 1 On Building Castles in Spain One day in the town of Perpignan I was poking about to see where I could best get something to eat. When I saw a door open into a charming garden, and in the hope of finding it to be the garden of an inn, and at any rate of seeing the garden during the process of asking whether it were an inn, I walked in. But I found everything deserted. There was a little house at the end with everything shut against the blinding sun, but the main door of it wide open. I walked in there too and heard no noise of men, and my curiosity took me up the stairs until I came out quite unexpectedly upon another little garden built on the flat roof of this dwelling, and on each shady side, and there I saw a man sitting and looking dreamily toward the mountains. He did not ask me how I came there, but I desired to tell him, for it was evidently his roof. We spoke a little together until I asked him why he watched the mountains, and why his gaze was towards Spain. Then at great length he spoke to me, but dreamily still. Long before I knew that the speech of men was misused by them, and that they lied in the hearing of the gods perpetually, in those early days through which all men had passed, during which one believes what one is told, an old and crusty woman of gray wealth to whom I was describing what I intended to do with life, which in those days seemed to me of infinite duration, said to me, you are building castles in Spain. I was too much in awe of this woman, not on account of the wealth, but on account of the crust, to go further into the matter. But it seemed to me a very foolish thing to say, for I had never been to Spain, and I had nothing wherewith to build a castle, and indeed such a project had never passed through my head. For many years I returned to this race. I heard it upon several occasions, and in those years through which a man approaches maturity, it still remains in my mind possessing a singular fascination. Though I had found long since that phrases meant at the best something different from their words, and often something exactly opposite to them, yet this phrase kept about it something mystical and sincere, and I never read of Spain, nor saw a map of Spain without thinking of the castles in that land, and wondering whether, as ancient civil had prophesied to me, I should come to build them there or no. It so happened that the feeling grew upon me until in my thirtieth year I determined to travel in that country, and I did so arriving at one of the Spanish ports by sea, and the first thing I did when I landed was to ask in my own tongue whether there were any castles in the neighborhood, and especially whether any of them were at that moment in process of being built. During which the gentleman whom I had addressed bade me stay a moment where I was, upon the quay, and returned with a policeman who wore a helmet in the English manner, but whose face betrayed him. This official beckoned me to follow him. I was closely interrogated by a member of the superior or educated classes, who was also a magistrate, and after some deliberation as to whether I should not be in prison, I was escorted to the frontier between two armed men. Nor in the course of my journey, which was hot and uncomfortable, did I see any one building castles. So I returned as wise as I had come. But I am glad to say, not any of the poorer for the Spanish state had taken charge of me, and it paid for all that part of my journey which had taken place upon Spanish soil. Coming therefore into the Rusulon by way of the pass in the mountains, I went very sadly but a free man in by the gypsy gate at Perpignan, and ate by myself at the Red Lion. Then, saying nothing to any one, I went over the mountains in another manner, with nothing to carry but a sack, and determined to trust only to a considerable sum of money which I carried in my pocket. So I came down into Aragon, and when I got there I found it very unsuitable for the building of castles. For you must know that Aragon is almost completely composed of mud, so that any very large building, at least in the northern part, would very probably sink. Moreover, those rare rocks on which anything enduring can be found are already occupied in that country by the priests, who have for ages forbidden the building of castles in any form, and that under the most dreadful penalties. But I found a man in Hussika who told me that, though he himself had never seen such a thing, I would no doubt find it in Saragosa, which was a capital city of enormous dimensions, and one that contained every human thing. So then I went on down into the valley of the River Galego, which was full of mud, as is everything in that district, and at last I saw before me the towers and the spires of Saragosa. But before I went into the town I thought I would first ask for information, and save myself the trouble of further walking. There was sitting with his back against a very dirty and ancient wall, a man much dirtier than a wall and almost as old. Brown to his head was a handkerchief, and in his eyes was the stern pride of Aragon, which, though it be made out of mud, is full of courage, and breeds men who will kill you for nothing. Remembering this, and knowing that in their contempt for wealth the Aragon east will often unite good blood with poverty, I took off my hat and swept it about, and asked him whether his family motto were not, Prince Didangi, to which he replied, only by shaking his head in a decisive way. I then asked him whether I should find them building a castle in Saragosa, to which he said very sharply, No, for the Aragon east are as terse as they are courageous. Then I said to him, Days night, for in this manner does one take leave in Aragon, and he replied, Go with God, which is their common salutations, even to dons. When I had gone a little way down to the bridge, which here crosses the muddy Evo, whether there is water in the river or not, I saw a man riding on a mule who seemed to me more promising, for he was singing a song in quarter notes, which is the Spanish way. I asked him whether they were building castles in Saragosa, to which he laughed heartily, and said, No, believe me, if we have any, which I doubt, it is more in our line to let them fall down than to build them. And with these words he spoke affectionately to his mule and went his way, and I, knowing I should get no luck after such an omen, turned back and took the train into my own country. Did you not then said I ever see a building or a castle in Spain? Yes, he said very sadly, it was in this way. There are parts of Spain which are included by mistake upon our side of the mountains, so that they have French waters and forests, and one can live decently there. And going into one of these valleys upon business one day, I saw before me a very hideous thing, but there was no mistaking it. It was a castle. It was built, or rather building, a very glaring white stone. It had four turrets with very staring red tiles, half a hundred false gothic windows, and at least twenty gargoyles, each one of which exactly resembled its neighbor, and all of which had been done by contract in Toulouse. Two statues of an offensive kind guarded the entrance to the place, and the main door of it was one of those that turned round like a turnstile, so as to keep out the air. And in front of this thing was a lawn with a net. There were two trees just planted and looking as though they would rather die than live, and a little further off the work when we're digging for a fountain. It was a very saddening sight. I went up to the foreman who by his dress seemed to be a countryman of my own, and I said, This is a castle that you are building, is it not? He stared at me and said yes, wondering why I had asked, and I think I went on. That I am in Spain, am I not? Yes, said he, wondering still more. The frontier lies there, and he pointed to a little stream in the grounds. I thought as much, I said, sighing profoundly. At last I have come upon a man building a castle in Spain. Since then I have seen no other such sight, nor do I wish to see one. And ever since then I have made in my business, when I had need to build castles in Spain, the appetite for which comes upon me at least twice a week, to come up here under this roof and survey the Ruslan, the Canigo, and the Mediterranean Sea, and to build castles in my head. For I have discovered realities to be appalling. With these words he begged me to leave him at the end of Section 1. Section 2. On Anything This is a LibraBox recording. All LibraBox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. On Anything by Hilaer Bellach. Section 2. On Clay Let us be Antion. Let us touch earth. Let us look at the pit, out of which we were digged. Let there be no false shame. Let us talk of clay, of all the things in which the modern world has gone wrong, there is nothing in which it has gone wrong more than in the point of clay. Our fathers before us, who were great men and wise, they knew what the thing was. When they had robbed a monastery, or killed a king, or in some other way acquired an estate in land, what did they? They said to the steward, or to the fathers of the village, Is there no clay about? And when they heard there was, there they did found their house. And in this way it has come about that all great Englishmen, or very nearly all great Englishmen, have been born and brought up on clay. That noble and regal city, the city of London, the second city of the west, the city which was founded by Brutus himself, the city which is directly descended from ancient Ilya, and bears its glories, London, I say, could not be built save upon clay. For though at first in their folly the builders of London put up their wettled wettled huts on gravel, yet when the spirit took them that they would grow, and they determined to make a town of it, on to the clay they went. Then again the clay bred the wheat that used to grow in England. And it grew, the barley also. And a man who was made of clay, lived on the clay, drank out of the burnt clay, and ate the fruit of the clay. Nor is this all the clay has done for us. And what have we done for clay? For when I speak of drinking out of the burnt clay it recalls to be another function of this admirable, ungotten mineral. At least it is for the great part ungotten. But for clay where should we be for pipkins, panikins, porcelain of all kinds? But for clay what should we do for the ola, or for the cream jug, and for those large flat basins in which people pour milk that the cream may rise on top of it? At least the wise people who go by the old fashions and will not use a separator. For if you know anything of the matter you will know that no pig will thrive upon skim milk unless the cream has risen from it in the old manner. And there I make an end to this digression. You may think I've exhausted the matter of clay, but you are wrong. Clay has a further quality. It is a mystery. Anyone can see how granite came about. And as for chalk it was made by a vast number of little fishes. Sand is the thing a tomfool can understand. Limestone is self imminent. And I never knew anyone yet who was puzzled by alluvial soil. But clay is a harder enough to crack. How was it made? Those who were there when the foundations of the earth were laid and who pretend that they would own everything, those whose god is matter and whose infallible authority is printer's ink, boast like Lucifer, their father, and will explain everything to you on their eight fingers and two thumbs. But they confess that they cannot explain clay. It is all very well to say that clay is full of alumina, that it is the breaking up of granite rocks. But no one can tell you how all this came about, nor why it is so pasty. It is not known, says my encyclopedia, why certain specimens of granite are rapidly corroded and crumbled down, while others have resisted for ages the same causes of decay. No, no, by heaven it is not known. And it is a great day in modern times when one can get one of the scientists to admit that he is not possessed of universal knowledge. No man living knows how clay came to be. I repeat, it is a mystery and it is crammed with the virtue of all mysterious things. And should it not be mysterious, seeing what are his powers? For I remember that all this does but touch upon the edge and fringe of the greatness of clay. Records were for skeptin' clay, and but for clay would never have survived. They were scratched on clay tablets and burnt, and they have come down to our own time. Bricks have to be made from clay, and with bricks did men first learn to build small and reasonable houses. For before they thought of bricks, the rich man could live in stone, but the poor man had to do as best he could in wood and wattles. But the moment they thought of clay and of making bricks, reasonable houses for the middle class appeared, and with the middle class there came also public opinion, common sense, good manners, verse, sculpture, and the art of living. You may very reasonably prove, and to the satisfaction of most men, that without clay there could be no middle class, nor does this great service which the clay has done us by any means exhaust the debt we owe to clay. There would be no due on ponds, on the chalk heights of England, had not our ancestors long before history carefully puddled clay, and very probably there would be no statues in the world had it not been for clay, for it is clay that suggests the statue. So whenever you see a good statue, of which there are so many in this world, as for instance the Madonna over the South porch of Rimes, the Mary Magdalene at Brew, the statue of Our Lady of Paris in Notre Dame, the Venus of Milo, which is by no means the first cometer among statues, the Headless Victory with Wings, which is a first-rate statue and looks as if it was going to fly down the steps of the Louvre, the statue of the archer in that same gallery, the statue of St. John the Baptist in South Kensington, which is a copy of the one in Luxembourg, or indeed of any other statue. I say when you see a statue that is good and pleases you, remember clay, but for clay that statue could never have been. Do you think that with this we have come to the end of what clay has done? Why we have not, so to speak, begun the first page of the volume. But for the clay there would be no smoking, clay made pipes, and but for clay we should not be able to drain our fields. From clay also comes aluminum, which has some purpose or other, I forget what, and clay made this alone. For that great earth and desert which so few men know owes its very life to clay. It is the clay holding the water which has turned it into the forest. It is full of little pools and cram full of wild boars and other ingenious beasts. Roses adore the clay. They are as native to clay as salt to the sea, and there is another thing we owe to clay. For if we had no clay we should have no roses. And talking of that the oak is a clay tree. All that gnarled hard native stuff which you clap your hand on when you strike an oak beam is nourished and made strong by clay. An oak may be called the living son of the dead clay. It is a sort of clay turned vegetable, a slow, fundamental, and an enduring thing. Now by way of ending, being a modern man, you will grumble and say, yes, but it is bad to live on. You are wrong. It is the best soil of any Taliban. True, if you are a town man, you will find that your feet get wet on it. You cannot walk about after a shower as you can in London. Therefore, you prefer to be upon gravel or sand. That is because you are artificial and a snob. You were intended, my lamb, to plunge about in mud when the weather is muddy. It is an excellent discipline for the soul. And all that love of sand and gravel goes with rhododendrons, and copper beaches, and villas of red brick, and the death of the soul. You will then object that the house built upon clay goes up and down, heaving as it were with the weather. Why not? All things that live and are worthy have in themselves the principle of motion. Would you inhabit something dead? Aristotle has said it, that death, the absence of life, is essentially rigidity, the absence of motion. Give thanks, then, that your house should shift, and that the water that you must drink on clay is of a muddy kind. It is better for your health than that sparkling stuff which gives man goiter in the high hills. In a word, there is nothing human, nor anything about man, which is not the better for clay. He was made of clay. He should live on clay. His wood must be the fruit of clay, and so must his food, and so must his drink, and so must the flowers that are his ornament. And when he dies, the very best soil in which you can bury him is clay. Section 3 On No Book And its advantages as a companion to travel. I know very well that there are men going about who will pretend that when a thing is not there it may be neglected, and that existence is the only thing that counts. But these are ignorant and common men who have not read the philosophers of North Germany, and in particular the divine Hegel. For to us, who live upon the summit of human thought, it is manifest that there is no such thing as nothing, and that the absence of a thing or the non-existence of a thing is but another aspect of its presence or its existence. So Bergmann, I translate him into Latin for German is a difficult tongue, Essie Antiquam, non Essie Essie Satis Constant. So also Biggs, his greatest living pupil at Oxford, the moment we grant potentiality to entity, hold. What I am driving at good people is that a man who takes no book upon a holiday forms very worthily one of the series of men who do, and I will confess that this no book is the book I invariably take with me in every distant journey, which those who meet me upon them may think holidays, but which I myself have always considered to be occupation and life. It's many advantages. Up in Biggory, branching northward from the main Roman road across the Pyrenees, runs a torrent which falls in perhaps a thousand falls from the height and the mountains, and whose valley forms a very difficult approach to Spain. Now if a man be cut off by this torrent, rising after fresh rain and threatening his life, and if he attempts to afford it, what book do you think would survive? So the Pina Blanca is not a rock for mountaineers, but for true traveling men. Your mountaineer, your alpine club mountaineer, travels with a bath, a tent, and in general a baggage train. He can carry books if he likes. He climbs with a weight on his back or compels a servant to do so. But no man can get down the Pina Blanca, or up it on the steep side with a little end of scot, or a London directory on his back. There are places on Pina Blanca where everything you brought with you, including your boots, you wish were away. And these places are places where the body is in the shape of an X. The right foot, the left foot, the right hand and the left hand, each trying to persuade itself that it has a hold, and a coordinating spirit within, also asserting by sheer faith, that the surface of the rock does not lean outwards. What would a man do with a book in such a place as this? I mean with the book in its aspect of existence. No book is worth more than a whole library, to a man so placed and so thinking. Consider the seed. There is only room to cook, forward, on condition the hatches up, after the other men are playing cards. Then again it is either calm or rough. If it is calm, the boat sways intolerably, and everything reminds you of oil. What book can suit that mood? And when contrary wise the boat is taking it green every few seconds, and your eyes are bleared trying to see through the spin drift and the snow, what would you do with a book? Is there any book in the world that would help you to drive her through? Are there oil skins for books? The horse also, for whether a rich man has led you on, or whether it is your own, or whether it is one you have hired, and this sort go lame, the horse enters into every bit of travel. Who will read a book where a horse is concerned? Indeed, I have often considered that men who will learn everything from books can go into court, or throw the family fortune into chanceery on the strength of the pocket lawyer. All men who will build a boat after instructions printed upon paper, and then wonder where they have failed, all men who consider life from printed things, would be better for receiving, closely reading, annotating, and thoroughly mastering a volume called The Horse and How to Ride Him. It is a large flat book with diagrams, something like an atlas in shape and weight. This, I say, when they have mastered, let them take under the right arm, holding it as a bird would hold a thing under its wing, and so a cooter'd let them climb upon a mustang, and digging those enormous Mexican spurs, which are the glory of the West, deep and hard into the brute's hide, they will discover, as in a lightning flash of revelation, the value of books in the large concerns of life. No book is the book for all the planes, between the San Greedy Cristo and the Sierras. The same is true of the desert, though why, I cannot tell, unless it be that by day it is too hot, and by night there is nothing to read by. The soldiers, real soldiers, I mean, carry notebooks until they have reached the grade of general officer. And what books do you think were regretfully laid down when the Brunswick went into action, on the 1st of June, 1794? I could indeed consider no act of occupation for a man, in which no book is not a true companion, and that book shall be my companion in future, as it has been in the past, all over the world. The end of Section 3. Section 4. On Anything This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. On Anything by Hilaire Baylock. Section 4. On Irony Irony is a form of jest in which we ridicule a second person in the presence of a third. It is most complete when the second person is most ignorant of our intention, the third person most alive to it. Irony exists and is full even when the second person, thus attacked, is alone and suffering the attack, and the irony exists and is full when the third person is restricted to our own expectant selves, or even to God, who made us, and in whom is mirrored, the universal truth of things. Irony enjoys an exuberant life, whether the second person so attacked is universal, and the third as restricted as can be, or whether the second person so attacked is particular and singular, and the third person, the onlooker, and the audience, comprehends the whole world. It is the intention of Irony that it should do good because it is of the nature of Irony that it should avenge the truth. I say avenge because Irony would not be Irony, were it not destined to inflict a fatal or at least a grievous wound. There is not in Irony any measure of pity for the enemy, though Irony could not exist without some vast motive of pity for a victim in whose defense it was aroused. Irony is a sword, and must be used as a sword. It has this quality about it that, like some fairy word, it cannot be used with any propriety, saving God's purpose, and those who have been the most expert swordsmen, when they take a wrong reward for their service, or use that weapon for an unworthy end, find it fail in their hands. Nay, like any fairy sword, enhance that use it unworthily, it will disappear, and the history of letters is full of men who tempted by this or that, by money, or by ease, or by random friendship, or by some appetite lower than the hunger and thirst after justice, have found their old strong Irony grow limb, and fruitless, after they had sold their souls. Irony, therefore, is unknown in those societies where the love of ease dominates all men. It is most powerful in those societies which are by their temper military. You will find Irony treated angrily as though it were an acid or a poison, where men love ease, and you will find it merely ignored when men have wholly lost the sense of justice. In such societies it retires from the realm of letters to that more powerful sphere, in which divine vengeance and divine necessity have their action over things. And many such a society no longer capable of producing or of appreciating Irony, when it proceeds from the mouth or the pen of a man, learn it most dreadfully, in the catastrophes of war. To the young, the pure, and the ingenuous, Irony must always appear to have in it a quality of something evil, and so it has, for, as I have said, it is a sword to wound. It is so directly the product or reflex of evil, that, though it can never be used, nay, hardly even exist, save in the chastisement of evil, yet the Irony always carries with it some reflections of the bad spirit against which it was directed. How false it is to say that vengeance and the hatred of the evil men are in themselves evil, all human history can prove. Nay, but for Irony in the last times of a decline, no breath of health would remain demand. Nevertheless, as it is called into being by evil things, it works in an evil like. It suggests most powerfully the evil against which it is directed, and those innocent of evil shun so terrible an instrument. Alone of the powers of expression possessed by the human spirit, wherewith to defend right against wrong, Irony is invulnerable, and alone of those powers it can always strike. Nor is anything invulnerable against it, save that death of the intelligence which comes so shortly before the death of the society suffering it, that there is no need in the interval to attack the evil of that society or attempt to remedy it. For when stupidity comes upon a state, all is over. A happy world, such as the world of children or any society of men who have still preserved the general health of the soul, such a society as may be found in many mountain valleys, needs none of this salt for the curing and the preservation of morals. But even where men have so protected primal virtue, old men, old proverbs, dim records of past misfortunes leave some savor of Irony in the traditions of the tribe. And Irony is proved native to the scheme of things, and not of its own self, unnatural or rebellious, by the manner in which the mere course of human happenings is perpetually filled with it. A dreadful Irony is present when a man, having heard of the death of a friend, receives later his living letter posted far off before that death. There is Irony when every defense having been made against some natural accident, that accident yet enters by another gate unsuspected to man. There is an Irony in every unfulfilled prophecy and in every lengthy and worthless calculation. No man having purchased an honor defends unpurchased honor without the spirit of Irony surrounding all his words. No man praises courage being himself but a rhetorician, or praises justice being himself a lawyer or a magistrate, without some savor of Irony in the air of his audience. And it may be presumed without too much fantasy, that spirits, equal and undisturbed and of a high intelligence, can see in every action of human life save the most holy, and Irony as strong as that which inhabits the tragedies of the great poets. There is a last use for Irony, or rather a last aspect of it which this general irony of nature and of nature's God suggests. I mean that Irony which can only appear in the letters of a country, when corruption has gone so far that the mere truth is vivid with ironic power. For there comes a time, it is brief, as must be all final moments of decay, but there comes a time in the moral disruption of a state, when the mere utterance of a plain truth, laboriously concealed by hypocrisy, denied by contemporary falsehood, and forgotten in the moral lethargy of the populace, takes upon itself an ironical quality more powerful than any elaboration of special ironies could have taken in the past. Some truth, too widely put aside and quietly thrust forward, by detail in general conversation about a powerful man, strikes in such societies exactly like the point of a spear. Blood flows and the blood is drawn by Irony. Yet here was no act nor any fabric of words. Mere testimony to the truth was enough, and this should prove that Irony is in touch with the Divine and is administered a truth. In such awful moments in the history of a state, that which makes the dreadful jest is not the jestor, but the eternal principle of truth itself. That which is jested at is the whole texture of the universal society upon which the truth falls. And for the audience, for the third person who shall see the jest at the second person's expense, there is present nothing less than the power by which truth is of such effect among men. No man possessed of Irony and using it has lived happily, nor has any man possessing it and using it died without having done great good to his fellows and secured a singular advantage to his own soul. Section 5. On anything. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. On anything, by Hilaire Bellach. Section 5. On the simplicity of words. That is simple, which, when you have long looked at it and when you have carefully considered it, you cannot justly discover to be built up of other unities. That is simple, which, when we will divide it, divides into things like itself, and which, when we divide it, divides not of its own nature, but violently and unnaturally by our volition. The acute mind will divide what is simple as freely as it will divide what is complex, but the just mind recognizes simplicity and will not attempt its division. For in all analysis, it is the business of the analyzer to get at the ultimate unities, and when he has reached the ultimate unities, it is also his business to respect them. Further division will show acuteness, but it will not show judgment. The simplest thing we know is the soul of man. For it has abouter to quality as it were crystalline and one, so that the more fundamentally it does a thing, the more that thing is one. The powers of the soul, its instruments, and therefore the parts of its machinery, are innumerable, and perhaps infinite, for we are said to be made in the image of the infinite. But the thing itself is utterly simple. Now the soul of man impresses, receives, and expresses certain things. For instance, it impresses its unity upon things outside of it. Talks of London, mankind, this landscape. It receives, and it says of a color, this is such-and-such a color of a tone, this is such-and-such a tone, of a truth hitherto unheard, this is true, this is consonant with my nature and with my making, for I was made. This has authority, for authority is authorship. The soul of man impresses, receives, and expresses, and note you, in this business, the soul of man has designed an instrument, and this instrument is the word. Those who question whether the soul of man so acts, can only question from one of two causes. Either they have not considered how we think and do, or else, like many men in our modern deal equations, they believe all knowledge to be equally futile, and they despair equally of all kinds of careful view, whether of things that can be handled or of immaterial things. The soul of man impresses, receives, and expresses, and its instrument is the word. It impresses its unity upon this mass of houses and people. Houses and people are themselves words, and it stamps that impression as a word, London. The soul of man receives, a certain physical impression, which a modern theory would have depended upon, proportionate undulation. But this, like most physical hypotheses, is not proved, stirs in the mind a sentiment of color and of a certain color, and the mind records its reception in a word, blue. The soul of man expresses. It is cognizant, and in its own manner, sure of existence, secure in existence. To express this, to put forward its certainty exteriorly out of itself, its instrument is again a word. It says, I am. Well then, the word is all-important, for without the word the soul of man would live within itself, and therefore stand imprisoned and null, a sort of death. And the word is all-important in a second way, for by the word the soul of man not only lives, but also communicates. It is by the word that soul, and soul recognize, fertilize, and enrich among themselves each, all its fellows. But there is a third character of dignity, attaching to the word, which is this. That the word reflects and carries on, inherits, shows forth in little presence, that great origin the soul of man, whence it proceeded. And here it is that I come to the kernel of my subject. For it is my business to argue here that there is a mystical quality, that is a quality not contradictory of reason, but superior to it, inhabiting the right use of words. I would say more, I would say that upon the exactitude of that quality in use, depend the magic of poets. Very certainly men at random, any man, may experience the unexpressed emotion. But the function of the poet, in which he is a sort of splendid servant, is to bring words to his master, his fellow man, the innumerable, and to untie his tongue. Two things are most noticeable in this character of the poet. First, that he has the capacity to put these words before his fellow men for their use, and of the right sort, and in the right order. And secondly, that neither does he know how he does it, nor can mortal man in any place, or under any influence, explain how it is done. Consider these three lines, a Greek phrase. Let us suppose this translated by some man who would put an English word for nearly every Greek word, not considering that such mere transformation was by no means a resurrection of the dead. It is from the Iliad where the body of Sarpadan is ordered by a god to be taken to Lycea, to which place he belonged. This god orders the body of Sarpadan, fallen in battle, to be taken to his native place, and this is how the poet speaks of his transference from the place where he died, to his own land, if you put word for word. He gave him to be born at once by swift companions, the twins sleep and death, who swiftly laid him in the rich land of Lycea, the full. Now a man carrying more for resurrection than for a mechanical transference might put it in many ways. I suggest this. And he gave Sarpadan dead to be born by swift companions, the twin god sleep and death, who bore him to his own land of Lycea, a pleasant land. I care not how it is translated, for whoever translates it, unless he is inspired, that is ordered from outside mankind by a spirit, will translate it wrong. But the nearer we get to the violent truths of those famous words, the more we see what the word is to the soul. The more we see how the simplicity of the word reflects, and to our eyes and our ears, in some way enhances the simplicity of the soul. These toppling things which a man can neither escape nor avoid, reside, it would seem, from such a passage, not only in the inmost soul, but also in the words. These words once written, the soul that put them forth, has done its work for ever. Yet no man can say that common counters have been used, that a mere currency of expression has here done its work. What could be more worn? What, for all time, more common than these considerations? A dead man, companions, home, death, sleep, and a fertile valley. But in some way it is possible to make of these things what was there made, when the man who so wrote them, wrote them. And there is no one who will not feel that a son of the gods, of the high gods, was taken by lesser but divine servants, death, sleep, who brought him back dead to where his mother had borne him, the land of Lycea, a pleasant land, and he was so born out of battle, and he rested when the fight was done. Now how is that purpose of words achieved? No man knows, no man can explain. It is the power of the word, it is the magic power of the word. There are some poor fools who try to analyze the connotation of the word. They will show how such and such a word involving, in such and such a civilization, such memories, and such associations plays a trick with the mind and deceives it. They will show how Elizabethan English stirs us by modern experiences, which the words used by the Elizabethans recall. But the whole of their philosophies upset at once by the consideration of such a passage as this, which I have quoted, for here are only the simplest of things, as simple I say as the human soul and at once overwhelming. There is more There is more to be said than the mere praise of so amazing a success. The right choice of words in this example, or to speak more accurately, the right acceptance of them, for poets to not choose, does much more than merely say that thing which the word should say. It does much more than only tell what the singer was inspired to tell. It expands and embraces and conceives. And out of the right acceptance of words, there grows a sacred and a further explanation of their meaning. They illumine not only what we are, but what we might be, and what we will be. And above all they raise echoes. They raise echoes from beyond the world. Thus in that little bit of Homer quoted, do you not see what it means beyond its bare poetic statement? Not only did death and sleep take the body of Sarpadon back to Lycea, but the bodies of all of us are in such hands, for if you will think of it closely, in what way do men recover their innocence, their childhood, and the place where they were born? In what way do they pierce through time? By sleep, in dreams, and possibly in a more final manner, by death. It is a commonplace, and a true one, that the modern world is full of illusions, or rather that the things which we interest ourselves about today are nearly all of them matters upon which we have no direct knowledge. The climate of Jamaica, a foreign trial, a war between two nations, neither of which we have visited, come to entertain us far more than things upon which we have immediate and personal experience. After a little while we come also to judge these things as though we knew them. I say that the whole modern world, with the exception of the peasants, suffers heavily from this disease, and no one more than politicians and their electorate. Of a politician upon whose judgment may depend the happiness of the country, most of those who admire or hate him have an impression drawn from caricatures. Of the electorate whom they are supposed to serve, politicians have of a conception drawn from the hurried aspect of vast crowds of poor men, seen by gaslight after dinner in huge halls, and in the course of all the distractions of a speech. This fantastic ignorance, which modern conditions have bred in the great towns, seems to some to be wholly evil in its effect. It is not so, for among its effects are to be discovered a number of joyful surprises. Many things which we had imagined to be, and such as such which we had deplored, turned out upon examination to be very different, and much better than our newspaper pictures had conceived. Among these joyful surprises is the discovery that the earth is not full, that travel has not overspread it, and that there is perfect loneliness within the reach of all. No popular conception of the modern world is more firmly held, especially by educated, and therefore by jaded men. There is none which it is more useful to explode. Two things have come side by side, first an immense increase in the ease of communications, secondly a positive delight in the crowd to associate with the crowd, and these two facts, the one economic and the other social, have more than counteracted all the expansion in numbers of those who travel about and defile the earth with their presence. In between the tracks of their travel, a few miles upon the center, in which they heard, pig and pen, there is an isolation which our forefathers never knew. A hundred years ago the landsend and St. David's were both places far removed from London. Today the end of Cornwall is familiar to many thousands of men who are not native to it, but what about St. David's? How many men who read this can say where it is or have visited it? A hundred years ago Petworth, Bullborough, Horsham, East Grinstead, Crowbro, Top, Haywards, Heath, Heathfield, Burr-Wash were places upon the map of Sussex, intimately known to the men of that county, and visited but rarely by men from beyond the wheel. But though they were visited rarely, they were visited equally, and if a man said he knew the country, then he knew those places. Compare their fate today. Crowbro, Hayward, Heath, and Heathfield are suburbs of London, and right through the heart of the country, a long bridge, pure London all the way, unites London with its suburb of Brighton. Do you imagine upon that account that the isolation of Sussex is lost? Very far from it. It is considerably increased. Nay, the loneliness of that vast proportion of the country, which lines of travel do not touch, is, if anything, too great. It is an excess even of what the greatest lover of contemplation can desire. And you may, within a mile of Brighton Road, lie in a wood, watch small beasts behaving with freedom, and an ignorance of human intercourse, which perhaps they never had when the village life was really strong, when the greatest states were not mortgaged to cosmopolitan finance, when the old families lived in the houses, and made the county town five miles away their resort for purchase and even for amusement. It is equally true of the north. The whole chain of the pennines between the two main lines of travel, to the east and to the west of them, is utterly deserted. A man may walk thirty times in a year from Hawes to Ribblehead, and in not half of those walks meet or speak to a man. This is true of the great high road of the chain of the Summers. It is far truer. Go from Appleby over Crossfell up the Wild Boar Scar, down the water to Alston, and you will be as completely cut off from men the whole day long as you could be in the west of Canada. The same is true of the Dales of Chavoy, from where Chevy Chase was fought all the way up Redderdale is a fine great road that was once the highway to Scotland over Carterfell. If a man goes lame upon the English side of it, he cannot count upon getting a lift to Jedborough. He must limp all the way. And speaking of that road reminds one that not only has this novel isolation come upon a great part of Britain, but that as one watches it with a sense that is not wholly pleasurable, especially on winter evenings after a day bereft of human intercourse, one has often, around one, evidence of recent time when the activities of the country more evenly spread. Upon this same great road from Carterfell, there is upon the Scotch side of the path a house which once paid a high rental and did great trade with the traffic. It is in ruins. Upon that same Crossfell, which is now completely alone, you come perpetually upon abandoned workings, upon bits of hardened road, now half sunk into the bog, and even upon the remains of broken bridges over streams. In the quadrilateral, which is formed by the railways in southwest of Scotland, there is a great area of silence. And in that belt of Wales, which separates the northern from the southern dialects, a belt which is again served by a fine high road, and which has been throughout English history, the scene of the western advance from across the marches into the principality, there is silence also. Plin Limon, the mountain which dominates this central part, is unknown, and the reason is easy enough to discover. Plin Limon is not an abrupt mountain, astonishing and outline or difficult of ascent. It is upon the contrary a great rounded hill, but there is perhaps no height in the island more solemn, nor commanding a more awful and spacious scene. And those few who would still take the trouble to reach it may find the north a chasm more wonderful, I think, than any in the range of Snowden, or in the neighborhood of Cotter Idris. All this is true of that little narrow space, which lies between the North Sea and St. George's Channel, and when one considers the neighboring counties of the continent the instances that arise are innumerable. Within two days of London, and to be reached at about an expense of two pounds, there is a little democracy in which no man has ever been put to death, in which no wheeled vehicles have ever been seen, of which the few laws are made, or rather the ancient and honorable customs maintained, by the heads of families meeting for discussion. You can, from the little village in its center, telephone to Paris, if you wish, and yet who has been to that place, or who knows the way there from London, probably not a dozen men. There is on one of the main railways of Europe a chain of mountains abrupt, intensely blue, comparable only to the background of certain medieval illuminations, and with their astonishing unworldly aspect, making one understand how the active medieval imagination could see, remember, and use things that we pass by. I know of no artist who has drawn that range, nor of any traveler who has described it. You cannot see it from the train. It runs along a narrow and profound valley. You must leave the railway at a little roadside station. You must climb two thousand feet onto the plateau above, and from there, when you have turned a corner of the road, there breaks upon you this unearthly vision of the range. Now consider that example, and it will not be difficult to discover how and why these places remain, or rather increasingly become isolated from the modern world. For what must you do to obtain a view of what I have spoken? You must abandon the express, with its speed and luxury, to which you are accustomed. You must get into a little slow and dingy local train. You must climb a high hill in spite of weather. You may do it once from curiosity, but you are not compelled to the open air and the road, as were your fathers. And for one man that will rarely be at the pains to go about to visit and to understand the world, there are a thousand who would rather delude themselves into a simulacrum of the emotions of travel by reading of them in some book, and that book will probably have been written by someone who has no more followed the road than themselves. For a man to know the world, he must not sleep now and again in the open, or now and again, for a freak in some dirty inn where there is bad cooking and bad wine, he must so sleep continually day after day. He must not have only an object before him in his journey, such as the visiting of a famous shrine. He must also have an object all the way along to know whatever he may pass. He must so draw his itinerary that it shall be something out of the common, that is, something exposing one always to discomfort and often to peril. There are few men who care to pay the price, and, after all, the effect of their hesitation is excellent. Where they run off to vulgarize the New World and the Far East, and they leave England and Europe to the intimacy of those who love them best. 7. On People in Books It is a matter for the curious to examine, but not the wisest will determine it, why people in books are so extraordinarily different from real people. You might imagine that the people in biographies, at least, would be more or less like human beings, but they never are. A man may say that the reason of this is that biography today is always a sort of modern, pale, conventional, and hypocritical affair, that the biographer dare not print nine-tenths of his material under our modern tyranny of suppression, and that he has necessarily to make a puppet of his man. But there are others besides modern biographies, and it is true of them all, that the people inside are not human. You have biographies of politicians acting upon principle, biographies of men who have accumulated vast fortunes without a hint of their main passion, biographies of men of lineage in which you are given to understand that their distinction was due to some individual worth and force, biographies of the frankest and most brutal periods, biographies of men long dead, biographies written by enemies all have this in common, that the person inside the book does not go on like a human being. Autobiographies give one a better chance, but even there, though you get something much more vivid, you never get a real man. It seems as though the writing of an autobiography or confession always went with a twist, either morbid or megalomaniac. Take the very best one of all, Rousseau's. It can be proved, and research has proven it, that he is perpetually maligning himself. As for Saint Augustine's, oh how dull. He tells us so little, and his purpose is so far from being autobiographical, that it does not come under the same criticism. And as for Barrow, those who have read him assure me that he is perpetually performing marvelous feats of intelligence and courage, to which there is no witness at all but himself. Agiographers are appalling. They do not attempt to present a living figure, though I will make an exception for one account of the death of Saint Thomas of Canterbury. I forget which, but it is full of realities. Gestac Agiography, as for instance he of the Carolinian period, postulates three things. The noble birth of his hero, his boldly standing up to somebody else, usually a layman, and his performing a number of actions precisely similar to those which others of the type have performed. It is almost mechanical. It is like the leader in a party newspaper describing a party speech by a party man. People in histories also are not human beings. The moment you try to make them human in writing your history a demon enters and makes you make a great quantity of little mistakes. For instance you are writing about a man with one eye and you are determined to make him human. You find out all you can about that eye, whether the other one was of glass or was just left screwed up in the old-fashioned style. You get right about the date of the time when he lost his eye, the effect which his one eye had on other people, and all the rest of it. You make the man live again before you and the moment you begin writing about him you will make his left eye his right eye. It is the knowledge of this and the fear of the powerful demon who works it that makes historians shun the human being and stuff their books full of ghosts paler than any that wander by Asheron. This is especially true of historians of war. The people they write about occupy strategic points, a phrase which is blankly meaningless to the writer as to the reader. They grasp the situation at a glance. They master detail. They are, when the author is against them, in spite of all their faults not devoid of physical courage, or if the author is in favor of them, acting with that quiet decision which is characteristic of them, and of bad actors in problem plays too, by the way, but they never live. Now and then you get flashes. The eye glints, the tones take on reality. There is a human voice and gesture, but it dies again. Perhaps the most vivid and most fascinating of such histories, in our tongue, is Napier's. You will constantly find such flashes in it, but they are not permanently connected. It is odd that the most living of histories are the exceedingly simple and bold relations set down under primitive conditions of society when a man merely desired to chronicle dates and facts. How it is so no one can tell, but a plain statement of some not very interesting thing with just a verb and a substantive will do the trick. For instance, where Eigenhard says of Charlemagne that everything about him was virile except his voice which was high, or again were fulker of Chartres, I think it is, says of a spy on the crusading march that he was short in the nose and in every virtue. But even the early historians built up no continuously living figure. When it comes to novelists, the matter is notorious. The people in novels not only do not go on like real people, but they do things sometimes physically, always morally impossible to real people. I have often wished to know a professional novelist in order to ask him why his people went on like that. To take quite small points. A lover and his lady in a novel will often hunt the fox. So far so good. There is nothing impossible about that. When they have done running after the animal, they go home together and their horses walk side by side. How is that done? Except horses in cavalry regiments or in circuses, or horses constrained and tied by leather thongs in front of wheeled vehicles. When were two horses ever seen that walked the same pace side by side? The novelist may say that it is necessary to the convention of his novel. It would spoil a love scene if he showed one of the two horses dragging further and further behind the other, as one of them always does, and then having to cantor or trot every three minutes to catch up his neighbor. And it would also spoil his love scene if he made one of the horses walking slowly and the other dancing, which in real life is one of the ways in which people attempt to keep two horses abreast. But there are many things in your novel which have no such excuse and which are equally out of nature. For instance, people sit down suddenly and write enormous checks at a moment's notice. Now even the richest man cannot do that. He has his money invested. He does not waste it by letting him lie idle in gigantic balances of a current account. Then again the things they do with their mouths. No, she laughed. How on earth could that be done? If you try hard to laugh and say no at the same time, it sounds like nae-ing. Yet people are perpetually doing it in novels. If they did it in real life they would be locked up. Another thing that people do in novels, on all sides, is to make immensely long speeches. Sometimes the whole of the author's views upon some big manner, like the fate of the soul, for instance, comes pouring out in a solid page and a half of spoken stuff. In real life the only people who do this are politicians, and even they only do it on stated and ritual occasions. They do not do it in private houses. Sometimes they try, but they are interrupted. Yet again consider the vast number of titles which people have in novels. I cannot call to mind one single novel without a title. I mean no novel of the modern kind. Of course there must be such and such, but they are certainly rare. Now in real life things are not thus. Old ordinary people of this country go about day after day without meeting lords and ladies. But in novels something like half the characters come in quite casually with titles. I have been told it is a matter of professional pride with some novelist to be able to get the complicated system of English titles exactly right, and that they will even fabricate difficult problems for the pleasure of solving them, as do men who play chess. They will take the younger son of an Earl and make him a colonial cabinet minister, and then triumphantly settle for you, which of the two honourables he is. Or again they will marry the heiress of a Marquisette, inheritable in the female line, to the eldest son of a man who comes into a barony later on in the book, and get it absolute. But people in real life do not care much about these things. Conversely a very large number of things that do happen in real life and are interesting never seem to get into novels. For instance repetitions. Your hero will fall off a horse and break something, but he does not do it twenty times as he would if he were a living being. A man comes late to dinner, but he is not always coming late to dinner, as he would if he were human. And what is worse a score of highly interesting real types never get between covers at all. Take for instance that immoderately common type among the most common of God's creatures, which I will call the silent fool. The man who hardly ever talks, and when he does, says something so overwhelmingly silly that one remembers it all one's life. I can recollect but one silent fool in modern letters. But he comes in a book which is one of the half dozen immortal achievements of our time. A book like a decisive battle, or like the statue of John the Baptist at South Kensington. A glory for us all. I mean the diary of a nobody. In that you will find the silent Mr. Page, who says, that's right, and nothing more. One might go on forever piling up instances of this divorce between the supposed pictures of our modern life and the truths of it. I will end with what is to me perhaps the most glaring of all, the attitude of fiction towards what is called success. No matter who the author is, no matter what his knowledge of the world, he simply cannot draw successful men as they are. That is, in a diversity as great as any to be discovered in the human race. Men who have got on, that is, who are at once well-to-do and well-known, are as different as men with the toothache or as men with warts on their chins. Some are kind, some brutal, some clever, some stupid. Some got their money by luck, some by inheritance, some by theft, some few by being able to make or do something better than their fellows. But at any rate in real life, when you are about to meet someone who is known to you as successful, you never have the slightest idea of what you're going to meet. Your last experience of the sort is no guide to the next, and the successful chap may turn out to be anything at all. But in novels your wealthy and well-known man is invariably powerful in character. It never fails. He may be good or bad, English or foreign, young or old, but he always has in him something of what you see in a very good, Sergeant Major, at a few shillings a week, an experienced headmaster at a few hundred a year, or a capable engineer on a passenger ship. He displays qualities which have no more to do with what is called success nowadays than red hair or brown boots have. In a word, your successful man is a type in the novel. In real life he is not a type at all. He is any one. And another thing you never get in a novel is a well-mannered man or a bad-mannered man. I cannot recollect one character who interrupts at the top of his voice, nor one who joins the conversation of others in an easy way. But suppose one filled a novel with real people. What escape would there be from daily life? 8. Of all contrasts, the most ironical and the most profound is the contrast between the tag and the truth of the tag. A couple of lines are chosen by humanity from the work of a great poet and are usually so chosen, not only because they are beautiful, but because they are true. When they have been repeated a certain number of times, they become a tag. A proverb or a mere popular statement puts into the shortest possible form some extremely simple, and perhaps extremely obvious, at any rate this is quite certain, some extremely important truth. Every one sees it is a truth, everybody repeats it, and it becomes a tag. Now note the next phrase in the life of the said tag. It is criticized, and it is ridiculed. It becomes a solid butt for the archery of human wit. That phase lasts, perhaps, the lifetime of a man. Now note the third phase, for it will teach you the most that can be learned about mankind, and it is endless. It is the consummation of the tag and the test of humanity afforded by the tag. The tag is now taken for granted, and is eternal, and the following things happen to it. Children are taught it like the alphabet. They are compelled to learn it. Hovel de hoys, great wits, and leaders of thought avoid it because it is commonplace. They can be seen waggling from one side of the road to the other in their grotesque efforts to avoid the tag. The whole world knows that the tag is there. Lastly, most wonderful of all, the tag ceases to bite. It ceases to affect men. Men are saturated with it. Men are reclimatized to it. They are vaccinated with it, and the tag has now arrived at the exercise of its eternal function, which is to wake in individuals here, in one man there, in another, and overwhelming sense of its truth or beauty. It begins its career of converting individual men. Let it be mentioned where three are gathered together, and it will be fled from as an outused thing. But two can make confidences each to the other about it, and one can feel it like a thorn, or like a gem in his heart. Who goes a-borrowing, goes a-sorrowing. Has gone through all these phases. So has waste not, want not. So has for who to dull forgetfulness a-pray, etc. So has Felix qui puto'ed, etc. And so have the three or four thousand others that are the stock of a proper mind. All these set me thinking of yet another tag, and as it is that which most sharply tests humility, and through humility intelligence, and as, therefore, in this not very humble and not intelligent time it is grossly neglected, there is a pleasure in dwelling upon it. It is to this effect the future is veiled from man. Good Lord! To read the press and to hear the speeches, why one would think that the future had a map to it. One can hardly hear one's self-thinking for prophecies. And what is perhaps the most terrible thing of all, as a symptom of our modern state of mind, the prophecies have a dogmatic quality, using the word dogmatic as it is popularly used of transcendental affirmations. Or man prophesying in great herds and all together, and to question their prophecies, simply to say that possibly the future is veiled from man, create something nowadays of the astonishment, ridicule, or anger, which the denial of a religious dogma does in a society with a fixed religion. Thus man in England today confidently regards the future of the earth for, let us say, the next hundred years in a certain light. Certain countries, especially new countries, are to increase in a regular manner in value and population and property. Certain other countries are to continue their decline. Certain forms of mechanical perfection are to increase, certain speculations as to the nature of the soul are to decline in interest. But more than any other particular set of opinions, there is a general color stamped upon the future in the modern mind, and how securely it is stamped one can best prove by the amusement or surprise that is caused if one suggests, but does not affirm, that there may be, not that there must be, some totally new philosophy, new religion, or new development, within three generations. A book recently published suggests to me the permanent and ironical value of that old tag the future is veiled from man. It is a study of two somewhat obscure individuals who were members of the revolutionary tribunal. It is a very detailed study in which one feels in every page the things that were taken for granted in that place and time in Paris of the revolution. One of all that has come to pass, what of all the fixed certitudes has to the future, nay, the fixed certitudes upon the very nature of man, from which of necessity the future was deduced, has remained. The author has done all the better in his study of Vélate and Trinchard from the fact that his position in the archives has permitted him to look into the ultimate details of the period, but not so much the high historical value of the work as its permanent human lesson strikes me as I read. Vélate was twenty-four when the great war of the revolution against the kings was within a month of breaking out, and when he set out for Paris from the lovely rocky passage of his province of beyond limoges. And this is what he had in his mind, that the revolutionary movement, to use his own words, must give to the whole world a spur of insurrection against the oppressors of men. This pathetic certitude was nothing peculiar to the very commonplace young fellow who was leaving his professorship in the André for Paris. To him, nay, then seemed as much a commonplace as would seem to some young fellow in a similar position today in Birmingham some phrase about the development of the west of Canada, or some certain prophecy that nations would enrich themselves in proportion to the amount of coal and iron discovered upon their territories. When Vélate hears a speech in the revolutionary parliament, he says, Truth has now appeared and is fixed forever. It can now call to its tribunal every abuse, every vice, and every crime. Has Truth done that in the last hundred years? Yet to Vélate the prophecy of what the revolution was about to do seemed, and not only to him, but to millions of his contemporaries, as simple as some prophecy of ours about the future of communications. And he was as easily persuaded that what he said was true, as we are, that the North tempered climate, and especially that part of Europe which is insular and lies between parallels 50 and 60, is the natural climatic seek of human energy. Consider again this which is not from Vélate's own pen, but which occurs in the study before me, and is of first interest. Vélate was in the jury on that day. It was the 9th of February, 1794. Seven Carmelite nuns had refused to take the civic oath to the Republic. The judge made a very common place, and as it seemed then a very sensible speech, pointing out that they were perfectly free to observe the vows they had taken, that nothing had disappeared in their lives except the particular convent with which they were associated, that none of their prejudices would be offended. And he pointed out that in the society in which he believed they would have the sense to live, all men would now be permanently free. The nuns refused. They refused because the oath would involve them in a sism. How many men at that time surrounding Vélate had the slightest conception of what the Renaissance of religion was to be in the city of Paris? These women members or servants of the little reactionary aristocratic clique into which the monastic institution had declined seemed mere fanatics, not only to Vélate but to the whole of his society. Could you suddenly have shown Vélate how Europe would still be raging upon those ultimate questions of religion more than three generations later? Could you have presented him with the sight of a whole society divided upon so simple, and as it was then thought, so irrational a point? What would he have thought? I can tell you what he would have thought. No matter what your credentials as a prophet, he would have thought your prophecy mad. Though you should have carried him into our very time and given every proof of the reality of his vision, he would have woken up to believe it an illusion and a silly dream. The state of mind of Trenchard is even more impressive, because Trenchard was an even smaller, more commonplace and therefore more typical man. He sat side by side with Vélate on the jury of the revolutionary tribunal. Trenchard was a carpenter. He was somewhat over thirty years of age at the period of the revolution. His brother was a gunner fighting against the Vendians. Just at that moment when Valencians had fallen and when all seemed over with the Republic, and his brother used to ride from the army signing your brother a true republican. Two months later he was judging Marie Antoinette. He wrote to his brother a letter immediately after the trial. Monsieur Donior publishes in his book Deux Jours du Tribunal Revolutionnaire, a facsimile of that letter, and a wonderful reading it makes. One might put its bad spelling and street language into modern English, something like this. I am learning, you brother, that I was one of them jurymen as judged the will-beast, what was wolfing a girt part of the empire, and so forth. But the man is doing nothing exceptional. He no more thinks of himself as exceptional than does any leader-writer today writing upon the virtues or vices of a contemporary politician in more moderate language. And note you, as a hundred years can make men more temperate, so can they make men more violent, and our modern absence of emphasis may astound our great-grandchildren quite as much as that revolutionary violence astounds us. A friend writes to him in that spring of 1794, when Danton died, and when every man was occupied in the defense or the destruction of the Republic. He is a very ordinary friend, his name is Plotin, a Southerner, as Trinchard was. He corresponds more or less in that society to, let us say, a young village shopkeeper in our own, full of simple patriotism and especially full of what the press tells him, and he heads his letter thus. Second of German, the second year of the Republic, which is as imperishable as the word What, rhetoric? Nay, to us reading such stuff today, what lunacy? But do not be too sure. Go to the British Museum when you can find an idle afternoon, and look up your newspapers of September 1899, and you will read some amusing phrases. The truth is that men pass under strong influences of time that fill them, more than with wine, rather with an entirety of life. The time in which a man lives may be an exalted time or a weary one, but it fills him altogether, whether it is on fire or round. He can conceive as a rule nothing in the future different from the temper of his time, though there is all the past to teach him his folly. If he makes a picture of the future, that picture is a mere extension of his own tiny and ephemeral experience, and the more confidently certain he is of that future, the more rigidly is it seen by the critical onlooker to be a puppet dressed up in the clothes of the present. All these things denoyers careful bulk upon two men of the revolutionary tribunal, a monograph characteristic of that ceaseless and immense research which dignifies the modern French school of history, as suggested to my mind. Now, whenever I read of the revolution in general, or in particular, while that lesson of the folly of prophecy perpetually returns to me, yet something else rises from the page. In a certain sense, almost in a mystical sense, the periods of profound faith in a particular future were right, not because the picture that they saw was true, but because those things outside time upon which they relied were and are true, and even today, in the sheer anarchy and welter of the time we suffer, there is a method of thought which has anchoring ground in the permanent fate of mankind. But what that method may be, there is no space to discuss here. The end of Section 8. Section 9. On Anything This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. On Anything by Hilaire Bellock. Section 9. On a Poet The days in which Swinburne died, it was remarked by all, were days peculiar to the air and to the landscape which had inspired his verse. One riding in those days upon the high ridges of the new forests saw before him in the distant hills of Dorset and of Wilts, in the very clear line of the island, the belt of sea, and in the great billows of oak woods and of beach that lift up from the hollows, in the clear wind and the large clouds of spring before it, everything which his poetry meant to those who were of one tongue with him, and all that part of it which, though not incommunicable to foreigners, made him the least translatable of modern writers. Nowhere was it easier to understand what influences had made, or rather driven, his form of expression than on those heights looking towards those hills and under such a sky, feeling that wind come bright from off the English sea. For it is the chief characteristic of Swinburne's work, and the one which will be noted of him throughout, whatever changes the future may bring to our taste, that his motive, if one may use this metaphor, was the landscape and the air of England, especially of South England, and of that very roll of land from the chalk to the chalk, from the northern avon of Wilshire to the cliffs of the island, which a man surveys from the ridges of which I speak. Let it not be forgotten that revolutions in taste are among the most certain, as they are among the most mysterious proofs of the power of rapid change, combined with unity, which is peculiar to Europe, and which has been discovered in no other civilization than that of the Europeans. Only some very few have escaped the chastening of that reflection. There are indeed some classics, one might count them upon the fingers of both hands, which no transition of taste much raises or much diminishes, and chief among these is the sovereignty of Homer. But almost all the others do suffer violent neglects, they may be for a generation and more violently despised, or again violently adored. And so rapid are these fluctuations of opinion, as so sincere while they remain, that we must always approach with extreme care the criticism of a contemporary. The fluctuations of opinion will at last decide an average. Truth will be plotted out, a clear and intellectual thing from the welter of mere stimulus. Criticism will acquire and with every new critic acquire further certitudes and fixed points of judgment. And the reputation of a great poet is molded and informed by the process of time, as all other worthy things are molded and informed by the process of time. Let us attempt to understand apart from the feeling of the moment and to ask ourselves what certainly was present in the work of the great writer, who died in this uprush of new weather and this invitation to life that was sweeping over his own land. It is by qualities which, whether we approve them or disapprove, are certainly present in a writer, that his reputation with posterity will be made, not by the emotions of the moment which those qualities arouse. Nor is any great writer, nor any small one for that matter, to be judged in general terms. But in particular, since writing is, like a man's voice, and always has in it no matter who produces it, if it be closely examined, character is not general, but individual. A man who should have resisted the wave of enthusiasm for Lord Byron, but who should carefully have noted what at any rate he was, what his verse was, and what it was not, who should have distinguished between what he certainly did easily and what he as certainly could not do, might have praised too much or too little. But that which his analysis had distinguished would enable him to know more or less what kind of posterity would judge Byron, and how. He would have been able to guess, for instance, that a time of youth and of largesse would have drunk him in great draughts. A time of age and of exactitude would have found in him a mere looseness of words. He would have been able to see why foreigners, especially, could discover his greatness, why the reading of him was proper to a time of active and physical combat against oppression, was improper to any nation which along peace had corrupted, or to any class which the opportunity for every license and the power through wealth to approach every enjoyment had satiated and cloyed. If we so examine Swinburne, we shall, as I have said, first notice that in all his work the mere nature of South England drives him. It is the expression often uncontrolled, always spontaneous, of an intense communion with that air, those colors such hills and such a sea. In this Swinburne holy novel, as was his medium of expression, was peculiarly and rigidly national. Whoever best knows that landscape and that sky best feels him. Whoever in the future most neglects it or knows at least will leastfully appreciate, or will perhaps even neglect, his work. In whatever times the inspiration of that belt of land weakens in the men who inhabited, it weakened in the eighteenth century for instance, and such a time the influence of Swinburne's work will weaken too. Next there must be noted that in him, much more than in any other writer of the language, or at any rate much more than in any other modern writer of prominence, words followed rhythm, and the poem, though an organized and constructed thing, went bowling before the general music of its meter as a ship over canvas goes bowling before the general gale. That music underlies all lyrical expression, and for that matter poetry of every other kind as well. All critics have always known. But it is modern to make of it as it were the necessary and conscious substructure of the work, and Verlaine, who put it in his poetic art as the chief rule to consider, music and always music, was in laying down such a law the extreme expression of his time. Sense is not sacrificed wholly in any place. It is but rarely imperiled even by this motive in Swinburne. But one feels that reason has in the construction no divine place, but is subsidiary, as it is subsidiary in unworded tunes, as it is subsidiary in great and vivid dreams, as it is subsidiary, since one should be just even in judging its travagance in all major emotions of the human soul, in love, in combat, in despair. And in this necessary service of rhythm, this bondage to music is to be discovered the source of another characteristic of the work, the perpetual repetition. Two men, both sedulous and scholarly admirers, will be equally struck by the apparently contradictory judgments that Swinburne was unequaled in the range of his vocabulary, and that Swinburne was quite beyond parallel repetitive. Each judgment would strike one of the two types of admirer, as a paradox or a truism, yet both are true and both have an illuminating meaning when his work is considered. That vast vocabulary, and if you will be at pains to note word upon word, or to make a short ton cordons, you will see that the word vast is just. That vast vocabulary, I say, proceeded from the necessity of satisfying a year. In exact shade of length and emphasis were needed. They must be exactly filled, and some one word out of the thousands upon thousands, which to numerically richest language of our time possesses, must be hit upon to do the work. This surely was the source of that wide range. So also was it the source of the repetition. Repetition is discovered in literature under two aspects. It is deliberate and admiringly designed, or it is involuntary, and an odious symptom of fatigue. The repetitions of catalysts in their way, the repetitions of the Hebrew poets in theirs, were meant to be, or rather, for their voluntary quality is obvious, they were exactly designed to produce a particular effect, and did produce it. The repetition of those who fail, involuntary and symptomatic of fatigue, may be neglected. Swinburne's repetitions were neither of the one kind nor of the other. They were the recurrence of a set of words, or of single words, which suited the sound in his head, and just as to fit exactly a void of known form, one word exactly fitting must be found. Fitting, not reason but the ear, so those which had been found to fit particular rhythms, must be used again to fit those rhythms when they recurred, as naturally and as necessarily as a man picks up this tool, and that to do some particular bit of carving which he has found it apt for in the past. The word in Swinburne was subordinate. It is a commonplace, and a true one, to pass to another matter, that the English writers of the later nineteenth century, and not the writers alone, reposed upon the Jacobian translation of the Old Testament, that unique and fundamental piece of work, the monumental characters in which appear more largely with every process of reach-reach from it, whether in time or in conviction, has so formed that generation that it was itself almost unconscious of the enormous effect. Swinburne is as full of it as Kipling. The ready-made phrases of weary political discussions are full of it. The whole national life, insofar as modes of expression are concerned, was filled with it. Many of Swinburne's rhythms were the rhythms of the English sultry, and perpetually you will find some sounding final phrase, especially if it ends in an interrogation, to be a phrase of biblical character or even a biblical transcription. Here and again, as in that effective landscape and of air, he is national in every particular of his poetic being, and one may remark that this note is the note of unity in him, and that a recognition of it explains what has confused so many critics of his life and of his opinion. The man who in youth was ardent for a liberty which lent much nearer to anarchy than to the Republic, who ranged as the fashion was all over Europe to find subjects for that mood in an age perpetually sounded a note, which had in it something exaggerated a fury and a protest against whatever might be thought to be weakening the very old and fixed boundaries of the national life. Yet it was the same man whose extreme facility poured out in either field. The passionate protest of the first years was a protest drawn from the untrammeled nature about him which ran through him and made him right. The convinced and extreme political insistence of his later verse was drawn from the same source. It was still the surroundings of his own land that compelled him. There is one last thing to be said. The work has been called pagan. It is the commonest praise or blame attached to the achievement. Those who attach it, whether in praise or blame, have not clearly seen the pagan world. By pagan we mean that long manhood of Europe, a thousand years long to our knowledge, how much longer we know not, in which the mind certainly reposed and was certainly in tune with the nature of the Mediterranean. Swinburne's great love of that mood was the love of a foreigner, of a much belated man, and of a man of the north. The sea of the Atalanta in Caledon is an English sea. All that attitude in him was reaction and a protest. It was full of yearning. Now pagan paganism was not full of this. The very earliest moment in which a protest of that kind is to be found is the fourth century. For the transformation between the old and the new lay in this, that there came upon our race in the first four centuries of the Roman Empire, a yearning which must be satisfied, and men since then have accepted and assuagement of it, or have passionately protested against that assuagement, or have cynically ridiculed it, but they have never remained other than profoundly influenced by it. What is called paganism, since that change came, is not a marble and is not calm. It is a product not of the old time, but of the new. The end of Section 9 Section 10 On Anything This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org On Anything by Hilaer Bellach Section 10 On a Profit Years ago in the county of Kent a gentleman of means, culture, and lineage begged me to make the acquaintance of a certain neighbor of his who dwelt in a little cottage called, by the wrath of God, the Hollies, and indeed a holly-tree of no small size, but one only, grew beside his door. This cottage was cubical in formation, with the exception of the roof which was a pyramid, and it was built a brick with the exception of the roof which was of slate. Its name, the Hollies, was painted outside upon a gate. This is all I have to say about the cottage. The man who dwelt within it came that very evening to dine at the squires, and was what you will call obviously a gentleman. He was not a gentleman in any cryptic or mystical sense. He was not the adumbration of a gentleman. He was not the platonic idea of a gentleman. He was not the gentleman used loosely as a term for a good man. He was not rich. He spoke perfectly. He was very stupid. Much more than this, he was a prophet. The learned have observed, or at least the only ones among them who count have persistently observed, that it is in the nature of barbaric peoples to accept whatever is told them with sufficient assurance, conviction, and simplicity, but especially if it regarded the future. On this account, the learned say, he who will prophesy with flame shall certainly, among barbarians, become a founder. Now it is sufficiently certain that this type of man, so successful among the primitive, and perhaps also among the decayed, continues through all the ages and in all societies, though varying perhaps in proportion and certainly varying enormously in the source of his information, according to the generation in which he lives. He is here today, and this man was one of him. At first I did not know in what a presence I stood, or rather sat, if indeed it be modest to make no noise in the eating of soup, to frown heavily and never to speak a word. There were but three of us there, the squire, myself, et rex means the prophet. Having seen little of the world I much desired to hear what he would say, though he was still what politicians call young, he seemed old to me, because he had a full beard, and because life had already wearyed him, a thing incomprehensible to boys. The squire watched him with a good deal of admiration and of fear, until at last he said, there won't be any war. Here let me tell you that these words were promised in the year 1888 and a little before the bursting of the spring upon the Kentish wheel, nor was there one. There was no more about that time. Those who read these lines I am quite certain will find them a shock. We live in a time when war is so struck with doom that it is putting on speed, as it were, to make a fine ending. War is out of our manners. We can tolerate it no more. Every year is a new reconciliation and a new treaty in the Federation of All Mankind, except those who have neglected their armament, and in general we are forgetting war. But there have been wars, and of some caliber, hefty and noisy wars, since you and I were boys. Now in 1888 there was no war, so the prophet was right. The squire was interested in humble and, being a plain man, asked why there would be no war, for it was imagined at that moment, by eight or nine newspaper men, that some war or other was going to break out. But what war I forget after such a lapse of time. The prophet was a true prophet by which I do not mean that he prophesied truth, but only that he was in keeping with all that I have ever read of his breed. He shook his dormat of a head and wagged his beard, smiling, as bearded men do, with eyes only, and would give no reasons. And indeed there was no war. But as the dinner went on he talked of other things. He prophesied a parliament in Dublin within ten years, and knew as I was to the world I could but know how much of his conversation worked within fixed frames and limits, as should be seen a prophet. Some things were going to happen within five years, some within twenty years, some and a leap was indeed splendid within fifty years. Among these last, I dimly remember, was the spread of a universal language which I think he called Anglo-Saxon, and there was something or other about the birth rate which escapes me now, but which I can remember to have appalled me at the time, for it was a destruction of all I loved and revered in Europe. The dinner went on and as he got more food and wine into him he prophesied less, for fasting is the mother of prophecy. He was still assertive, he was still sure. His talk was still of public man, of continents, of armies, of battle, and of sudden death, but the future entered less and less into it, and the present more. He became not so much a prophet, but if I may use the word quite gently, more of a liar. I can remember vividly now, after so many years, how he stood in the hall of that great house, all wrapped up to go through the park to the hollies. I looked at his large frame and masterful demeanor. I remembered all that he had said, both of things distant from me and of things to come, and I admired such eyes in the brain. It was ten years before I met him again. I'm wrong, it was nine. I met him upon a steamboat in the North Sea, and he remembered me. We looked over the side of the ship and talked about America and Spain. As to the chance of war, he waved it all away with his hand. It might come or it might not. The truth was it was too near for his type of vision. But what would come after, whether the war was fought or not, was quite clear. America, he said, would learn that she could fight a European power. It seems that having learned this, all sorts of things would happen, and there would be banging and binging to some tomb. The earning of one's living, the weight and dullness which come upon the mind from seeing too many places and knowing too many men, left my impression less vivid. For as it says in the song, a phrase in a language I don't recognize. But anyhow there remains to me the impression of that conflict between the old world and the new, which I was destined to experience, and which I in no way desired. He had been following French politics also, and he told me not my way of prophecy, but as a revelation of inner truth, why it was that Germany had not declared war upon France and taken Paris in the autumn of the preceding year. I talked to him, therefore, of the seventy-five millimeter gun. He did not shirk it. He talked of it as one who knew, and as I heard him my mind grew aged. I left him in a port of Holland after luncheon, and the last I remember of him on that occasion was a slight gesture of his from the wrist only, for he was a dignified man, explaining how all that I saw, the port, the shipping, the docks, everything, would be German within ten years. I met him again several times in the succeeding waves of our century. I met him just before the Boer War, and a little after Colenso. He prophesied only upon one matter, upon these occasions, and that was the length of the conflict, which, with an exact discrimination, he invariably placed within six months of the day upon which he addressed me. And the third time he assured me of this thing was in the month of February 1902, and that time he was right. Since then I have met him continually, for he knows less people than he used to do, and he has fallen into a routine of old friends. The squire is dead, and he only goes down to the hollies now and again. It is his pleasure still to foresee. The war over, he bought consoles. He was careful to explain that he was no fool. They were at ninety-seven. They would fall, of course. He was not buying for immediate rise. In part of this anticipation he was not disappointed, but in another part he was. He was in a fume for some little time about an approaching war with Russia upon the frontiers of India, and again he would return to that recurrent theme of life, the destruction of all limitrophous civilizations by the organized might of Germany. But his chief concern was the march of China upon Europe which, as he clearly foresaw, could not be long delayed. That, he said, with a sort of Christian enthusiasm, would bind us all together once more. Whether it be a labor to prophesy or no, his hair had certainly grown white in the pursuit of his vocation, and when I last saw him, which was a little after the Epiphany and Rugby station waiting for the train to Carlisle. We spent ten minutes together, and he told me with unvaded gladness there war would break out in the Balkans when the snow melted. I asked him at what time this change came about in the Balkans, but he did not know.