and floored with human beings. In the galilee there was a kind of movement so that a man could get up further, and at last the traveller found a place to stand in just on the edge of the open gangway, at the very end of the nave. He peered up this, and saw from the further end, near the altar, the head of the procession approaching, which was (in his fancy of that morning) like the line of the Faith, still living and returning in a perpetual circle to revivify the world. Moreover, there was in the advent of the procession a kind of climax. As it came nearer, the great crowd moved more quickly towards it; children were lifted up, and by one of Sully's wide pillars a group of three young soldiers climbed on a rail to see the great sight better. The Cardinal-Archbishop, very old and supported by his priests, half walked and half tottered down the length of the people; his head, grown weary with age, barely supported the mitre, from which great jewels, false or true, were flashing. In his hand he had a crozier that was studded in the same way with gems, and that seemed to be made of gold; the same hands had twisted the metal of it as had hammered the hinges of the cathedral doors. Certainly there here appeared one of the resurrections of Europe. The matter of life seemed to take on a fuller stuff and to lift into a dimension above that in which it ordinarily moves. The thin, narrow, and unfruitful experience of to-day and yesterday was amplified by all the lives that had made our life, and the blood of which we are only a last expression, the race that is older even than Rome seemed in this revelation of continuity to be gathered up into one intense and passionate moment. The pagan altar of Tiberius, the legend of Dionysius, the whole circle of the wars came into this one pageant, and the old man in his office and his blessing was understood by all the crowd before him to transmit the centuries. A rich woman thrust a young child forward, and he stopped and stooped with difficulty to touch its hair. As he approached the traveller it was as though there had come great and sudden news to him, or the sound of unexpected and absorbing music.
The procession went on and closed; the High Mass followed; it lasted a very long time, and the traveller went out before the crowd had moved and found himself again in the glare of the sun on the Parvis.
He went over the bridge to find his eating-shop near the archives, and eat the first food of that day, thinking as he went that certainly there are an infinity of lives side by side in our cities, and each ignores the rest; and yet, that to pass from what we know of these to what we do not--though it is the most wonderful journey in the world--is one that no one undertakes unless accident or a good fortune pushes him on. He desired to make another such journey.
He came back to find me in London, and spoke to me of Paris as of a city newly discovered: as I listened I thought I saw an arena.
In a plain of the north, undistinguished by great hills, open to the torment of the sky, the gods had traced an arena wherein were to be fought out the principal battles of a later age.
* * * * *
Spirits lower than the divine, spirits intermediate, have been imagined by men wiser than ourselves to have some power over the world--a power which we might vanquish in a special manner, but still a power. To such conceptions the best races of Europe cling; upon such a soil are grown the legends that tell us most about our dark, and yet enormous, human fate. These intermediate spirits have been called in all the older creeds "the gods." It is in the nature of the Church to frown upon these dreams; but I, as I listened to him, saw clearly that plain wherein the gods had marked out an arena for mankind.
It was oval, as should be a theatre for any show, with heights around it insignificant, but offering a vantage ground whence could be watched the struggle in the midst. There was a sacred centre--an island and a mount--and, within the lines, so great a concourse of gladiatorial souls as befits the greatest of spectacles. I say, I do not know how far such visions are permitted, nor how far the right reason of the Church condemns them; but the dream returned to me very powerfully, recalling my boyhood, when the traveller told me his story. I also therefore went and caught the fresh gale of the stream of the Seine in flood, and saw the many roofs of Paris quite clear after the rain, and read the writings of the men I mixed with and heard the noise of the city.
* * * * *
It is not upon the paltry level of negations or of decent philosophies, it is in the action and hot mood of creative certitudes that the French battle is engaged. The little sophists are dumb and terrified, their books are quite forgotten. I myself forgot (in those few days by that water and in that city) the thin and ineffectual bodies of ignorant men who live quite beyond any knowledge of such fires. The printed things which tired and poor writers put down for pay no longer even disturbed me; the reflections, the mere phantasms of reality, with which in a secluded measure we please our intellect, faded. I was like a man who was in the centre of two lines that meet in war; to such a man this fellow's prose on fighting and that one's verse, this theory of strategy, or that essay upon arms, are not for one moment remembered. Here (in the narrow street which I knew and was now following) St. Bernard had upheld the sacrament in the shock of the first awakening--in that twelfth century, when Julian stirred in his sleep. Beyond the bridge, in Roman walls that still stand carefully preserved, the Church of Gaul had sustained Athanasius, and determined the course of the Christian centuries. I had passed upon my way the vast and empty room where had been established the Terror; where had been forced by an angry and compelling force the full return of equal laws upon Europe. Who could remember in such an air the follies and the pottering of men who analyse and put in categories and explain the follies of wealth and of old age?
Good Lord, how little the academies became! I remembered the phrases upon one side and upon the other which still live in the stones of the city, carved and deep, but more lasting than are even the letters of their inscription. I remembered the defiant sentence of Mad Dolet on his statue there in the Quarter, the deliberate perversion of Plato, "And when you are dead you shall no more be anything at all." I remembered the "Ave Crux spes Unica"; and St. Just's "The words that we have spoken will never be lost on earth"; and Danton's "Continual Daring," and the scribbled Greek on the walls of the cathedral towers. For not only are the air and the voice, but the very material of this town is filled with words that remain. Certainly the philosophies and the negations dwindled to be so small as at last to disappear, and to leave only the two antagonists. Passion brooded over the silence of the morning; there was great energy in the cool of the spring air, and up above, the forms the clouds were taking were forms of gigantic powers.
I came, as the traveller had come, into the cathedral. It was not yet within half an hour of the feast. There was still room to be found, though with every moment the nave and the aisles grew fuller, until one doubted how at the end so great a throng could be dismissed. They were of all kinds. Some few were strangers holding in their hands books about the building. Some few were devout men on travel, and praying at this great office on the way: men from the islands, men from the places that Spain has redeemed for the future in the new world. I saw an Irishman near me, and two West Indians also, half negro, like the third of the kings that came to worship at the manger where Our Lord was born. For two hours and nearly three I saw and wondered at that immense concourse. The tribunes were full, the whole choir was black, moving with the celebrants, and all the church floor beyond and around me was covered and dark with expectant men.
The Bourdon that had summoned the traveller and driven mad so many despairs, sounded above me upon this day with amplitude and yet with menace. The silence was a solace when it ceased to boom. The Creed, the oldest of our chaunts, filled and completed those walls; it was as though at last a battle had been joined, and in that issue a great relief ran through the crowd.
* * * * *
From such a temple I came out at last. They had thrown the western doors wide open, the doors whose hinges man scarcely could have hammered and to whose miracle legend has lent its aid; the midday, now captured by the sun, came right into the hollow simplicity of the nave, and caught the river of people as they flowed outwards; but even that and the cry of the Benediction from the altar gave no greater peace than an appeal to combat. In the air outside that other power stood waiting to conquer or to fail.
I came out, as from a camp, into the civilian debate, the atmosphere of the spectators. The permanent and toppling influence against which this bulwark of ours, the Faith, was reared (as we say) by God Himself, shouted in half the prints, in half the houses. I sat down to read and compare (as it should be one's custom when one is among real and determining things) the writings of the extreme, that is of the leading men. I chose the two pamphleteers who are of equal weight in this war, but of whom one only is known as yet to us in England, and that the least.
I read their battle-cries. Their style was excellent; their good faith shone even in their style.
Since I had been upon phrases all these hours I separated and remembered the principal words of each. One said: "They will break their teeth against it. The Catholic Church is not to perish, for she has allies from outside Time." The other said: "How long will the death of this crucified god linger? How long will his agony crush men with its despair?"
But I read these two writers for my entertainment only, and in order to be acquainted with men around me; for on the quarrel between them I had long ago made up my mind.
AT THE SIGN OF THE LION
It was late, and the day was already falling when I came, sitting my horse Monster, to a rise of land. We were at a walk, for we had gone very far since early morning, and were now off the turf upon the hard road; moreover, the hill, though gentle, had been prolonged. From its summit I saw before me, as I had seen it a hundred times, the whole of the weald.
But now that landscape was transfigured, because many influences had met to make it, for the moment, an enchanted land. The autumn, coming late, had crowded it with colours; a slight mist drew out the distances, and along the horizon stood out, quite even and grey like mountains, the solemn presence of the Downs. Over all this the sky was full of storm.
In some manner which language cannot express, and hardly music, the vision was unearthly. All the lesser heights of the plain ministered to one effect, a picture which was to other pictures what the marvellous is to the experience of common things. The distant mills, the edges of heath and the pine trees, were as though they had not before been caught by the eyes of travellers, and would not, after the brief space of their apparition, be seen again. Here was a countryside whose every outline was familiar; and yet it was pervaded by a general quality of the uplifted and the strange. And for that one hour under the sunset the county did not seem to me a thing well known, but rather adored.
The glow of evening, which had seemed to put this horizon into another place and time than ours, warned me of darkness; and I made off the road to the right for an inn I knew of, that stands close to the upper Arun and is very good. Here an old man and his wife live easily, and have so lived for at least thirty years, proving how accessible is content. Their children are in service beyond the boundaries of the county, and are thus provided with sufficiency; and they themselves, the old people, enjoy a small possession which at least does not diminish, for, thank God, their land is free. It is a square of pasture bordered by great elms upon three sides of it, but on the fourth, towards the water, a line of pollard willows; and off a little way before the house runs Arun, sliding as smooth as Mincius, and still so young that he can remember the lake in the forest where he rose.
On such ancestral land these two people await without anxiety what they believe will be a kindly death. Nor is their piety of that violent and tortured kind which is associated with fear and with distress of earlier life; but they remain peasants, drawing from the earth they have always known as much sustenance for the soul as even their religion can afford them, and mixing that religion so intimately with their experience of the soil that, were they not isolated in an evil time, they would have set up some shrine about the place to sanctify it.
The passion and the strain which must accompany (even in the happiest and most secluded) the working years of life, have so far disappeared from them, that now they can no longer recall any circumstances other than those which they enjoy; so that their presence in a room about one, as they set rood before one or meet one at the door, is in itself an influence of peace.
In such a place, and with such hosts to serve him, be wears of the world retire for a little time, from an evening to a morning; and a man can enjoy a great refreshment. In such a place he will eat strongly and drink largely, and sleep well and deeply, and, when he saddles again for his journey, he will take the whole world new; nor are those intervals without their future value, for the memory of a complete repose is a sort of sacrament, and a viaticum for the weary lengths of the way.
The stable of this place is made of oak entirely, and, after more than a hundred years, the woodwork is still sound, save that the roof now falls in waves where the great beams have sagged a little under the pressure of the tiles. And these tiles are of that old hand-made kind which, whenever you find them, you will do well to buy; for they have a slight downward curve to them, and so they fit closer and shed the rain better than if they were flat. Also they do not slip, and thus they put less strain upon the timber. This excellent stable has no flooring but a packed layer of chalk laid on the ground; and the wooden manger is all polished and shining, where it has been rubbed by the noses of ten thousand horses since the great war. That polishing was helped, perhaps, by the nose of Percy's horse, and perhaps by the nose of some wheeler who in his time had dragged the guns back aboard, retreating through the night after Corunna. It is in every way a stable that a small peasant should put up for himself, without seeking money from other men. It is, therefore, a stable which your gaping scientists would condemn; and though as yet they have not got their ugly hands upon the dwellings of beasts as they have upon those of men, yet I often fear for this stable, and am always glad when I come back and find it there. For the men who make our laws are the same as those that sell us our bricks and our land and our metals; and they make the laws so that rebuilding shall go on: and vile rebuilding too.
Anyhow, this stable yet stands; and in none does the horse, Monster, take a greater delight, for he also is open to the influence of holiness. So I led him in, and tied him by the ancient headstall, and I rubbed him down, and I washed his feet and covered him with the rough rug that lay there. And when I had done all that, I got him oats from the neighbouring bin; for the place knew me well, and I could always tend to my own beast when I came there. And as he ate his oats, I said to him: "Monster, my horse, is there any place on earth where a man, even for a little time, can be as happy as the brutes? If there is, it is here at the Sign of The Lion." And Monster answered: "There is a tradition among us that, of all creatures that creep upon the earth, man is the fullest of sorrow."
I left him then, and went towards the house. It was quite dark, and the windows, with their square, large panes and true proportions, shone out and made it home. The room within received me like a friend. The open chimney at its end, round which the house is built, was filled with beech logs burning; and the candles, which were set in brass, mixed their yellow light with that of the fire. The long ceiling was low, as are the ceilings of Heaven. And oak was here everywhere also: in the beams and the shelves and the mighty table. For oak was, and will be again, the chief wood of the weald.
When they put food and ale before me, it was of the kind which has been English ever since England began, and which perhaps good fortune will preserve over the breakdown of our generation, until we have England back again. One could see the hops in the tankard, and one could taste the barley, until, more and more sunk into the plenitude of this good house, one could dare to contemplate, as though from a distant standpoint, the corruption and the imminent danger of the time through which we must lead our lives. And, as I so considered the ruin of the great cities and their slime, I felt as though I were in a fortress of virtue and of health, which could hold out through the pressure of the war. And I thought to myself: "Perhaps even before our children are men, these parts which survive from a better order will be accepted as models, and England will be built again."
This fantasy had not time, tenuous as it was, to disappear, before there came into that room a man whose gesture and bearing promised him to be an excellent companion, but in whose eyes I also perceived some light not ordinary. He was of middle age, fifty or more; his hair was crisp and grey, his face brown, as though he had been much upon the sea. He was tall in stature, and of some strength. He saluted me, and, when he had eaten, asked me if I also were familiar with this inn.
"Very familiar," I said; "and since I can enter it at any hour freely, it is now more familiar to me even than the houses that were once my homes. For nowadays we, who work in the State and are not idle, must be driven from one place to another; and only the very rich have certitude and continuity. But to them it is of no service; for they are too idle to take root in the soil."
"Yet I was of their blood," he said; "and there is in this county a home which should be mine. But nothing to-day is capable of endurance. I have not seen my home (though it is but ten miles from here) since I left it in my thirtieth year; and I too would rather come to this inn, which I know as you know it, than to any house in England; because I am certain of entry, and because I know what I shall find, and because what I find is what any man of this county should find, if the soul of it is not to disappear."
"You, then," I answered (we were now seated side by side before the fire with but one flickering candle behind us, and on the floor between us a port just younger than the host), "you, then, come here for much the same reason as do I?"
"And what is that?" said he.
"Why," said I, "to enjoy the illusion that Change can somewhere be arrested, and that, in some shape, a part at least of the things we love remains. For, since I was a boy and almost since I can remember, everything in this house has been the same; and here I escape from the threats of the society we know."
When I had said this, he was grave and silent for a little while; and then he answered:
"It is impossible, I think, after many years to recover any such illusion. Just as a young man can no longer think himself (as children do) the actor in any drama of his own choosing, so a man growing old (as am I) can no longer expect of any society--and least of all of his own--the gladness that comes from an illusion of permanence."
"For my part," I answered in turn, "I know very well, though I can conjure up this feeling of security, that it is very flimsy stuff; and I take it rather as men take symbols. For though these good people will at last perish, and some brewer--a Colonel of Volunteers as like as not--will buy this little field, and though for the port we are drinking there will be imperial port, and for the beer we have just drunk something as noisome as that port, and though thistles will grow up in the good pasture ground, and though, in a word, this inn will become a hotel and will perish, nevertheless I cannot but believe that England remains, and I do not think it the taking of a drug or a deliberate cheating of oneself to come and steep one's soul in what has already endured so long because it was proper to our country."
"All that you say," he answered, "is but part of the attempt to escape Necessity. Your very frame is of that substance for which permanence means death; and every one of all the emotions that you know is of its nature momentary, and must be so if it is to be alive."
"Yet there is a divine thirst," I said, "for something that will not so perish. If there were no such thirst, why should you and I debate such things, or come here to The Lion either of us, to taste antiquity? And if that thirst is there, it is a proof that there is for us some End and some such satisfaction. For my part, as I know of nothing else, I cannot but seek it in this visible good world. I seek it in Sussex, in the nature of my home, and in the tradition of my blood."
But he answered: "No; it is not thus to be attained, the end of which you speak. And that thirst, which surely is divine, is to be quenched in no stream that we can find by journeying, not even in the little rivers that run here under the combes of home."
MYSELF: "Well, then, what is the End?"
HE: "I have sometimes seen it clearly, that when the disappointed quest was over, all this journeying would turn out to be but the beginning of a much greater adventure, and that I should set out towards another place where every sense should be fulfilled, and where the fear of mutation should be set at rest."
MYSELF: "No one denies that such a picture in the mind haunts men their whole lives through, though, after they have once experienced loss and incompletion, and especially when they have caught sight a long way off of the Barrier which ends all our experience, they recognise that picture for a cheat; and surely nothing can save it? That which reasons in us may be absolute and undying; for it is outside Time. It escapes the gropings of the learned, and it has nothing to do with material things. But as for all those functions which we but half fulfil in life, surely elsewhere they cannot be fulfilled at all? Colour is for the eyes and music is for the ears; and all that we love so much comes in by channels that do not remain."
He: "Yet the Desire can only be for things that we have known; and the Desire, as you have said, is a proof of the thing desired, and, but for these things which we know, the words 'joy' and 'contentment' and 'fulfilment' would have no meaning."
MYSELF: "Why yes; but, though desires are the strongest evidence of truth, yet there is also desire for illusions, as there is a waking demand for things attainable, and a demand in dreams for things fantastic and unreal. Every analogy increasingly persuades us, and so does the whole scheme of things as we learn it, that, with our passing, there shall also pass speech and comfortable fires and fields and the voices of our children, and that, when they pass, we lose them for ever."
He: "Yet these things would not be, but for the mind which receives them; and how can we make sure what channels are necessary for the mind? and may not the mind stretch on? And you, since you reject my guess at what may be reserved for us, tell me, what is the End which we shall attain?"
MYSELF: "Salva fide, I cannot tell."
Then he continued and said: "I have too long considered these matters for any opposition between one experience and another to affect my spirit, and I know that a long and careful inquiry into any matter must lead the same man to opposing conclusions; but, for my part, I shall confidently expect throughout that old age, which is not far from me, that, when it ceases, I shall find beyond it things similar to those which I have known. For all I here enjoy is of one nature; and if the life of a man be bereft of them at last, then it is falsehood or metaphor to use the word 'eternal.'"
"You think, then," said I, "that some immortal part in us is concerned not only with our knowledge, but with our every feeling, and that our final satisfaction will include a sensual pleasure: fragrance, and landscape, and a visible home that shall be dearer even than these dear hills?"
"Something of the sort," he said, and slightly shrugged his shoulders. They were broad, as he sat beside me staring at the fire. They conveyed in their attitude that effect of mingled strength and weariness which is common to all who have travelled far and with great purpose, perpetually seeking some worthy thing which they could never find.
The fire had fallen. Flames no longer leapt from the beech logs; but on their under side, where a glow still lingered, embers fell.
THE AUTUMN AND THE FALL OF LEAVES
It is not true that the close of a life which ends in a natural fashion--life which is permitted to put on the pomp of death and to go out in glory--inclines the mind to repose. It is not true of a day ending nor the passing of the year, nor of the fall of leaves. Whatever permanent, uneasy question is native to men, comes forward most insistent and most loud at such times.
There is a house in my own county which is built of stone, whose gardens are fitted to the autumn. It has level alleys standing high and banked with stone. Their ornaments were carved under the influence of that restraint which marked the Stuarts. They stand above old ponds, and are strewn at this moment with the leaves of elms. These walks are like the Mailles of the Flemish cities, the walls of the French towns or the terraces of the Loire. They are enjoyed to-day by whoever has seen all our time go racing by; they are the proper resting-places of the aged, and their spirit is felt especially in the fall of leaves.
At this season a sky which is of so delicate and faint a blue as to contain something of gentle mockery, and certainly more of tenderness, presides at the fall of leaves. There is no air, no breath at all. The leaves are so light that they sidle on their going downward, hesitating in that which is not void to them, and touching at last so imperceptibly the earth with which they are to mingle, that the gesture is much gentler than a salutation, and even more discreet than a discreet caress.
They make a little sound, less than the least of sounds. No bird at night in the marshes rustles so slightly; no man, though men are the subtlest of living beings, put so evanescent a stress upon their sacred whispers or their prayers. The leaves are hardly heard, but they are heard just so much that men also, who are destined at the end to grow glorious and to die, look up and hear them falling.
* * * * *
With what a pageantry of every sort is not that troubling symbol surrounded! The scent of life is never fuller in the woods than now, for the ground is yielding up its memories. The spring when it comes will not restore this fullness, nor these deep and ample recollections of the earth. For the earth seems now to remember the drive of the ploughshare and its harrying; the seed, and the full bursting of it, the swelling and the completion of the harvest. Up to the edge of the woods throughout the weald the earth has borne fruit; the barns are full, and the wheat is standing stacked in the fields, and there are orchards all around. It is upon such a mood of parentage and of fruition that the dead leaves fall.
The colour is not a mere splendour: it is intricate. The same unbounded power, never at fault and never in calculation, which comprehends all the landscape, and which has made the woods, has worked in each one separate leaf as well; they are inconceivably varied. Take up one leaf and see. How many kinds of boundary are there here between the stain which ends in a sharp edge against the gold, and the sweep in which the purple and red mingle more evenly than they do in shot-silk or in flames? Nor are the boundaries to be measured only by degrees of definition. They have also their characters of line. Here in this leaf are boundaries intermittent, boundaries rugged, boundaries curved, and boundaries broken. Nor do shape and definition ever begin to exhaust the list. For there are softness and hardness too: the agreement and disagreement with the scheme of veins; the grotesque and the simple in line; the sharp and the broad, the smooth, and raised in boundaries. So in this one matter of boundaries might you discover for ever new things; there is no end to them. Their qualities are infinite. And beside boundaries you have hues and tints, shades also, varying thicknesses of stuff, and endless choice of surface; that list also is infinite, and the divisions of each item in it are infinite; nor is it of any use to analyse the thing, for everywhere the depth and the meaning of so much creation are beyond our powers. And all this is true of but one dead leaf; and yet every dead leaf will differ from its fellow.
That which has delighted to excel in boundlessness within the bounds of this one leaf, has also transformed the whole forest. There is no number to the particular colour of the one leaf. The forest is like a thing so changeful of its nature that change clings to it as a quality, apparent even during the glance of a moment. This forest makes a picture which is designed, but not seizable. It is a scheme, but a scheme you cannot set down. It is of those things which can best be retained by mere copying with a pencil or a brush. It is of those things which a man cannot fully receive, and which he cannot fully re-express to other men.
It is no wonder, then, that at this peculiar time, this week (or moment) of the year, the desires which if they do not prove at least demand--perhaps remember--our destiny, come strongest. They are proper to the time of autumn, and all men feel them. The air is at once new and old; the morning (if one rises early enough to welcome its leisurely advance) contains something in it of profound reminiscence. The evenings hardly yet suggest (as they soon will) friends and security, and the fires of home. The thoughts awakened in us by their bands of light fading along the downs are thoughts which go with loneliness and prepare me for the isolation of the soul.
It is on this account that tradition has set, at the entering of autumn, for a watch at the gate of the season, the Archangel; and at its close the day and the night of All-Hallows on which the dead return.
THE GOOD WOMAN
Upon a hill that overlooks a western plain and is conspicuous at the approach of evening, there still stands a house of faded brick faced with cornerings of stone. It is quite empty, but yet not deserted. In each room some little furniture remains; all the pictures are upon the walls; the deep red damask of the panels is not faded, or if faded, shows no contrast of brighter patches, for nothing has been removed from the walls. Here it is possible to linger for many hours alone, and to watch the slope of the hill under the level light as the sun descends. Here passes a woman of such nobility that, though she is dead, the landscape and the vines are hers.
It was in September, during a silence of the air, that I first saw her as she moved among her possessions; she was smiling to herself as though at a memory, but her smile was so slight and so dignified, so genial, and yet so restrained, that you would have thought it part of everything around and married (as she was) to the land which was now her own. She wandered down the garden paths ruling the flowers upon either side, and receiving as she went autumn and the fruition of her fields; plenitude and completion surrounded her; the benediction of Almighty God must have been upon her, for she was the fulfilment of her world.
Three fountains played in that garden--two, next to the northern and the southern walls, were small and low; they rather flowed than rose. Two cones of marble received their fall, and over these they spread in an even sheet with little noise, making (as it were) a sheath of water which covered all the stone; but the third sprang into the air with delicate triumph, fine and high, satisfied, tenuous and exultant. This one tossed its summit into the light, and, alone of the things in the garden, the plash of its waters recalled and suggested activity--though that in so discreet a way that it was to be heard rather than regarded. The birds flew off in circles over the roofs of the town below us. Very soon they went to their rest.
The slow transfiguration of the light by which the air became full of colours and every outline merged into the evening, made of all I saw, as I came up towards her, a soft and united vision wherein her advancing figure stood up central and gave a meaning to the whole. I will not swear that she did not as she came bestow as well as receive an influence of the sunset. It was said by the ancients that virtue is active, an agent, and has power to control created things; for, they said, it is in a direct relation with whatever orders and has ordained the general scheme. Such power, perhaps, resided in her hands. It would have awed me but hardly astonished if, as the twilight deepened, the inclination of the stems had obeyed her gesture and she had put the place to sleep.
As I came near I saw her plainly. Her face was young although she was so wise, but its youth had the aspect of a divine survival. Time adorned it.
Music survives. Whatever is eternal in the grace of simple airs or in the Christian innocence of Mozart was apparent, nay, had increased, in her features as the days in passing had added to them not only experience but also revelation and security. She was serene. The posture of her head was high, and her body, which was visibly informed by an immortal spirit, had in its carriage a large, a regal, an uplifted bearing which even now as I write of it, after so many years, turns common every other sight that has encountered me. This was the way in which I first saw her upon her own hillside at evening.
With every season I returned. And with every season she greeted my coming with a more generous and a more vivacious air. I think the years slipped off and did not add themselves upon her mind: the common doom of mortality escaped her until, perhaps, its sign was imposed upon her hair--for this at last was touched all through with that appearance or gleam which might be morning or which might be snow.
She was able to conjure all evil. Those desperate enemies of mankind which lie in siege of us all around grew feeble and were silent when she came. Nor has any other force than hers dared to enter the rooms where she had lived: it is her influence alone which inhabits them to-day. There is a vessel of copper, enamelled in green and gilded, which she gave with her own hands to a friend overseas. I have twice touched it in an evil hour.
Strength, sustenance, and a sacramental justice are permanent in such lives, and such lives also attain before their close to so general a survey of the world that their appreciations are at once accurate and universal.
On this account she did not fail in any human conversation, nor was she ever for a moment less than herself; but always and throughout her moods her laughter was unexpected and full, her fear natural, her indignation glorious.
Above all, her charity extended like a breeze: it enveloped everything she knew. The sense of destiny faded from me as the warmth of that charity fell upon my soul; the foreknowledge of death retreated, as did every other unworthy panic.
She drew the objects of her friendship into something new; they breathed an air from another country, so that those whom she deigned to regard were, compared with other men, like the living compared with the dead; or, better still, they were like men awake while the rest were tortured by dreams and haunted of the unreal. Indeed, she had a word given to her which saved all the souls of her acquaintance.
It is not true that influence of this sort decays or passes into vaguer and vaguer depths of memory. It does not dissipate. It is not dissolved. It does not only spread and broaden: it also increases with the passage of time. The musicians bequeath their spirit, notably those who have loved delightful themes and easy melodies. The poets are read for ever; but those who resemble her do more, for they grow out upon the centuries--they themselves and not their arts continue. There is stuff in their legend. They are a tangible inheritance for the hurrying generations of men.
She was of this kind. She was certainly of this kind. She died upon this day[1] in the year 1892. In these lines I perpetuate her memory.
[Footnote 1: The 22nd of December.]
THE HARBOUR IN THE NORTH
Upon that shore of Europe which looks out towards no further shore, I came once by accident upon a certain man.
The day had been warm and almost calm, but a little breeze from the south-east had all day long given life to the sea. The seas had run very small and brilliant, yet without violence, before the wind, and had broken upon the granite cliffs to leeward, not in spouts of foam, but in a white even line that was thin, and from which one heard no sound of surge. Moreover, as I was running dead north along the coast, the noise about the bows was very slight and pleasant. The regular and gentle wind came upon the quarter without change, and the heel of the boat was steady. No calm came with the late sunset; the breeze still held, and so till nearly midnight I could hold a course and hardly feel the pulling of the helm. Meanwhile the arch of the sunset endured, for I was far to the northward, and all those colours which belong to June above the Arctic Sea shone and changed in the slow progress of that arch as it advanced before me and mingled at last with the dawn. Throughout the hours of that journey I could see clearly the seams of the deck forward, the texture of the canvas and the natural hues of the woodwork and the rigging, the glint of the brasswork, and even the letters painted round the little capstain-head, so continually did the light endure. The silence which properly belongs to darkness, and which accompanies the sleep of birds upon the sea, appeared to be the more intense because of such a continuance of the light, and what with a long vigil and new water, it was as though I had passed the edge of all known maps and had crossed the boundary of new land.
In such a mood I saw before me the dark band of a stone jetty running some miles off from the shore into the sea, and at the end of it a fixed beacon whose gleam showed against the translucent sky (and its broken reflection in the pale sea) as a candle shows when one pulls the curtains of one's room and lets in the beginnings of the day.
For this point I ran, and as I turned it I discovered a little harbour quite silent under the growing light; there was not a man upon its wharves, and there was no smoke rising from its slate roofs. It was absolutely still. The boat swung easily round in the calm water, the pier-head slipped by, the screen of the pier-head beacon suddenly cut off its glare, and she went slowly with no air in her canvas towards the patch of darkness under the quay. There, as I did not know the place, I would not pick up moorings which another man might own and need, but as my boat still crept along with what was left of her way I let go the little anchor, for it was within an hour of low tide, and I was sure of water.
When I had done this she soon tugged at the chain and I slackened all the halyards. I put the cover on the mainsail, and as I did so, looking aft, I noted the high mountain-side behind the town standing clear in the dawn. I turned eastward to receive it. The light still lifted, and though I had not slept I could not but stay up and watch the glory growing over heaven. It was just then, when I had stowed everything away, that I heard to the right of me the crooning of a man.
A few moments before I should not have seen him under the darkness of the sea-wall, but the light was so largely advanced (it was nearly two o'clock) that I now clearly made out both his craft and him.
She was sturdy and high, and I should think of slight draught. She was of great beam. She carried but one sail, and that was brown. He had it loose, with the peak dipped ready for hoisting, and he himself was busy at some work upon the floor, stowing and fitting his bundles, and as he worked he crooned gently to himself. It was then that I hailed him, but in a low voice, so much did the silence of that place impress itself upon all living beings who were strange to it. He looked up and told me that he had not seen me come in nor heard the rattling of the chain. I asked him what he would do so early, whether he was off fishing at that hour or whether he was taking parcels down the coast for hire or goods to sell at some other port. He answered me that he was doing none of those things.
"What cruise, then, are you about to take?" I said.
"I am off," he answered in a low and happy voice, "to find what is beyond the sea."
"And to what shore," said I, "do you mean to sail?"
He answered: "I am out upon this sea northward to where they say there is no further shore."
As he spoke he looked towards that horizon which now stood quite clean and clear between the pier-heads: his eyes were full of the broad daylight, and he breathed the rising wind as though it were a promise of new life and of unexpected things. I asked him then what his security was and had he formed a plan, and why he was setting out from this small place, unless, perhaps, it was his home, of which he might be tired.
"No," he answered, and smiled; "this is not my home; and I have come to it as you may have come to it, for the first time; and, like you, I came in after the whole place slept; but as I neared I noticed certain shore marks and signs which had been given me, and then I knew that I had come to the starting-place of a long voyage."
"Of what voyage?" I asked.
He answered:
"This is that harbour in the North of which a Breton priest once told me that I should reach it, and when I had moored in it and laid my stores on board in order, I should set sail before morning and reach at last a complete repose." Then he went on with eagerness, though still talking low: "The voyage which I was born to make in the end, and to which my desire has driven me, is towards a place in which everything we have known is forgotten, except those things which, as we knew them, reminded us of an original joy. In that place I shall discover again such full moments of content as I have known, and I shall preserve them without failing. It is in some country beyond this sea, and it has a harbour like this harbour, only set towards the South, as this is towards the North; but like this harbour it looks out over an unknown sea, and like this harbour it enjoys a perpetual light. Of what the happy people in this country are, or of how they speak, no one has told me, but they will receive me well, for I am of one kind with themselves. But as to how I shall know this harbour, I can tell you: there is a range of hills, broken by a valley through which one sees a further and a higher range, and steering for this hollow in the hills one sees a tower out to sea upon a rock, and high up inland a white quarry on a hill-top; and these two in line are the leading marks by which one gets clear into the mouth of the river, and so to the wharves of the town. And there," he ended, "I shall come off the sea for ever, and every one will call me by my name."
The sun was now near the horizon, but not yet risen, and for a little time he said nothing to me nor I to him, for he was at work sweating up the halyard and setting the peak. He let go the mooring knot also, but he held the end of the rope in his hand and paid it out, standing and looking upward, as the sail slowly filled and his craft drifted towards me. He pressed the tiller with his knee to keep her full.
I now knew by his eyes and voice that he was from the West, and I could not see him leave me without asking him from what place he came that he should set out for such another place. So I asked him: "Are you from Ireland, or from Brittany, or from the Islands?" He answered me: "I am from none of these, but from Cornwall." And as he answered me thus shortly he still watched the sail and still pressed the tiller with his knee, and still paid out the mooring rope without turning round.
"You cannot make the harbour," I said to him. "It is not of this world."
Just at that moment the breeze caught the peak of his jolly brown sail; he dropped the tail of the rope: it slipped and splashed into the harbour slime. His large boat heeled, shot up, just missed my cable; and then he let her go free, and she ran clear away. As she ran he looked over his shoulder and laughed most cheerily; he greeted me with his eyes, and he waved his hand to me in the morning light.
He held her well. A clean wake ran behind her. He put her straight for the harbour-mouth and passed the pier-heads and took the sea outside.
Whether in honest truth he was a fisherman out for fishes who chose to fence with me, or whether in that cruise of his he landed up in a Norwegian bay, or thought better of it in Orkney, or went through the sea and through death to the place he desired, I have never known.
I watched him holding on, and certainly he kept a course. The sun rose, the town awoke, but I would not cease from watching him. His sail still showed a smaller and a smaller point upon the sea; he did not waver. For an hour I caught it and lost it, and caught it again, as it dwindled; for half another hour I could not swear to it in the blaze. Before I had wearied it was gone.
* * * * *
Oh! my companions, both you to whom I dedicate this book and you who have accompanied me over other hills and across other waters or before the guns in Burgundy, or you others who were with me when I seemed alone--that ulterior shore was the place we were seeking in every cruise and march and the place we thought at last to see. We, too, had in mind that Town of which this man spoke to me in the Scottish harbour before he sailed out northward to find what he could find. But I did not follow him, for even if I had followed him I should not have found the Town.
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