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Walking Tours

The close of the holiday season sets most of us reflecting on the philosophy of travel, and many of us upon the simplest form of it, the philosophy of walking tours. Among serious and imaginative pedestrians there are only two schools or parties, and one school maintains that the pedestrian should go forth without map or compass, and wander until a wood beckons to him or a pathway points like a finger. The other school maintains that he should map out with every circumstance of detail the place he is going to, and then go somewhere else. The idea of having a fixed intention on such an occasion, and adhering to it through thick and thin would make an excellent medieval religious vow, but makes a very poor holiday. Some people set out upon walking tours with the most horrible indifference to that idea of loneliness and liberty which is the essence of such an enterprise. Some even send a bag on before them to the hotels to which they intend to go: a dark and depraved aspect in which to regard human nature. They might as well station footmen in livery at intervals of every three miles carrying coffee and liqueurs. The whole beauty and meaning of pedestrianism vanishes if the pedestrian is once tied to a particular hotel, even if it is thirty miles away. Then he is no longer a wild thing like the hawk or the hare, he is only a cow on a particularly long tether. The sending on of bags is predestination: it is a sort of holiday Calvinism, when the very soul of walking is free will. If a travelling companion is sought he should always be sought among those lovers of the errant and the spontaneous. He should be sought among those true worshippers of liberty who feel a certain degradation whenever they take a return ticket. Those who are interested in antiquities should be avoided, but those who are interested in what they call nature are worse. Great public buildings were after all in some sense made to be stared at, but to regard our mother earth merely as a thing to be stared at is like exhibiting one's maiden aunt in a cage. A man should walk in the country in order to become a part of the country, not in order to get to the top of a particular hill and see a distressing number of counties.

The man who goes upon a walking tour should be open to all the usual interests. He should enjoy the country and enjoy the churches and enjoy the beetles, but also, and as a very important item, he should enjoy the walk. He should not be consumed with any devouring preference for going anywhere. His desires should be no more fixed upon the end of the walk than the desire of a child upon the end of a sugarstick. The walk should be a work of art, the real colour and value of which do not appear until it is completed. The objects of a walk are often disappointing, but the accidents are magnificent. The true adventurer does not walk so much in the hope of finding cities or mountains as in the hope of discovering by the end of his journey why he came out. The darkness of this great mystery will always be present to his mind. Every twist of roadway, every knot of trees may conceal behind it the explanation of his own superb folly. He is in search of the central incident of his journey, and it may be a strange sunset or a fight with a foot-pad, a patch of primroses or a lunatic with a green umbrella. Just as some primitive hero trusted himself upon the back of a dragon or hippogriff, the traveller trusts himself upon that wildest of steeds--a runaway road. Upon the whole, it may be admitted that the pedestrian should carry a map, but he should not consult it often, and he should always cherish the thrilling and secret thought that it may be all wrong. In fact, a map should be taken chiefly because it is such a particularly beautiful thing in itself. A great many other things should be selected and retained on the same principle. A walking tour, for example, is unthinkable without a walking-stick, though the experienced will have the strongest internal doubts whether it is any use, and the walking-stick of all walking-sticks for such a purpose is one cut in the woods, as being the most rough and crooked and inconvenient. Carrying such a staff a man feels himself a thing of the earth. He is almost a walking portion of the woods, he carries a tree like the army which brought Birnam to Dunsinane. And if he has walked well and cheerfully, by the time he sticks his staff in the ground and sits down to rest in the evening he will do it in such a state of inward glory that he would scarcely be surprised if the staff broke into flower before him like the Pope's rod in Tannhäuser. The essential ground of the unwisdom and unprofitableness of planning a walk too systematically with maps and guide books is a thing easy to feel, but not quite so easy to analyse. One point, however, may be noticed. In our days, when we have names for everything and accurate plans of everywhere, we tend very much to forget that there does exist a place called the world. The world was the place, for example, into which the heroes of the fairy tales went out to seek their fortune. It began at the end of their father's garden, and it stretched away into infinity full of everything from birds' nests to dragons, from apple trees to ogres. This remarkable place, the world, is the only place that is not marked even upon the latest and most accurate geographical charts. We have so cut up the face of the earth into our own arbitrary divisions, that it is always Sussex, or Essex, or Kent, or Norway, or Patagonia, and never simply the earth. Science has given us a vulgar familiarity with the earth, a familiarity without knowledge. We have set the seal of the commonplace upon inaccessible peaks that no man has ever trodden, and unfathomable seas inhabited by monsters that have never risen to the surface. We have names and tickets for sights and regions which we no more possess than if they existed only in someone else's dreams. Thousands and thousands of leagues beyond the farthest limit of our possible personal experience the earth contains things as marvellous as any fairy tale. But we have not the wisdom as the men of the fairy tales had, the wisdom to call these places fairyland or the castle east of the sun and west of the moon. We call them Jonestown, and Smith's River, and Snooksville, U.S.A.

The perfect pedestrian should always set forth like the third son in the fairy tale. It is a mystic and beautiful dispensation of Providence that every person in this world has an inward conviction that in the cosmic system he himself is the third son. He should go into Kent if he likes, or Buckinghamshire if he likes, or Normandy, or Italy, or China if he likes, but first and foremost into the world. He should go forth with any object he pleases: to shoot lions, or pick flowers, or collect fossils, or find a desert island, or find a wife, but first and foremost he should go out, in the old fairy tale phrase, to seek his fortune. In the life of industrial civilisation, where everything is done by a kind of clockwork, most of us have forgotten that we have a fortune. Most of us have forgotten that somewhere in the nooks and corners of the world there has, perhaps, been waiting for us all our lives a neglected destiny. When we praise the order of Nature it is only as we might praise a mangle or a mincing machine, useful for our own practical purpose, just as the old silversmiths cried 'Great is Diana of the Ephesians'. Like them we have forgotten the true identity of the moon who was the patroness of lunatics and the goddess of crossroads.

The Blindness of the Sightseer

I once had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of an American, a very intelligent and inspiriting person, who, during a pause in a discussion on scenery, said, with the inimitable accent, `Well, I can't see when you have seen the highest mountain in Switzerland what you want to see the rest for'. So completely obsessed was he with this American sense of competition that he admitted competition even among mountains, and judged of some hundreds of the towering crests of the earth as he would have judged of six American hotel servants who struggled at the station for his bag. There is a very general idea--how general I cannot imagine-- that competition is productive of or conducive to individuality. The defenders of the extreme forms of competition invariably insist upon this argument, that the struggle develops personality and variety. Of course, it does nothing of the sort. Competition is simply imitation, and however fierce and ruthless competition may be it only becomes a fierce and ruthless imitation. When the most important object in a landscape must be the thing which is down in the guidebook--the highest hill, the largest tree, the roundest hole in the wall--thousands of other beauties for miles round waste themselves like the neglected talents of humanity. People see the Madeleine and the Louvre, but they do not see Paris. They see the Pfalz Castle and the Drachenfels, but they do not see the Rhine. They see Westminster Abbey and Stratford-on-Avon, but they have never seen England; England is still to them an undiscovered Atlantis. They see pyramids, dolmens, sloping towers, great walls, hanging gardens, catacombs, colossal statues; but they have never seen that one miracle to which all these are nothing. They have seen the seven wonders of the world, but they have never seen the world.

Let me hasten to say at once that I have not a gleam of sympathy with that contempt which is sometimes expressed by the languid for those who travel. My complaint is not that people are enthusiastic about the Drachenfels, but that they are not enthusiastic about other things. The real evil is that which takes these sights out of their setting and holds them up as the reason for travel. A man of any imagination gains enormously by travelling in France or Germany. My only suggestion is that he would gain scarcely an atom less if he never saw any one of the places to which such tours are universally and systematically directed. If a man could come upon these places suddenly and naturally the effect would be magnificent. Statues and cathedrals would waylay him like a patch of blossom in the hedges or a shape in the clouds. To walk across the magnificent hills of Sussex, to come upon the long lines of a great forest and a great fortress, and to be told that it is the Castle of the Howards. To walk along the sands of the great Norman coast, and behold out at sea a village clinging upon a spire of rock, and to know that it is the Mountain of St Michael; this would indeed be to be educated by travel. But, then, the great sights would come as the culmination of a series of lesser ones, enjoyed and admired in the same manner. The man who did not enjoy the Sussex Downs would not really enjoy the Castle of Arundel. The man who was not impressed by mere sand and sea would not be impressed by the awful crag of the Archangel. But the system of modern travel takes these things out of their environment, makes them prodigies, valuable in themselves. There is not a pin to choose in essential superstition between the medieval pilgrim who would walk miles that for a moment he might touch a particular stone and the modern tourist who will drive leagues that for a moment he may stare at it. We can all feel this essential difference between seeing a sight as an example of its environment and seeing a sight as an exception to its environment, if we merely imagine the principle applied to other forms in nature. If we walked down a long lane in Surrey, and saw, let us say, an incomparable hedge of wild roses extending apparently for miles, we might be stricken still with an exceptionable wonder at the height and splendour of some exceptionable branch or bloom. But if, because this branch was the highest in the lane, it was suddenly given a name, and advertised through the country; if we heard that a station had been opened near it, that omnibuses and excursion trains were run down to it on Bank Holidays, and that by these facilities some hundreds of harmless human beings were dragged out of London, dropped down in front of it for a minute or two to stare, and then dragged back again, we should say that the magic had departed. And if we were wise, we should see that the magic had not departed, as some superfine people suppose, because trains and trippers are ugly. Trains are very poetical things, and so are trippers; for only the wildest kind of poetry can furnish any explanation of why they trip. But the magic would have gone from that branch of wild roses for the very simple reason that the magic had not resided in that alone; the magic was partly the magic of the lane itself and of loneliness, of the combination of the two strangest and most impressive of things-- silence and life. Now, steamers and conducted tours have done precisely this very thing for places like the Rhine: they have found the wild rose and they have lost the lane. It is better a hundred times to wander about the lane and never see its most glorious and natural product than to see that product and regard it as a monstrosity. In so far as a thing is what people call marvellous it is not and cannot be representative. To judge of Italy by the leaning tower is like judging of the human race by the bearded woman at a fair. That type of wonders of the world is based upon the principle that the wonderful consists in things going wrong: to a somewhat more essential imagination the genuine wonder is that things go right. The leaning tower of Pisa is, if we realise man's history seriously, by no means so astonishing as the nearest waterworks tower. The marvel is that all our turrets and tenements do not reel this way and that, like a scene from the Day of Judgment.

In one sense, the great buildings and great cities which we labour to visit are less worth the labour than those common scenes and figures in the street which we pass easily by. For great buildings belong to great traditions of European civilisation which are akin throughout Europe, and whether or no a man could get as much education from Westminster Abbey as from Cologne Cathedral, at least it would be education upon the same lines. It is in a chance strip of landscape, a chance group in the street that we see the real difference which it is worth while to cross the sea to find. The architecture of a German cathedral and that of an English one belong to the same school; but the architecture of a German and that of an Englishman exhibit the most fascinating differences. Every land, every town, has its dark and sacred individuality. The man who has found this out, and he alone, has visited that land or town. And, perhaps, when we have wandered, in obedience to modern culture, among all the kingdoms of the earth, and gathered the knowledge of them, we may begin to penetrate into that most unexplored of all territories, our own country. We may realise what it is that consitutes an English landscape, and in the wild developments of some future century, may begin to be patriots.

The Aesthetes in the Kitchen Garden

When, a week or two ago, I came down among the hills of Kent, the country looked ancient and innocent enough. Save for birds and old men lapping hedges the visitor seemed to be in solitude. But all this was a mask--a delusion. This green England of ours is really bursting with literary men. Short story writers leap from behind hedges, minor poets drop from the trees like ripe fruit; you cannot walk through deep grass without stumbling over Sociologists. On dark, windy nights wild voices mingle with the wind, and the words 'reactionary', `superman', `the Philistines', and `raise the drama' echo desolately from hill to hill. We see the vision of Fitz-James in `The Lady of the Lake' which Scott describes in words (which I quote from memory):

At once from copse and heath arose

Roundels and fugues and lyric prose,

From shingles grey their nocturnes start,

The bracken bush cries, `Art is Art',

And every tuft of broom is rife

With highly beastly views of life.

I have met in meadows here some of the most terrible and beautiful people of Fleet Street. I have seen a cottage, decent and quiet on the outside, inside which, as I hope for heaven, there were Burne-Jones's on the wall. In short, we are in the presence of a peculiar phenomenon. The people are not going `back to the land' but the cultivated classes are.

But there is something about these intellectual people in flannel shirts who come out and live in the country, where they play tennis and read Thoreau which gives me a haunting notion that they do not really belong to the country; they dwell rather than live in it.

Now this is very false. Go into the country for your health; go into the country for your children; go into the country because the police are after you; go into the country because you like painting in water-colours, or because you like keeping chickens, or because you like spearing otters, or because you want beauty or contentment or the continual presence of cows. But do not go into the country because you like liberty, for there is of necessity less liberty in the country than anywhere else. The pressure of society on the individual must be much greater in a village than in a city. Public opinion must be much stronger; personal eccentricity much more difficult. And if the aesthetic people in the flannel shirts do not feel this pressure it is because they are not really living in the life of the village-- that is to say, not really living in the life of the country. Liberty is a thing of the town; any Roman or Greek would have understood that. It is in the places where men live an intense and complicated life that they find the necessity for liberty, and that which is almost the same as liberty--loneliness. The routine of rural life, happy, dignified, sensible, but not inventive, and not free, has been going on almost unchanged from the beginning of the world.

Amid all these philosophers and artists who run like rabbits about the woods of Kent I met one who really loved the country. He was driving a sort of wagonette which was plastered all over with little bills and placards announcing that now for the first time people could go from Westerham or Limpsfield to various places that I have never heard of for some singularly small price which I did not read. He was trotting his coach up and down the country roads by way of a preliminary pageant or advertisement, giving free lifts to highly amused pedestrians, or proclaiming the nature and glories of the route to dazed stonebreakers or wild-eyed gypsies. Something led me to make the acquaintance of this individual, and I discovered that driving a coach was by no means the first of his adventures, nor the most amusing. He has written books; he has stood for Parliament; he has conducted, I believe, a kind of wild newspaper. His name is Stuart Gray, and will probably be familiar to many of my readers, especially if they are interested in the movement for the colonisation of England, the return of the people to the land. It was a single sentence of his that convinced me that he had that really poetic feeling which the minor poets in the neighbourhood tend to lack. Before us lay a roll of country like the back of an unbroken wave, spacious, silent, meeting the sky. He stretched out his whip towards it, and said in what I can only call an awestruck voice, `If this were all kitchen gardens! Then you'd have people--people--people.' Three times he said the sacred word of the republic. This article, you will perceive, is also written in a kitchen garden, and a witchery of onions is wafted with it.

While standing in this kitchen garden I perceived what many of my readers must have perceived long ago, that of all things on earth the one perfectly beautiful thing is a kitchen garden. It has a hundred kinds of beauty richly blent into a solemn harmony. It has the beauty of an embroidery, for all the colours are quiet and yet varied infinitely. It has the beauty of an army, for all the vegetable regiments are set in ranks as if they had been drilled by God for the great battle against Nonentity. It has the beauty of a sepulchre, because so many of the shapes and colours that are seen are but the coloured crests or monuments upon the more precious bodies underground. It has the beauty of a store-cupboard, the beauty of a fairy tale. Cabbages alone have all the colours of the sea. I am forced, I find, to conclude these reflections for the moment. But I trust that before I resume my reflections on kitchen gardens someone will have brought out a book of amatory poems in which all the similes shall have been drawn from this nobler and more fruitful Eden. I do not see why he should not say that in a lady's cheek the turnip and the carrot fought for supremacy. Such a description is far truer to the mellow and tawny quality in the human complexion than the violent similes of the rose and the lily. These latter, I may be fastidious, offend me as fantastic.

The Need of Personalities in Politics

The village I now inhabit (as a locum tenens in the temporary absence of the Village Beauty) was in a great stir last night, owing to the arrival of the Liberal Van, which was regarded with more gravity than I should have thought possible. It drew up on the village green; its speakers opened a meeting, and everything would have gone smoothly and respectably if it had not happened that among the promoters of the meeting, standing beside the van, was a man with that air of strained intellectuality which marks a reader of The Daily News. He heard my name by some social accident; and remembered seeing it in the paper. `I have read your articles,' said this excellent Liberal, with a friendly smile, while I faintly condoled with him. Then he said, after a pause of some length, `I think I know what some of them mean'. I implored him to share with me this secret and painful knowledge, but he refused, and I shall go to my grave without it. But my encounter with the man had drawn me into the dangerous circle. And when the Chairman, a local Liberal magnate, was obliged to leave halfway through the meeting, they hoisted me into the chair instead of him. The chair was a kind of wooden ledge a little way above the shafts; and I took the chair with so dignified a decisiveness as almost to wreck the van. Then, I regret to say, the proceedings took on a more turbulent character. My rising to say anything was greeted (I cannot explain this phenomenon) with loud shouts coming exclusively from little boys. I think I somehow stirred in them a sickening hope that after all it was going to be a circus.

Then there was a sombre Conservative on the outskirts of the crowd, who interrupted so consistently and continuously that it came to be a rather delicate logical question whether he was interrupting our speeches or we were interrupting his. But it was not so much the quantity as the quality of his interruptions that pleased and at the same time perplexed me. One thing was firmly embedded in his mind, the fruitful seed of continuously flowering satire. This was the conviction that all of us in the van were persons of enormous wealth. He even professed to know the sources of that wealth. When I was making some remarks about poverty, he hurled at my head, with a deadly aim, this mysterious sarcasm: 'Ha! We ain't all on the Civil List.' I made, of course, the somewhat obvious retort, that some of us seemed to be on the Uncivil List; but to this moment I cannot imagine what was the meaning of that unfathomable sneer. Is there something in my air and manner, something of official dignity and decorum, touched with a servile prosperity, that suggests that I am in receipt of a bloated pension? Or has somebody really given or left me some money (poignant and improbable thought) since I have been away from town?

Let us leave this merely personal enigma and pass on to the final development, which from a deeper point of view, at any rate, was the most interesting. The temperature of the meeting, I am proud to say, rose higher and higher: a perfect rattle of repartees, the sympathisers on each side rocked and roared, a large fat farmer of Conservative opinions was beginning with a dreadful and dangerous slowness to think of something to say; and when I wound up the meeting and thanked everybody for their patience, politeness, and good temper, they were ready to kick each other round the green.

And then an interesting thing happened. Ten minutes after the end of the meeting the large, deliberate farmer of Conservative opinions was delivered of the thing that he wanted to say; and eclipse and thunder accompanied that portentous birth. The thing he wanted to say was--Could anybody there say he'd ever cut down any man's wages? This seemed to me a very essential, a very serious, and a very manly challenge, immeasurably more important not only than anything said at our meeting, but than anything that is ever said in the House of Commons.

It was followed by a kind of restless silence, such as occurs in such mobs at such moments, and in the next instant there was drama. A pale, coarse-looking lad, his arm half out of his coat with eagerness and anger, thrust his face forward. His wages had been cut down, he said; he had been underpaid, and underpaid by this man. The farmer, staring at him through the darkness, at first denied all knowledge of his face. Then a voice broke out of him, a loud and wrathful and decisive voice, crying, `Why, I know yer now. I know yer now, I sacked yer for--'. Then the sense of English respectability awoke suddenly in everybody, and the men were torn apart and soothed wildly by their friends. Whatever happened, we must not be asked to decide on a matter of real and diurnal right and wrong. Whatever happened we must not have a plain personal challenge answered by a plain personal reply. The farmer went away, shaking with his furious secret; the lad went away shaking with his. Yet here was present on that dark green, in that dim group, what is often the eternal substance and whole meaning of society and government. Two men were calling upon their neighbours to give judgment on their wrongs. This is politics. We had fixed the frontiers of India; we had examined the imports of Canada; we had meditated on the quarrels between Dutchmen and German Jews; we had criticised kindly but firmly the condition of the Prussian working classes; we had thought imperially and also in continents; we had seen the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them.

But this doing of justice between one angry man and another never crossed our minds as a public duty. This was the last business that could be expected of us-- this which would be the first business of a primitive community, this which would be the first business of a tribe of Zulus. Our politics for the night had ended. Our politics had ended exactly at the point where all politics ought to begin.

It seemed to me that on this little green, as on a green baize stage, was acted an allegory of the whole situation of our contemporary statesmanship. Everything goes on gaily as long as we are dealing with things. Everything stops abruptly the moment we come to men. We are allowed to say: 'The supporters of the Blue-nosed Monkeys Modification and Improvement Act are corrupt scoundrels.' We are allowed to say, 'Sir William Guppy is a supporter of the Blue-nosed Monkeys Modification and Improvement Act'. We are not allowed to complete the syllogism. Everybody says with one accord in our English Parliament: `Let us have no personalities in politics.' Every Briton says at his breakfast table: 'At least, we are not like the French and the Irish; we have no personalities in our politics.' And because we have no personalities we have no responsibilities.

The Largest Window in the World

It is a terrible thing to have trod on battlefields before they were fought. It gives a man a cold and ghostly shiver, as of being the babe unborn. But I was a boy, and almost a babe, when I was first in Belgium; and I can only write down the reality that impressed me then. Beyond some streets burning with brassware, which seemed perpetually on sale, almost out of sight of the great Belfry, there is (or was) a sort of museum of the great Memlinc. Among the pictures was one which even as a boy I could not forget; and very few poets or prophets can even imagine how much a boy can forget. It was a picture in which the window seemed hardly wider than the crack of a door. Yet through that crack the human eye could almost, in the strong Scripture rhetoric, take the wings of the morning and abide in the uttermost parts of the sea.

And I remember a voice near me speaking in an accent that was neither French nor Flemish nor my own: `You see how narrow the windows were in those days.'

I did. I also began to see, for the first time, how narrow the minds are in these days. I looked at the little window again and I thought it the largest window in the world. Simply because the aperture was narrow, I knew the landscape was wide. If modern artists had swept it in a larger style, I should have noticed it no more than some hundred miles of wallpaper. Then note not only the pride of a small nation, but the pride of the rich peasantry. Look from the slit of a turret in Cumberland or Calabria and there is a chance that your eye may strike something slightly depressing. But any strip of Belgium will be a string of jewels. Note, thirdly, that the thinness of the outlook is largely due to the thickness of the walls. There is no trace of what vulgar people call `a vista': the house does not open up indefinitely to the world outside. The man of Memlinc sees the world from his window. But it is still the final fact that the window was his window and the world is not his world. I should have thought it, then, quite inconceivable that any one would assail that turret. But I should have thought it equally inconceivable that any one should fail to defend it. A man living in such a house might almost shut the front door to protect the beauty of the window.

I have never been in Belgium since; I have never met any who would possibly be in connection with any revolutionary or anti-national idea. Yet for me Belgium has continued to mean that small field of vision, making certain so vast a field of prosperity. That keyhole is still the largest window in the world.

Since then I have not seen the country, except in frightful photographs. I have gradually begun to understand what was meant by my alien friend when he spoke of the needless narrowness of the medieval window. To judge by the photographs, he has broadened architectural effects very much; he has blown window into window and enlarged the premises; he has left long lines of street in which it is impossible to say whether he has combined the windows that exist, or spared the windows that never existed. He cannot make anything except a window; for a window is simply a hole. When he has blown everything to atoms, when no stack or stone stands about us for many miles, he will say, with an insane simplicity: `I have made the largest window in the world.'

The Apostle and the Wild Ducks

Last week I learned a historical lesson in some sense by going on a wild-goose chase. Perhaps it might more correctly be described as a wild-duck chase. Not that I had any intention of shooting wild ducks, though the country I visited was, I believe, specially suited to the sport; the country round about the Fens of Lincoln and the Broads of Norfolk. Those eastern flats generally are famous for such wild-fowl, as also for the remains of the rich medieval civilisation founded on the Flemish trade, and for expansive opportunities for the admiration of the sunset; or, for those of suitable habits, of the sunrise. Yet the wild duck I pursued was not entirely symbolical, though he was among other things a symbol. What happened in my own case was merely this: that a friend of mine told me that far in the interior of the Fens, in the heart of a labyrinth of lanes and dykes there was a little church which contained some medieval paintings in remarkable preservation. These pictures were said to represent scenes of medieval sport, dealing especially with ducks. After wanderings which might have led to the other end of nowhere, only that the endless road seemed to be perpetually turning inward instead of outward, we came at last to the place, in a wilderness of dusty grass and stunted and sprawling trees; with one of the great square towers of fine flints, that mark the Norfolk churches, alone filling the empty sky and dwarfing everything at its feet. And it was here that I found the feature that seemed to me a sort of symbol or summary for our understanding of the Middle Ages.

Incidentally, of course that great tower was something of a symbol itself. It was not only a beacon or thing to be seen; it is a symbol of blindness as well as sight. Nothing is so strange in human history as the things men do not see. Over all those flat lands the only mountains were made by men; and they were made by medieval men. For that matter, in a thousand little villages all over England there has been for centuries only one tall, stately ornate and orderly building; all the rest was obvious patchwork and poverty. Yet the Puritans could successfully teach five generations of English people, and especially of East Anglian people, that the men who built the big systematic building were living in savagery and superstition, while the men who still tolerated the little hovels had emerged into liberty and enlightenment. In this case it is curiously true that faith can remove mountains; it can remove the mountain opposite a man's door, if his prejudice has taught him that a mountain is only a myth. But this is a parenthesis; for my purpose here is not concerned with the old English churches in general, but with something that is to be found in this old Norfolk church in particular.

I say it is something that can be found, though at first it seemed rather like something that could not be found. In truth, in that remarkable little fane of the flats, we might be said to have found everything but what we were looking for. There were indeed medieval paintings; and very fine ones, by no means hidden but splendidly displayed. Fronting us as we entered the church door, in a great row across the rood-screen, stood the Twelve Apostles, six on each side, with their rich colours somewhat darkened but their gold in full glow, and their emblems and tools of martyrdom unmistakable. Facing inwards, opposite each other, were two figures of St Michael and St George, treated somewhat in a heraldic manner. I mean the manner that looks arbitrary until we realise that it is decorative. The armament of St George seemed fantastic and top-heavy even for the tilting armour of the fourteenth century; the feathers of St Michael seemed to be sprouting from strange parts of him, as from the body of a monster. Only when we consider it as we do a coat of arms, as a pattern more than a picture, we suddenly realise that every line of it is in exactly the right place. High above all these there was a much more faded figure of St Etheldreda, the great Christian foundress and patron of those parts; looking down perhaps the more impressively for seeming more like a ghost or a great shadow on the wall.

This was, in the strict sense of the word, all very fine; but it was not what we had come to see. The attitude of the Apostles however darkly traced, could not be mistaken for the postures of gentlemen when duck-shooting. St George was clearly occupied in killing a dragon and not a duck. St Michael's wings might seem to be sticking out of him in an arbitrary and ornamental fashion; but they did not recall the wings of a duck, or even what the Psalmist coveted as the wings of a dove. Besides, St Michael is more associated with a goose. Nobody would venture to call St Etheldreda a duck. We concluded that the rumour about pictures of duck-hunting in the Fens must have been a rumour without foundation. In short, the duck was only a canard.

Just as we were trailing out of the church in disappointment and even despair, so far as our duck-hunting expedition was concerned, my friend gave a cry; and I turned in the very porch to look back at him. He was bending over the figure representing St Paul, which wore a long inner garment elaborately embroidered with gold; we had both passed it over as a pattern merely adding richness to the general design. But on looking closer, I found that the Apostle of the Gentiles was all over ducks. He was, so to speak, crawling with ducks, with ducks and dogs pursuing them in one pantomimic dance all over the gilded pattern. It was here that the artist had crowded all his comic sketches of the sports of his native fens. It was a very good pattern, but it was made of quite grotesque pictures. It might have been the design for the fancy waistcoat of a fat gentleman in one of the Dickens novels. The first of all the Dickens novels, by the way, was originally written to illustrate some grotesque sketches of sport. It is not too much to say that, in the original scheme of the publishers, Mr Pickwick merely existed for the sake of Mr Winkle. Mr Winkle might very well have gone duck-shooting in the fens, as he went skating on the ice or riding on the famous horse that went sideways. The sporting artist employed on that occasion would doubtless have been ready to depict him surrounded by any number of ducks and dogs. But he would have been mildly surprised if he had been asked to depict them as part of the decoration of the parish church, to say nothing of the vestments of the parson. But the older artist saw nothing incongruous in depicting them thus in mazy detail between the massive book and the mighty sword, that stood for that terrible convert who was struck down upon the road to Damascus.

Now that is the answer to the question I have already asked and that is why this pointless anecdote is also a parable. People were able to shut their eyes to the big church because it was only a church, however big; and they did not think of deducing anything from it about the number of houses or the nature of households. Because the framework of so much of medieval life was a religious framework, they never even looked at the picture in the frame. They passed it over exactly as anyone looking at the painted figures of the Twelve Apostles passed over all the lively little animals of which its ornament was made up. Thus, to take only one example, popular history seldom takes account of the large numbers of medieval people more or less loosely attached to the Church without being in the full sense either priests or monks: students, members of lay orders and men who were merely clerks in the sense of pleading benefit of clergy; that is, being under the milder law of the Church rather than the harsher law of the State. All this popular life, I suspect, moved normally within more or less clerical enclosures, as the details of the decoration seemed to dance within the enclosure of the main lines of the design. In the gradual revival of the study of such a period, we have had to investigate the religious life in order to discover the secular life. We have had to search the cathedrals to find the guilds; as my friend had to scrutinise the saint in order to find the hounds and the birds. There is no way to those things except through that Gothic porch; and this was realised even by the great men like Morris and Rossetti who might well have wished, for some other reason, to come in by some other way. But none ever came in by any other way except the thieves and the robbers.

There are thousands of little things like that to be found in every corner of what is left of medieval craft and culture. I have taken this small instance because it is small, and because it is the last that has occurred to me. The study of these old things has to be intensive study; just as the cultivation of them anew would have to be an intensive cultivation.

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Travellers' Joys

Once when I was wandering about in the beautiful city of Bath, I fell into a vein of meditation not concerned with any of the antiquities of the place, as such things are counted in a guidebook. My reflections, though profound and philosophical, were not concerned with the Bath of Bath, which recalls the Roman foundation of Britain. They were not concerned with the Abbey of Bath, which recalls the Middle Ages; nor with the Pump Room or Assembly Room which recall the stately frivolity of the eighteenth century. I was not even thinking of that noble theme, the Wife of Bath, a medieval monument which seems even more gigantic than an abbey.

If anyone really wants to know why some of us have a taste for what is called `medievalism', he can find a great deal of it in that grand and grotesque personality. But the point is that the Wife of Bath was coming from Bath, and not going to Bath. When we consider what her errand was, and then what she was, we realise the wide reach and grasp of religion upon the motley mob of mankind. The Wife of Bath is a sort of caricature carved in brass; as brazen as Mrs Gamp and with as broad a grin. But who can imagine Dickens, who described so many wanderings in Kent, describing Mrs Gamp as going on a pilgrimage to the shrine of a saint? I suppose the whole stretch of history from the medieval to the modern world, might be summed up in the reversal of that journey. It is the change from the time when the Wife of Bath went to sprinkle herself with holy water at Canterbury, to the time when the Archbishop of Canterbury probably went to sprinkle himself with medicinal water at Bath. But it was not of such trifles as the towers of Canterbury or the Roman floors of Bath that I was musing mystically at the moment.

My mind was uplifted and attuned to the subject of buns. I was reflecting upon the remarkable fact that, to a great extent, it is still necessary to go to Bath for Bath buns. I have, indeed, encountered in my travels in less civilised places something apparently intended for food, to which is attached the name of the Roman city of Somerset. But, after tasting it, I have come to the conclusion that the derivation is different. These other objects, I conceive, are very legitimately called Bath buns because they are made of soap and flannel. But to a great extent, in spite of the modern network of communications and dead level of standardisation, a Bath bun still means a bun of Bath. The same is true in its degree, I believe, in the case of Chelsey buns. It may be true, for all I know, of those unique cakes of Richmond, gloriously described as Maids of Honour. It may be that, before standardisation began, there were these local luxuries in nearly every locality. Perhaps there were Pimlico Pancakes which were the rich reward of crossing the meadows to the picturesque hamlet of Pimlico. Perhaps Clapham produced a sweetmeat as well as a sect; and Mayfair was famous for toffee before it was famous for toffs. But over all districts that have been surrounded and swallowed by the big industrial cities, there runs the rule of the great commercial combinations, and all such individual things have perished.

I do not insist that nobody must be allowed to eat Brussels sprouts except in Brussels. I do not demand that everyone who likes Jerusalem artichokes should take staff and scrip and make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. I do not say that Turkish delight should delight none but Turks or travellers in Turkey. I do not even insist (though it would be a fine heroic idea, worthy of a romance of Scott or Stevenson) that no person should be permitted to taste Edinburgh Rock until he has earned it by scaling the steep and splendid facade of the Rock of Edinburgh. Some of these are merely names; and some of them do still carry with them something of the savour and the pride of nations. But in England, in those exquisitely English centres, the old provincial towns, we did manage to produce good things whose very glory was in being provincial.

It was worth a man's while to go from one town to another, and even from one county to another, to find things that he could not find at home. Thus there was a very real romance of travel, for romantic as well as for religious pilgrims. The traveller plodded along the Bath Road sustained from afar by the vista of the Bath Bun. He saw the cake peculiar to Richmond shining like a guiding star more brilliant than the Star and Garter. And though this may not seem the loftiest sort of star for a wise man to follow, yet these material luxuries had their moral significance, and stand in social criticism today as the symbols of something much deeper and wider than themselves. They illustrate something that is not only wanting in our latest social development, but something not immediately likely to be developed.

Thus travel in the true sense has become impossible in the large urban or urbanised districts. There are twenty ways of going everywhere, and there is nowhere to go. There are a hundred improved means of communication and there is nothing to communicate. A traveller in simpler times travelled with two legitimate and even estimable objects; first to see strange things in the places he went to; and second, to boast about the country he came from. Both these admirable arts are bound to suffer neglect and negation under existing conditions, when the place he finds is exactly like the place he leaves. All such places are alike, plastered with the same advertisements, blocked up with the same big shops, selling the same newspapers, attending the same schools.

There is therefore no real meaning in his travels, apart from the permanent personal interest of humanity. But the general spirit of travel, the desire to see new folk or new customs, all that has been ruined by the commercial concentration of modern times. I do not object to a reasonable number of things being scattered over the whole world, to remind the traveller of home and of the bond of mankind. I have seen The Illustrated London News for instance, in remote mud villages of Spain, or in caravanserais on the edge of the desert; and I am quite prepared to find it in the dark forests of Africa or the islands of the Southern Seas. But the Spanish villages and the Arab settlements were themselves quite different from London and the London News.

If each of our separate towns and villages were cut off by some happy catastrophe such as being snowed up or turned into an island by a flood, that town or village might begin to produce its own magazines, It might produce its own style of architecture, its own school of poets. It might produce something of its own out of the soil, instead of passing on something from somewhere else to somewhere else; as if every human town were no more than a railway junction It might be encouraged to use all the talent within its reach; instead of having that talent swamped and swept away by mere floods of fashion and rumour, from the ends of the earth. Then the true type of the traveller and the pilgrim might reappear upon the earth. Then it would really be worth while to cross the hills from one valley to another; for, entering a new valley, he would enter a new world. There would be more fun to wander over a part of England than it is today to wander over all the earth. The old fairy-tales, that told of a man coming to one kingdom where the houses were built of gold, or another where the fountains ran with wine, were but the legitimate literary exaggeration of the experience of real travellers, who found one peasantry wearing gilded headdresses or another brewing golden ale. But in our present phase travel has destroyed the traveller; and there is nowhere for the pilgrim to go save on a spiritual journey-- the only possible pilgrim's progress.

Understanding France

It is curious, but very obvious, that internationalists are never interpreters between nations. It is what their name almost implies; it is what we should logically expect them to be, or at any rate try to be. And yet they do not do it, and I rather doubt whether they really try. What happens is that the internationalist, while he is often mildly but sincerely horrified at the nationalism of his own nation, is almost always even more horrified at the nationalism of some other nation. And it so happens, as the history of humanity has in fact developed, that very often the nationalism is the nation.

Take the nearest and clearest case; the ancient but by no means primeval rivalry between England and France. In the early Middle Ages they were very nearly one nation. In the later Middle Ages, they were the first of the new and clearly distinguishable nations: on the one side by the splendid accident of Agincourt; on the other by something rather too splendid to be called an accident: St Joan. But ever since then, roughly speaking the two nations drifted further and further apart. And for anybody who is content with nations as nations, or with a very crude and clean-cut sort of nationalism, that might be natural enough. But what has the internationalist been doing? What about the man who talks with particular earnestness about the need for peace among the peoples, for mutual understanding among men of every race and realm, about friendliness to foreigners or humanity to natives? Has he, for instance, ever attempted to explain France to England? The extraordinary fact is that he has never done anything of the kind. He has always been the very last to do anything of the kind.

Few ordinary Englishmen, whether Imperialist or Internationalist, have ever really grasped even what was meant by the greatness of France. But the Internationalist has grasped it much less than the Imperialist. There is much more sense of it in the poems of Mr Kipling than in the pamphlets of Mr Wells. But what is really needed is a widening of English culture, so as to understand what was really valued in French culture. Passing over all that earlier French history, in which the King of Paris had not yet fully become the King of France, we may note even in passing that the Crusades were a French affair; and we only fail to realise the fact because at that time our own monarchy and nobility were as French as the French. St Louis did not succeed in his Crusade; not even with the abortive success of Coeur de Lion. But St Louis does explain the Crusades, while Coeur de Lion rather confuses them. The main modern matter of which I speak, however, begins with the Renaissance and all that gigantic tradition that springs from Rabelais. Does it strike you that the worthy Nonconformist minister, who preaches against militarism and in favour of international pacifism, would be the very best man in the world to translate Rabelais?

Then follows what the French call with a pride that is perfectly logical in a Frenchman but has been allowed to remain almost unintelligible to an Englishman, the Great Century. Nobody knows anything about France, or even about Europe, who does not know that the Great Century was great. Our historians have seen nothing but bombast in the instinct or imagination which compared Louis the Fourteenth to the Sun. But there is no historical truth without historical imagination. And it is much nearer the truth to compare him to a sun-god than to compare him to a pompous dancing-master, in the manner of the narrow national bigotry of Macaulay. Some English literary men have begun to do justice to the great age of Racine and Pascal and the fullness of the Golden Age of classicism. Mr Sacheverell Sitwell, in an excellent study of the Baroque, has a truly imaginative and therefore understanding description of one of those great pageants in which royalty was such a reality that it could carry any load of artifice; and in which it seemed something quite spiritual and spontaneous, like a song, that the King should not only go clad in gold, but clothed with the sun. Mr Maurice Baring has repeatedly insisted with great force and humour, that the notion that Racine is merely stilted and dull is worth as much as the impression of a Breton fisherman that Milton is only stilted and dull: it arises from the rather simple cause of incapacity to read a foreign language.

There have been some good English translations of good French books on the tremendous and even tragic religious quarrel, the Jansenists and the Jesuits and the rest; a huge hinge or turning point in the whole history of Christianity. There have even been a few English critics capable of reading and reviewing the English translations. But the Rev. Timothy Tooting, who is a pacifist because he disapproves of all fights except bun-fights, who serves out cocoa but has never touched `alcohol', and who holds meetings to promote the peace of the world--do you suppose that he has contributed very much to the understanding of the procession of the great Kings and the pride in the glory of Gaul? But until we understand that pride we shall never understand the point of view of a Frenchman. Again, the odd thing is that the Rev. Timothy Tooting was equally shocked at the great Kings and at the great rebellion against the great Kings. His remarks about the French Revolution and especially about Napoleon are just as silly and sniffy as his remarks about the French Monarchy, and especially about Louis the Fourteenth. And the remarks made about Napoleon by Mr Wells, who has some prejudices in common with Mr Tooting, are of the sort that might be excusable in a very stupid half-pay Tory captain who had served under Nelson, but are certainly not worthy either of Napoleon or of Mr Wells. Yet it is precisely men like Mr Wells who set out elaborately to reconcile the nations; to bring about what they call a better understanding between them. I suggest that he begin by reconciling England and France, and achieving a better understanding, or any sort of understanding, of France.

It has often been said that signs and portents will accompany the advent of the Millennium, or the coming of the heavenly kingdom upon earth. Oliver Wendell Holmes demanded that certain miracles should precede that apocalypse; as that raspberries and strawberries should grow bigger downwards through the box; or that lawyers should take what they would give and doctors give what they would take. I would respectfully suggest that before peace, perfect peace, reigns in the United States of Europe, we shall probably have seen some strange things. We shall see that particular sort of pacifist in our country no longer content with being at peace with the same particular sort of pacifist in every other country. We shall see him do what is really needed to avert war: attempt to understand the patriots of the other country. We shall see Earl Russell explaining the ideals of Fascism as clearly and fairly and sympathetically as he would explain the ideals of Socialism. We shall see Mr H. G. Wells fighting o'er again the hundred battles of Napoleon, shouting the war-songs of the Revolutionary War, and beginning to realise how much of the modern world which he admires, and the European unity he values, are due to those who carried the Code Napoleon to the palaces of Vienna or Madrid. We shall see the Rev. Tooting himself, of whose soul no Christian must despair, sitting down to write some rousing and romantic record of the charging chivalry of Poland. It is barely possible that all this, at the moment, may appear slightly improbable. But it is the only way in which we shall ever have international peace, and the only way in which these men can work for international peace. What they are doing at present is to consolidate all the people of one particular philosophy against all the people of the opposite philosophy. They are drawing them up like two long lines of battle. It may be defensible to prepare for war; anyhow, the peacemakers of this school are preparing for it very thoroughly.

Salute to New York

I said to somebody, as I was leaving New York and looking back at its aerial towers, that it was very lovely. I found I had only conveyed the impression that it was a very lovely place to leave. These double meanings or misunderstandings are common in such cases, and the stranger in America often feels that, while his blame sounds like insolence, his praise sounds like insincerity; or at least like irony. I remembered that I had myself been criticised, first for whitewashing Main Street in defiance of the Menckenites, and afterwards for saying that American villages were unsightly as compared with English villages. The general tendency is, however, to overrate the subtlety of the wicked foreigner. I said the skyline of New York was beautiful, because it is; and I said the ruck of the villages are ugly, because they are. The whole labyrinthine plot of perfidious Albion being thus laid bare, it occurred to me that there really is a parallel between the case of the city and of the villages; and that it offered a good opportunity of explaining to some of the more quarrelsome persons something which they did not seem to know; I mean what the quarrel was all about.

The queer thing about New York is that it goes on being new. It is the only case in which the name has not come to mean the very opposite of what it says. Nova Scotia does not sound particularly novel or particularly Scottish. New Orleans sounds older than Old Orleans. And if you meet anywhere a progressive prophet announcing the New Religion or the New Theology, you may be sure that they are about as recent and revolutionary as the New Forest. But New York is unique. It is truly to be called a vision; because a vision means something that is hardly ever visible. It is the dwelling place of a Spirit; which men may like or dislike in all kinds of ways, but which does express itself in a particular art; in an architecture that is akin to aviation. It is built out of winged stones; its architecture is like the law of gravity turned upside down. And those starry heights, those palaces riding the air like rainbows, those pale opalescent spears piercing the sky, lighter than the very light of heaven, have a meaning and are a sign. They do stand for something which the stranger, if he is wise, will recognise; however many things he may find alien to his own civilisation, however many he may think evil for any civilisation. It is a spirit not easy to name without cant, but much more real than all the cant with which it is covered... Lift up your heads, O ye gates... Lift up your hearts, O ye people.... It is a sursum corda in the national soul that is not merely false or affected.

So that even all the old rant about the Starry Flag or the Bird of Freedom was right in its instinct for images exalted and far up in air; and a man in a sort of dream, grown dizzy with that dance of towers, may somewhere against the blinding sun, see suddenly the unblinded eagle.

Now suppose somebody said to me that New York was nothing but muck and money; that it might as well be carted away; that industrial capitalism is the same everywhere, I should tell him he was wrong. Industrialism began in England; but it never ended in anything like New York. The pilgrim approaching Pudsey does not behold palaces like rainbows. The traveller leaving Wigan does not look back on opalescent loveliness. The clerk in a poor suburb of Sheffield is not necessarily dizzy with stars and starry towers. This case is unique; it is a special spiritual expression; it probably could not be replaced. That is what I should say to them about New York. And that is what I said, to the protectors of rural England, about the English village.

The point was that a thing like English country life does not spring up merely out of living in the country. It does not spring up in America, or for that matter in Asia or Africa or a great part of Europe. It is the perfect artistic expression of something English, just as the best American architecture is the expression of something American. But you will not find the first in anything called a village or the second in anything called a city. And if you let it perish, you are like men who should look on at the ruin of the last Greek god or the last Christian cathedral.

The British Beech

I am happy to say that I live in Beaconsfield; I mean, of course, that I live in Bekonsfield. I believe that there are some people who live in Beaconsfield, but I do not know where it is, and I cannot imagine why anybody should live there. By the sound of it, I should suppose that it is in some Colony, and was probably named after Disraeli who ought to have called himself Earl of Hughenden if he had followed out his own rustic, rugged and feudal dreams and not been led astray by the temptation to pick up the abandoned coronet of Burke. Now about the origin of the name of this town there is some dispute; but about the pronunciation of the name, there is no dispute whatever. There is only knowledge as possessed by those who know; and the often invincible and therefore innocent ignorance of the world outside. I need hardly say that those who know are those who are now commonly called ignorant and uneducated people. When you have heard the name of your own town for twenty years on the tongues of hedgers, ditchers, rat-catchers, gamekeepers, poachers and village idiots, then you know absolutely for certain that it is the correct pronunciation. When the intellectual aristocracy comes down to such a place and pronounces it as it is spelt, you know for a simple fact that they are wrong. If you have any real education, you know that spelling was never in the past a great part of education; that it is now treated by these people as the whole of education; simply because it is the whole of their education; or the only education they have. It never occurs to them that, while Shakespeare would write his own name in two or three totally different but equally illegible scrawls, he trusted the whole great load of his glory to the sound of words, to be spoken by living men. In dealing therefore with a word like `Beaconsfield', they do not know how to choose between the men who can speak and the men who can only spell. It was always pronounced right. Only it is still spelt wrong.

Subject to this philological parenthesis, it is true that some at least maintain that the name is derived from an old word for a beech tree. Certainly there could be no more appropriate name and no more symbolic and inspiring thing. For the beech tree has a special representative quality in all this rolling wooded landscape, which makes up the central and southern parts of Buckinghamshire; and through the county a real relation to the country. A Sussex man, himself boiling over with enthusiasm for Sussex, once said to me of the beech-woods about my Beaconsfield home, `This is really the most English part of England; I confess that compared with this, Sussex is a thing quite separate and apart.'

We have all heard about the British oak; and I am traditional enough not to quarrel with a tradition full of many heroic memories; of Nelson dying under the low oaken beams, or Collingwood scattering the acorns that they might grow into battleships. A modern naval enthusiast, by the way, would find it difficult to scatter screws and bolts in the hope that they would turn themselves into the war-machines of today. There is something in that parable of the organic and mechanic growth. But detaching my mind as much as possible, I am forced to feel that the oak has qualities less intimately national. The oak, dedicated to Jupiter of the Romans, has the jagged angular branches that are like the bolts of Jove. Its hard texture and rectangular corners belong almost to the logic of the Latins. If I were choosing an entirely English emblem, I should choose the beech-tree. It is equally strong and expressive of strength; but the smoothness is also expressive of a certain slowness that is akin to mercy and mildness. Its curves are of the gradual sort found in everything in these parts; in the slow speech of the rustics; in the gradual curves in the hills; even far away to the downs of Hampshire and Sussex, that are the only mountains of the South. They have a power like that of lazy waves that are lifted slowly; and allow villages to grow up in their hollows, only because they are too lazy to fall. There is nothing in them of the oak-blasting thunderbolts and very little of the oaks. But here especially, in this section of Bucks, the beeches surround and overshadow us and cover our home; so that it is no accident that has called this particular stretch of England the Home Counties.

Perhaps there is something profane and unhistorical in thus suggesting the belated substitution of the British Beech for the British Oak. And yet there is an important truth in this, if used as a literary symbol; even if we would never wish it to be actually used as a pictorial emblem. For much of the English error about England, which has misled us ever since our real origins were shut off by the obscurantism of the Reformation, is expressed in the undue emphasis on the oak and the neglect of the nobler qualities of the beech. The tendency to turn John Bull into a braggart, and from that into a bully, was only too readily represented by giving him a great oaken cudgel, supposed to be as invincible as the club of Hercules. It left out all the better elements in the native temperament; the humour, the good humour and especially the good nature. These would have been much better expressed in the smoothness that can co-exist with the strength of the beech. Moreover, noble as was the Nelson legend and all the earlier part of our maritime romance, the consideration of oaks only with reference to ships did turn English thoughts too exclusively outwards to the ends of the earth, and too little inwards to England. Thus Britannia became merely a statue to be seen from afar, rather than a real woman and mother, to be made happy in her own home. Hence the dangerous neglect of agriculture and internal economic conditions from which we are already suffering. The whole thing was altogether too emblematic. The British Oak was a thing like the British Lion; but lions are really rather rare in our Buckinghamshire lanes. On the other hand, the British Beech could not suggest anything except the British Pig. The swine feed on the beech-mast; and the pig is more realistic, even if he is growing almost equally rare. The return to a real England, with real pigs for real Englishmen, would be a return to the beech-woods; which still make this town like a home.

At least, they did until recently. I shall probably be told tomorrow that several beech-forests have been removed to enable a motorist temporarily deaf and blind to go from Birmingham to Brighton.

Public Monuments

I happened to have occasion recently to behold again the celebrated monument of King Victor Emmanuel in Rome, and it turned my thoughts backwards to monuments in general, and to the controversies about our own Cenotaph. They are, as I shall suggest in a moment, rather controversies about the place, the scale, and the formal use of the Cenotaph than controversies about the Cenotaph. It might be argued that the thing itself fulfils it own laws-- and limitations. It may be unfair to complain that it is thin, when it is inherent in its intentional proportions to be thin. It may be unjust to object that it is naked and negative, when it was obviously meant to be naked and negative; it may be illogical to protest that it contains no symbol of any special spiritual significance, when it was obviously most carefully designed to contain nothing of the sort. But touching the emplacement and employment of the memorial, there is a great deal more to be said.

Nobody can complain that the Victor Emmanuel monument is too thin. Its thickness has the effect of a huge fortified wall which it is difficult to get round and unthinkable to get over. What is worse, this new Citadel actually bars the way to the old and real Citadel. The original rock of Rome, the high place from which the eagles flew, is practically overshadowed by this new wall of white marble. Victor Emmanuel of Savoy appears in the perspective of topography, if not precisely of history, as a considerably more important person than Julius Caesar. The road to the temple of Capitoline Jove, up which Caesar went with his roaring Triumphs, the place of the Capitol, where he met the end of the greatest human glory, seems no longer to dominate Rome, as I believe it did before the excited Liberals of the nineteenth century planned a mountain of marble that seemed ambitious to rise higher than the Seven Hills. And somehow, with all respect and sympathy, the purpose and the ambition seem hardly to fit. A particular Piedmontese prince, not without many virtues, and certainly not without most distressing difficulties, considerable as were, doubtless, his services to United Italy, does not now, in fact, bulk quite so big in history as Julius Caesar or even many a great Latin leader like Scipio or Marius. Its proportions in relation to the Capitol and the streets of Rome may yet need some explaining. It will probably be very difficult to convince our immediate posterity that it is not a monument to Mussolini.

Those whom in England we call Victorians, or, more properly, the men of the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century, are more completely misunderstood by most modern writers than if they were Ancient Britons. They are now always represented as stodgy and slow and paralysed by mere caution. The fact is that in most ways they were far too impetuous and enthusiastic. As romantic love was almost their religion, so in other ways they worshipped things, worthy indeed, but without enough discrimination between the sort of love that is fleeting and the sort of love that is lasting. They fell in love with public heroes, instead of merely following them. It is true that some return of this passion has appeared in some parts of Europe which were always specially prone to it, but I doubt whether even now the idolatries are so great as the noble idolatries of the English Victorians, and certainly not so great in England. Even in England we hear much of new movements and a need for leadership. But, with the greatest possible respect to all concerned, I doubt whether any mob actually makes a god out of Sir Oswald Mosley, as the middle-class Victorian mobs made a huge heroic legend out of Garibaldi or General Gordon. Remember that Victorianism was much more affected by its romantic side than by the later claims made on its scientific side. It was much more really moved by Carlyle than by Mill, let alone Herbert Spencer. And it did largely accept, among the apparent decay of many forms of religion, the form of religion which Carlyle invented and called 'Hero-Worship'. And it acted on this religion, which it did not always do in relation to the other religions. The trouble is that it acted much too swiftly and ardently. It acted with a blind impetuosity which was the very reverse of stodgy. The evidence for it can be seen in many eyesores that we call public monuments. It is true that in England this is as far as their rage and madness went. In Europe as a whole, a great part of the nineteenth century might be called, and was called, the age of revolutions. It is true that the Victorians in England prided themselves on not being destructive, but only constructive. But those who have gazed on certain sculptured memorials, dedicated to eternal fame, have sometimes been tempted to think that construction can be more devastating than destruction.

By the way, may I be here excused if I enter once more a protest against that most meaningless distinction? If a man cuts down a tree and makes a mast, is he destructive or constructive? The emotional effect depends entirely on whether you happen to want a woodland shade or a sea-voyage. Except some of the Manichee heretics who attacked the Early Church, an Albigensian or two, and perhaps some of the old Russian Nihilists, I know of no political group which admits that it is destroying for the sake of destroying. And all political groups, if they are doing anything (a large assumption), are constructing by means of destroying. Compare this journalese jargon with the shrewd proverbs of popular life. It must have been a French peasant, I think, who invented the much wiser phrase: `You can't make omelettes without breaking eggs.'

Victor Emmanuel's monument has one great merit not easily to be found in London. It may seem to some merely to block the traffic, but it can seem to others to be really the goal of the traveller. The very fact that it fills the whole view, like a back-scene, does enable it to play the part of a great temple or theatre to which processions can march and seem to find their final goal. In other words, it is a shrine. It is a place to receive pilgrimages, if only patriotic pilgrimages. And when I saw an army of Italian Scouts grounding their poles or lowering their flags, like pilgrims laying down their staves, I thought they did really convey, by that halt and that salute, some sense of having come to the heart of their country.

Now, what is primarily the matter with the Cenotaph in London is simply what the Londoners did with it. They did not put it on a height or in an enclosure or with a background of finality, where it could possibly look like a national shrine to be the goal of pilgrimages. They put it down at random in the middle of the road, a road running both ways; and turned it into a mere stage in the traffic, one of many other objects, like a lamp-post. In fact, the Cenotaph looks like an unfortunate pedestrian who has started from one side of the street and is very doubtful of his chances of reaching the other. Under these disadvantages, he has even something a little weak-minded about his hesitation; as if, by some inversion of Einstein, the Hollow Tomb could be hollow outside as well as inside. But the fault is really in a lack of the sense, the true sense, of town-planning. And the moral is that we cannot make public monuments unless we recover the old imaginative instinct of public life; which did not mean sitting on committees, but marching in processions, organising into effective crowds, and learning how to salute the altar or the tomb.