 XXVI. CHAPTER XXIV. ON LIING. He that will set out to lie, without having cast up his action and judged it in this way, and that will fail, not in his lie, indeed, but in the object of it, which is imprimis, to deceive, but in ultimus, or fundamentally, to obtain profit by his deceit, as Aristotle and another clearly show. For they that lie, lie not vainly and wantonly as for sport, having a very few that are habitual, but rather for some good to be got or evil to be evaded, as when men lie of their prowess with the fist, though they have fought none, no, not even little children, or in the field, though they have done no more than shoot a naked blackamore at a furlong. These lie for honor. Not so are stalkers and jobbers who lie for money direct, or are parliament men, who lie bestraught, less worse befold them. Lies are distinguished by the wise, into the pleasant, and the useful, and again into the beautiful and the necessary. Thus a lie giving comfort to him that utters it is of the lie pleasant, a grateful thing, a cosening. This kind of lie is very much used among women. This sort will also make out good to the teller, evil to the told, for the pleasure the cheat gives, as when one says to another that his worst actions are now known and are to be seen printed privately in a midland sheet, and bids him fly. The lie useful has been set out at Supra, which consult, and may be best judged by one needing money. Let him ask for the same, and see how he shall be met. All answers to him should be of this form of lie. It is also of this kind when a man having no purse or no desire to pay puts sickness on in a carriage, whether by rail or in the street, crying out, help, help, and wagging his head and sinking his chin upon his breast, while his feet patter and his lips dribble. Also let him roll his eyes. Then some will say, it is the heat. The poor fellow is overcome. Others make way, make way. Others, men of means, will ask for the police, where at the poorer men present will make off. But chiefly they that should have taken the fair will feel kindly, and will lift the liar up gently and convey him and put him to good comfort in some waiting place or other till he be himself, and all the while clean forget his passage, for such is the nature of their rules. Lord Hingsey, now dead, was very much given to this kind of lie, and thought it profitable. You shall lie at large and not be discovered, or a little and for once, and yet come to public shame, as it was with Ananias and his good wife, Sapphira, in holy scripture, who lied but once, and that was too often. While many have lied all their lives long, and come to no harm, like John A. of Northchapel, for many years a witness in the courts that lied professionally, then a moneylender, and lastly a parliament man for the county. Yet he had no heard of all this that any man could see, but died easily in another man's bed, being eighty-three years of age or thereabouts, and was very unruly buried in Petworth at great charge. But some say he is now in hell, which God grant. There's no lie like the winsome, pretty, flattering, dilating eyelid and lip and brow-lifting lie, such as is used by beauty impoverished, when land is at stake. By this sort of lie many men's estates have been saved, none lost, and good done at no expense save to holiness. Of the same suit also is the lie that keeps a parasite in a rich man's house, or a mixer attendant upon a painter, a model upon a sculptor, and beggars upon old men. Fools will believe their lies, but wise men also will take delight in them, as did the honorable Mr. Gherkin for some time his Majesty's Minister of State, for the Lord knows what, who when policemen would beslaver him and put their hands to their heads and pay court in a low way, told all that saw what murmury it was. Yet inwardly was pleased. The more at loss was he, when, being by an accident in the minories, too late and his head lost, his coat torn and muddy, he made to accost an officer, and civilly saying hi, had got no further, but he took such a crack on the crown with the truncheon as laid him out for dead, and he is not now the same as he was, nor ever will be. Ministers of religion will both show forth to the people the evil of lying, and will also lie themselves in a particular manner, very distinct and formidable, as was clear when one denounced from the pulpit the dreadful vice of hypocrisy and false seeming, where at a drunkard, not yet sober hearing him say, show me the hypocrite, rose where he was, full in the church, and pointed to the pulpit, so that he was thrust out for truth-telling by gesture in that sacred place, as was that other who, when the preacher came to show me the drunkard, jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the parson's wife, a very mutinous act, but to lying. He that takes lying easily will take life hardly, as the saw has it. Easy lying makes hard hearing, but you are constructed and considered your well-drafted lie, that is, the lie for men grown, men discreet and fortunate, to which effect also the poet Shakespeare says in his sonnets, but no matter. The passage is not for our ears or time dealing with a dark woman that would have her will, as women also must if the world is to wed, which leads me to that sort of lie common to all the sex of which we men say, that it is the marvellous, the potent, the dextrous, the thorough, or better still the mysterious, the uncircumvented, and not explainable, the stopping short, and the confounding against right reason lie. The triumphant lie of Eve, our mother, Isalt, our sister, Judas, and Antavours, who saved the city and jail of holy memory. But if any man think to explain that sort of lie, he is an ass for his pains, and if any man seek to copy it, he is an ass sublimin' or compound, for he attempts the mastery of women, which no man yet has had of God or will, amen. The end of Section 26, the end of Chapter 24, Section 27, this, and that, and the other, this is the LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. This and that and the other by Hilaire Bellock. Chapter 27, Chapter 25, The Dupe. The dupe is an honest creature, and such honesty is the noblest work of God. The dupe is not the servant of the nave, but his ally. The dupe does not, as too simple a political philosophy would have it, serve only for material on which the nave shall work. He is also the moral support of the nave, strengthening and comforting the nave's most inward soul, and lending lubrication to the friction of public falsehood. For the nave is of many sorts, and the dupe helps them all. The plum nave, or nave absolute, finds in the dupe such an honest creature as does not revile him, and it is good to know that one is loved by some few honest souls. Thus, the nave absolute is foolish indeed when he lets the dupe see by gesture or tone that he thinks him a fool. For the dupe is very sensitive and touchy in all weather. The nave qualified, in his many incarnations, must have the dupe about him or perish. Thus the nave who would save his soul by self-deception feeds, cannibal-like, upon the straightforwardness of the dupe, and says to himself, How can I be such a nave after all since these good dupes here heartily agree with me? The nave cowardly props himself upon that sort of courage in the dupe which always accompanies virtue. I run a risk, says he, in proposing the state purchase of this or that at such and such a price. My friend the old nave went under thus in 1895, but the good dupe is a buckler in the fight. He will dare all because his heart is pure. The nave slovenly looks to the dupe to see to details, and to meet men in anti-chambers, and to have kind, honest eyes in bargaining. This sort of nave will have two or even three dupes for private secretaries, and often one for a brother-in-law. The dupe is, in God's providence, very numerous, for his normal rate of breeding is high in the extreme, his normal death rate low. Upon this account those curious in this part of natural history may watch the dupes going about in great herds, conducted and instructed by the nave, nor is one to be distinguished from the other by the coat, but rather by the snout and visage, the eyes, and if one be old enough to open the mouth, by the teeth. The dupe upon the other hand will not be of great service in any physical struggle, and must not be depended upon for this. It is his delight to browse, and when disturbed he scatters rather than flies. Here and there a rogue dupe will turn upon his pursuers, in which case he is invariably devoured. The dupe has his habitat, but that is not easily defined, as in the suburbs of great cities, and in those towns called residential, where the leisure and the inane make their life seem so much longer than those of others. But there are exceptions also to this, and the dupe will sometimes migrate in vast numbers from one spot to another in such a few years as wholly to discomfort the calculations of the naves. Some of these have been found to stand up in public halls before numbers whom they had thought to be dupes, seeing that the locality was little partington, but only to discover a great boiling of anti-dupes, men working with their hands, or what not, yet undeceivable, as often as not, atheist and ready to storm the platform and tear the nave alive. The dupe loves courtesy, and, as has been said above, will tolerate no hint of impatience. On the other hand he needs no breaking in, and will carry upon the back from his earliest years. It is incredible to travelers when they first come across the dupe what burdens he will bear in this fashion, so that sometimes the whole plane appears to be a moving mass of gold bags, public salaries, contracts, large houses, yachts, motorcars, opera houses, Haudas, sheltering masters, and mistresses, cases of wine, rich food, and charitable institutions, all as it were endowed with a motion of their own, until you stoop down and perceive that the whole of this vast weight sways securely upon the backs of an enormous migratory body of dupes upon the track for a better land. The dupe also differs from other creatures, in that he will sleep comfortably with such things upon his back, nor ever roll over upon them, and that he will bear them to a great old age and even to death itself without dispute. Indeed the dupe unburdened has about him a forlorn and naked feeling, to which it were pity to condemn him. His food must be ample, but there is no need to prepare it carefully, and he will eat almost anything that is given him, except a leek, which he will not touch unless he be told that it is an onion. Of wheat he takes very little, but he insists that a great portion be put before him, that he may munch and trample upon it. Why he manifests this appetite is not known, but upon any attempt to lessen the ration he will kick buck and rear, and will behave in a manner altogether out of his nature. The dupe must be given drink at irregular intervals, but he loves to treat it shyly and to flirt with it as it were. There is no prettier sight than to see a number of dupes meet together, arching and curved-edding, side-glancing and denying before they plunge their heads and maids into the life-giving fluid. It is the reward of the dupe that he is all his life very consistently happy. And on this account many, not-born dupes, imitate the dupes, and would be of them, in which they fail, for the dupe is God's creature and not man's, and proceeds by moral generation, as has already been affirmed. The end of Section 27, the end of Chapter 25, Section 28, this, and that, and the other. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. That and the other, by Hilaire Baloch, Section 28, Chapter 26, The Love of England. Love of country is general to mankind, yet is not the love of country a general thing to be described by a general title. Love changes with the object of love. The country love determines the nature of its services. The love of England has in the love of landscape, as has the love of no other country. It has in it, as has the love of no other country, the love of friends. Less than the love of other countries has in it, is the love of what may be fixed in a phrase, or well set down in words. It lacks, alas, the love of some interminable past, nor does it draw its liveliness from any great succession of centuries. Say that ten centuries made the soil, and that in that soil four centuries more produced a tree, and that that tree was England. Then you will know to what the love of England is in most men directed. For most men who love England know so little of her first thousand years, that when they hear the echoes of them, or see visions of them, they think they are dealing with a foreign thing. All Englishmen are a clean cut off from their long past which ended when the last mass was sung at Westminster. The love of England has in it no true plains, but fens, low hills, and distant mountains. No very ancient towns, but comfortable small and ordered ones, which love to dress themselves with age. The love of England concerns itself with trees. Accident has given to the lovers of England no long pageantry of battle. Here has given Englishmen an appetite for battle, and between the two, men who love England make a legend for themselves of war's unfought and of arms permanently successful. Though arms were they thus always successful, would not be arms at all. The greatness of the English soul is best discovered in that strong rebuke of excesses, principally of excess in ignorance, which a minority of Englishmen perpetually express, but which has not sufficed us yet, to save the future of England. In no other land will you so readily discover critics of that land ready to bear all for their right to doubt the common policy. But though you will nowhere discover such men so readily, nowhere will you discover them so impotent or so few. The love of England breeds in those who cherish it an attachment to institutions which is half reverential, but also half despairing. In its reverence this appetite produces one hundred living streams of action and a vesture and of custom. In its despair, in its refusal to consider upon what theory the institution lies, it permits the institution to sterilize with age and to grow fantastic. The love of England has never destroyed, but at times, and again at closer and closer times, while we have lived, it has failed to save. Yet it will save England in the end. Men are more bound together by this music in their souls than by any other. Wherever England is, or is spoken of by Englishmen, here you may discover what religion has been to many, and also you may discover here how legend and how epic arise. When men cut off from England, the love of England grows into a set repetitive thing, a thing of peculiar strength, yet almost barren. Nourished and example by England flourishing upon the field of England, the love of England is a love of the very earth, of the smell of growing things and of certain skies and of the tithes in river miles and of belts of sea. If a man would understand this great thing, England, which is now in peril and which has so worked throughout the world, he must not consider the accident of England's success and failure. Nour certain empty lands filled without battle, nor others ruined by folly, nor certain arts singularly discovered and perfected by England, nor other arts as singularly neglected and decayed. Nor must he contrast the passionate love of England with some high religion of which it takes the place, nor with some active work in contrast with which it seems so empty and an unproducing thing. He must not set it against a creed. It is not so high as that, nor against a conquest or a true empire such as Spain and Rome possessed. If a man would understand the love of England, he must do what hardly anyone would dare to do. That is, he must clearly envision England defeated in a final war and ask himself, what should I do then? The end of Section 28, the end of Chapter 26, Section 29, this and that and the other. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Section 29, Chapter 27, The Storm There is a contentable habit of mind, contentable in intellect, not in morals, which would withdraw from the mass of life the fecundity of perception. The things that we see are, according to the interpretation of the mystics, every one of them symbols and masks of things unseen. The mystics have never proved their theory true, but it is undoubtedly true that the perception of things when it is sane is manifold. It is true that as we grow older the perception of things is increasingly manifold, and that one perception breathes one hundred others, so that we advance through life as through a pageant, enjoying in greater and greater degree, day by day. If we open ourselves to them, the glorious works of God. There is a detestable habit of mind, which either does not understand or sneers at or despises or even wholly misses, when it is persisted in, this faculty for enjoyment, which even our gross senses endow us with. This evil habit of the mind will have us neglect first color for form, then form for mere number. It would have us reject those imitations of high and half-remembered things, which a new aspect of a tree or a house or of a landscape arouses in us. It would compel us to forget, or let gross stale, the pleasure with which the scent of woods blessed us in early youth. Perpetually this evil habit of the mind would flatten the diversity of our lives, suck out the sap of experience, kill humor, and exhaust the living spring. It whispers to us the falsehood that years in their advance leave us in some way less alive. It adds to the burden upon our shoulders, not a true weight of sad knowledge as life, however well-lived, must properly do, but a useless drag of despair. It would make us numb. In the field of letters it would persuade us that all things may be read and known, and that nothing is worth the reading or the knowing, and that the loveliest rhythms or the most subtle connotations of words are but tricks to be despised. In the field of experience it would convince us that nothing bears a fruit, and that human life is no more than anarchy or at best an unexplained fragment. Even in that high us to fields, the field of service, it would persuade us that there is nothing to serve. And if we are convinced of that, then every faculty in us turns inward and becomes useless, maybe called abortive and fails its end. These thoughts have rose in me as I watched to-day from the platform of my mill the advance of a great storm-cloud. For in the majestic progress which lifted itself into the sky and marched against the north from the channel, I perceived that which the evil, modern, drying habit of thought would neglect and would attempt to make material, and also that which I very well knew was it is awfulness allied to the life of the soul. For very many days the intense heat had parched the wheeled. The leaves dropped upon the ash and the oak. The grass was brown, our wells had failed. The little river of the clay was no more than several stagnant pools. We thought the fruits would wither and our houses, not built for such draughts and such an ardent sun were like ovens long after the cool of the evening had come. At the end of some days one bank of cloud and then another had passed far off east or far to the west, over the distant forest ridge or over the Egdean side, missing us. We had printed stuff from London telling us how it had rained in London as though rain falling in London ever fell upon earth or nourished fruits and men. We thought that we were not to be allowed any little rain out of heaven. But today the great storm came up marching in a dark breastplate and in skirts of rain with thunders about it, and it was personal. It came right up out of the sea. It walked through the gate which the river Edur has pierced, leaving upon either side the high chalk hills, the crest of its helmet carried a great plume of white and menacing cloud. No man seeing this creature as it moved solemn and panoply could have mistaken the memory or the knowledge that stirred within him at the sight. This was that great master, that great friend, that great enemy, that great idol, for it has been all of these things, which since we have till the earth we have watched, we have welcomed, we have combatted, we have unfortunately worshiped. This was that god of the storm which has made such tremendous music in the poets. The parish church, which had seemed under the heart-blue sky of the early morning a low brown thing with its square tower of the Templars and of the second crusade, stood up now white, menacing and visionary against the ink of the cloud. The many trees of the rich man's park beyond were taller, especially the elms. They stood absolutely and stubbornly still. No leaves upon them moving at all. The downs and hour away first fell dull, low and leaden. These were but half-seen and at last faded altogether into the gloom. The many beasts round about were struck with silence. The fowls nestled together and the only sign that animate nature gave of an approaching stroke was the winning of a horse in a stable, where the door was left wide open to the stifling air, and the mad circling swooping of a bird, distracted by the change in the light. For the sun was now blotted out, and the enormous thing was upon us like a foe. First I saw from the high platform of my mill a sort of driving mist or whirl, which at first I thought to be an arrow shoot of rain, but looking again I saw it to be no more than the dust of many parched fields and lanes driving before the edge of the thunder. There was a wind preceding all this like a herald. In a moment the oppressive air grew cool. It grew cool by a leap. It was like the descent into a cellar. It was like the opening of a mine door to a draft. The vigor of the mine, dulled by so many days of heat and nights without refreshment, leaped up to greet this change, which, though it came under a solemn and uncomforting aspect, gave breath and expansion. One might for some five minutes have imagined, as the dust clouds advanced and the furious shaking of the trees and hedges a mile away began to be heard, as well as seen, that the call of coolness for work had come. Then that wall of wind hit the two great oaks of my neighbor next to my own frontier trees. The fan of the mill groaned, turning a little, it turned furiously, and the strength of the storm was upon us. It lighted, single and double and fourfold. The blinding fire sprang from arch to arch of an incredible architecture, higher than anything you might dream of, larger than the mountains of other lanes. The thunder ran through all this, not very loud, but continuous, and a sweep of darkness followed like a train after the movement of the cloud. White wreaths, blown out in jets, as though by some caprice in willful shapes, showed here and there, and here and there against such a blackness, gray cloudless, drifted, very rapidly, hurrying, distracted, left and right, without purpose. All the while the rain fell. The village and the landscape and the wheeled, the rape, the valley, all my county, you would have said, was swallowed up, occupied and overwhelmed. It was more majestic than an army. It was a victory more absolute than any achievement of arms, and while it flashed and poured and proclaimed itself with its continual noise, it was itself, as it were, the thing in which we lived, and the mere earth was but a scene upon which the great storm trod for the purpose of its pageant. When the storm had passed over Northward to other places beyond, and when at evening the stars came out very numerous and clear in a sky which the thunder had not cooled, and when the doubtful summer haze was visible again, very low upon the distant horizon over the English sea, the memory of all this was like the memory of a complete achievement. No one who had seen the storm could doubt purpose or meaning in the vastness of things, nor the creative word of Almighty God. CHAPTER XXVIII THE VALLEY Everybody knows I fancy that kind of landscape in which hills seem to lie in a regular manner, fold on fold one range behind the other, until it lasts behind them all, some higher and grander range dominates and frames the whole. The infinite variety of light and air and accident of soil provide all men, save those who live in the Great Plains, with examples of this sort. The traveler in the dry air of California or of Spain, watching great distances from the heights, will recollect such landscapes all his life. They were the reward of his long assents, and they were the sunset visions which attended his effort when at last he had climbed to the utmost ridge of his day's westward journey. Such a landscape does a man see from the edges of the Guadarrama, looking eastward and southward toward the very distant hills at Guard Toledo and the ravines of the Tagus. Such a landscape does a man see at sunrise from the highest of the Savines, looking right eastward to the dawn as it comes up in the pure and cold air beyond the Alps, and shows you the falling of their foothills, a hundred miles of them, right down to the trench of the Rome. And by such a landscape is a man gladdened when upon the escarpments of the Tulemen he turns back and looks westward over the Stockton Plain toward the coast range which guards the Pacific. The experience of such a sight is one peculiar in travel, or for that matter, if a man is lucky enough to enjoy it near his home, insistent and reiterated upon the mind of the home-dwelling man. Such a landscape, for instance, makes a man praise God, if his house is upon the height of Mendip, and he can look over falling hills right over the veil of the Siverne toward the rank above rank of the wealth's salinities beyond, until the straight line and height of the Black Mountain against the sky bounces view and frames it. It is the character of these landscapes to suggest at once a vastness, a diversity, and a seclusion. When a man comes upon them unexpectedly he can forget the perpetual toil of men and imagine that those who dwell below in the nearer glens before him are exempt from the necessities of this world. When such a landscape is part of a man's dwelling place, though he well knows that the painful life of men within those hills is the same hard business that it is throughout the world, yet his knowledge is modified and comforted by the permanent glory of the thing he sees. The distant and high range that bounces view makes a sort of wall, cutting the country off and guarding it from whatever may be beyond. The succession of lower ranges suggests secluded valleys, and the reiterated woods distant and more distant convey an impression of fertility, more powerful than that of corn in the harvest upon the lowlands. Sometimes it is a whole province that is thus grasped by the eye, sometimes in the summer haze of the northern lands, a few miles only. Always this scenery inspires the onlooker with a sense of completion and end of repose, and at the same time I think with worship and with awe. Now once such group of valleys there was, hill above hill, forest above forest, and beyond it a great noble range unwooded and high against heaven, guarding all the place which I for my part knew from the day when I first came to know anything of this world. There is a high place under fir trees, a place of sand and bracken in South England, when such a view was always present to my eye in childhood, and there said I to myself, even in childhood, a man should make his habitation. In those valleys is the proper settling place for a man. And so there was, there was a steadying for me in the midst of those hills. It was a little place which had grown up as my county grows, the house throwing out arms and layers and making itself over ten generations of men. One roam was paneled in the oak of the seventeenth century, but that had been a novelty in its time for the walls upon which the panel stood were of the late fifteenth, oak and brick intermingled. Another roam was large and light built in the manner of one hundred and fifty years ago which people call Georgian. It had been thrown out south, and this is quite against our custom, for our older houses looked east and west to take all the sun and to present a corner to the south west and the storms. So they stand still. It had rounded a solid corner which the modern men of the towns would have called ugly, but there was ancestry in it. And further on this house had modern roominess, stretching in one new wing after another, and it had a great set of buyers and barns, and there was a copse and some six acres of land. Over a deep gully stood over against it a little town that was the mother of the place, and altogether this good place was enclosed, silent and secure. The fish that misses the hook regrets the worm. If this is not a Chinese proverb, it ought to be. That little farm and setting and those six acres that ravine those trees, that aspect of the little mothering town, the wooded hills fold above fold, the noble range beyond, all these were not and for ever will not be mine. For all I know some man quite unacquainted with that land took the place, rumbling for a debt, or again for all I know it may have been bought by a blind man who could not see the hills, or by some man who is seeing them perpetually regretted the flat marshes of his home. Today, this very day, up high on the Egtian side, not thinking of such things, through a gap in the trees, I saw again after so many years set one behind the other, the woods, wave upon wave, the summer heat, the high bare range guarding all, and in the midst of that landscape set like a toy, the little sabine farm. Then said I, to this place I might not know, continue, go and serve whom you will. You were not altogether mine because you would not be, and today you are not mine at all. You will regret it, perhaps, and perhaps you will not. There was verse in you, perhaps, or prose, or much better still, for all I know, contentment for a man. But you refused, you lost your chance, good-bye. And with that I went on into the wood, and beyond the gap, and saw the sight no more. It was ten years since I had seen it last, the little sabine farm, it may be ten years before I see it again, or it may be forever. Then as I went through the woods, saying to myself, You lost your chance, my little sabine farm, you lost your chance. Another part of me at once replied, Ah, and so did you. Then by way of repost I answered in my mind, Not at all, for the chance I never had, all I have lost is my desire. No more. No, not only your desire, said the voice to me within, but the fulfillment of it. And when that reply came, I naturally turned as all men do on hearing such interior replies, to a general consideration of regret, and was prepared, if any honest publisher should have come whistling through that wood, with an offer proper to the occasion, to produce no less than five volumes on the nature of regret. Its mortal sting, its bitter sweetness, its power to keep alive in man the pure passions of the soul, its hinted immortality, its memory of heaven. But the wood was empty, the offer did not come, the moment was lost. The five volumes will hardly now be written. In place of them I offer poor this, which you may take or leave. But I beg leave before I end, to cite certain words very nobly, attached to the great end, the griffin, which has its foundation set far off in another place, in the town of March, in the sad fenn-land near the eastern sea. England my desire, what have you not refused? The end of Section 30, the end of Chapter 28, Section 31, this, and that, and the other. This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. This and that and the other, by Hilaire Bellock. Section 31, Chapter 29, A Conversation in Andorra The other day, indeed some months ago, I was in the company of two men who were talking together and were at cross-purposes. The one was an Englishman, acquainted with the Catalonian tongue, and rather proud of knowing it. The other was a citizen of the Republic of Andorra. The first had the advantage of his fellow in worldwide travel, the reading of many newspapers and, beside his thorough knowledge of Catalonian, a smattering of French, German, and American. I was touched to see the care and deference, and good fellowship, which this superior extended to the inferior in this Kiloquy. I did not hear the beginning of it. It was the early middle part which I came in for. It was conducted loudly and with gestures, upon the part of the Andorran, good-humoredly but equally openly, on the part of the Englishman who said, I grant you that life is very hard for some of our own town dwellers in spite of the high wages they obtain. To which the Andorran answered, There is nothing to grant you, Grace, for I would not believe their life was hard, but I was puzzled by what you told me, for I could not make out how they earn so much money, and yet look so extraordinary. The Andorran showed by this that he had visited England. At this the Englishman smiled pleasantly enough and said, Do you think me extraordinary? The Andorran was a little embarrassed. No, no, he said, You do not understand the word I use. I do not mean extraordinary to see. I mean unhappy and lacking humanity. The Englishman smiled more genially still in his good wholesome beard and said, Do I look to you like that? No, said the Andorran gravely, Nor does that gentleman whom you pointed out to me when we left France, your English patron Mr. Bernstein, I think. You were both well fed and well clothed, and what is more, I know nothing of what you earn. But in Andorra we ask about this man and that man indifferently, and especially about the poorest. And when I asked you about the poorest in your towns, you told me that there was not one of them who did not earn, when he was fully working, twenty-five pestus a week. Now with twenty-five pestus a week, oh-ho. Why I could live on five, and five weeks of twenty saved is a hundred pestus, and with a hundred pestus, oh-ho. One can buy a great brood-sour, or if one is minded for a brand year, the best coat in the world, or again a little mule just fold, which in two years, mind you, in two years, and here he weighed his finger, will be a great fine beast, and here he extended his arms, and the next year will carry a man over the hills, and will sell for five hundred pestus. Yes, it will. In your familiar puzzled, well said he, leaning forward, ticking off on his fingers and becoming practical, there's your pound a week. The Andorra nodded. He began ticking it off on his fingers also. Now of course the man is not always in work. If he is lazy, said the Andorran with angry eyes, the neighbors shall see to that. Now, said the Englishman, irritated, you don't understand. He can't always find someone to give him work. But who gives work, said the Andorran. Work is not given. And then he laughed. Our trouble is to get the youngsters to do it, and he laughed more loudly. You don't understand, repeated the Englishman, pestered. He can't work unless someone allows him to work for him. Pooh, said the Andorran. He could cut down trees, or dig, or get up into the hills. Why, said the Englishman, with wondering eyes, the police would have had him in. The Andorran looked mournful. He had heard the name of something dangerous in this country. He thought it was a ghost that haunted lonely places and strangled men. Well then went on the Englishman in a practical fashion again, ticking on his fingers. Let us say he can work three weeks out of the five. Yes, said the Andorran, bewildered. He gets, let us say, three times a week's wage in five weeks. I don't mind calling an average of 20% as if you like, or even 18. What is an average, said the Andorran, frowning. An average, said the Englishman, impatiently. Oh, an average is what he gets all lumped up. Do you mean, said the Andorran gravely, that he gets 18 Posadas every Saturday? No, no, no, stuck in the Englishman. 25 Posadas, as you call them, when he can get work and nothing when he can't. Good Lord, said the Andorran, with wide eyes and crossing himself. How does the poor fellow know whether police will not be at him again? It is enough to break a man's heart. Well, don't argue, said the Englishman keen upon his tail. He gets an average, anyhow, of 18 Posadas, as you call them, a week. Now you see, however wretched he is, five of those will go and rent, and if he is a decent man, seven. The Andorran was utterly at sea. But if he is wretched, why should he pay? But if he is decent, why should he pay still more? he asked. Why, damn it all, said the Englishman, exploding, a man must live. Precisely, said the Andorran rigidly. That is why I am asking the question. He pays this tax, you say, five Posadas, if he is wretched, and seven if he is decent. But if a man may be decent, although he is wretched, and who is so brutal as to ask tax of the poor? It isn't a tax, said the Englishman. He pays it for his house. But a man could buy a house, said the Andorran, with a few payments like that. The Englishman sighed, Do listen to my explanation. He's got to pay it anyhow. Well, said the Andorran, sighing in his churn. You must have a wicked king, but these guys cannot spend it all on his pleasures. It isn't paid to the king, God bless him, said the Englishman. The man pays it to his landlord. And suppose he doesn't, said the Andorran defiantly. Well, the police began the Englishman, and the Andorran's face showed that he was afraid of occult powers. So, there you see, when on the Englishman, calculating, along with rapid content, he's only got thirteen. The Andorran was willing to stretch a point. Well, he said doubtfully, I will grant it thirteen. And with thirteen percent, as a man can do well enough. His wife milks, and it does not cost much to put a little cotton on the child. And then, of course, if he is too poor to buy a bed, why, there is his straw. Straw is not decent, and we don't allow it, said the Englishman, firmly. He doesn't buy a bed always, sometimes he rents it. I don't understand, said the Andorran. I don't understand. It was a little pause, during which neither of the two men looked at the other. The Englishman went on, good-naturedly, and laboriously explaining. Now, let us come to bread. Yes, said the Andorran, eagerly. Man lives by bread and wine. Well, said the Englishman, ignoring his interruption. You see, bread, for the lot of them, would come to half that money. Yes, said the Andorran, nodding. You are quite right. Bread is a very serious thing. He sighed. Half of it, continued the Englishman, goes in bread, and then, of course, he has to get a little meat. Certainly, said the Andorran. Bacon, anyhow, the Englishman went on, and there's boots. Oh, he could do without boots, said the Andorran. No, he can't, said the Englishman. They all have to have boots, and then you see there's tea. The Andorran was interested in hearing about tea. You Englishmen are so fond of tea, you said, smiling. I have noticed that you ask for tea. Juan has tea to sell. The Englishman nodded genially. I will buy some of him, he said. Well, go on, said the Andorran. And there's a little backie, of course, and he gave the prices of both those articles. There are little more than you might think, continued the Englishman, a little confused. There are taxed, you see. Next again, said the Andorran. Yes, said the Englishman rapidly, not much, besides which I haven't said anything was taxed yet. They pay about double on their tea, and about four times on the value of the tobacco. But they don't feel it. Oh, if they get regular work, they're all right. Then, said the Andorran, some of you get all up, they ought to do very well. Yes, they ought, said the Englishman, but somehow they're not steady of themselves. They get pauperized. What is that, said the Andorran? Why, they get to expect things for nothing. They think, said the Andorran cheerfully, that good things fall from the sky. I know that sort. We have them. He thought he had begun to understand, and just after he had said this, we came to a village. I must here tell you what I ought to have put at the beginning of these few lines. That I heard this conversation in Andorra Valley itself, while four of us, the Andorran guide, the Englishman myself, and an ironist, were proceeding through the mountains riding upon mules. We come to the village of Ann Camps, and there we all got down to enter the Inn. We had a meal together, and paid the four of us exactly five chillings and three pence altogether, for wine and bread, cooked meat, plenty of vegetables, coffee, liqueur, and a cigar. This was the end of the conversation in Andorra. It was my business to return to England after the holiday to write an essay on a point in political economy to which I did justice, while the conventions of academic writing prevented me from quoting in that essay this remarkable experience. The end of Section 31, the end of Chapter 29. Section 32, this and that and the other. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This, that and the other, by Hilaire Baloch. Section 32, Chapter 30. Paris and the East. One of the things that set a modern man wondering is the nature of the survivor of our times. It is customary to say that all human things begin and end. And if you will take a period long enough, of course it is true, for at last the world itself shall dissolve. But when men point to dead empires, as Egypt or Assyria are dead, or when they point to a fossilized civilization, as it seems according to travelers that certain civilizations of the East are fossilized, or when they point to little broken cities where once were famous towns, one is tempted to remember that to all these there is an exceptional glorious sort which is our cells. Like Europe, the Europe that was made by the Christian faith, and in the first four centuries of our era, lives on from change to change in a most marvelous way. And for now, two thousand years has not seemed capable of declining. You have in the history of it resurrection after resurrection, and through all those rapid and fantastic developments, transformations far more rapid and far more fantastic than any other of which we have a record, the sort of inner fixity of type remains, like the individual soul of the man which makes him always himself in spite of accident, and in spite of the process of age. Only Europe differs from such a metaphor in this, that it is like some man not subject, it would seem, to mortality. This thought to which I perpetually return occurred to me as I handled the book on Paris, the illustrations of which were impressions gathered by a Japanese artist. Such a contrast will call up in the minds of many the contrast between something very old and something very new. A reader might say as he glanced at this book, here is one of the most ancient things we have, the oriental mind, and it is looking at one of the freshest and most modern things we have, modern Paris. I confess that to me the contrast is of another kind. I should say, here is something which is, so far as its inner force goes, immovable, the oriental mind, and this is how it looks at the most mobile thing on earth, the heart of Gaul, yet the mobile thing has a history almost as long as, and far more full than the immobile thing. Upon a central page of this book I found a really splendid bit of drawing. It is an impression of the statue of the Republic under a cold dawn. Now when one thinks what that statue means, what portion of the stoical philosophy re-arisen after so many centuries it embodies, what furious combats have raged around that idea. I mean combats, not debates, pain, not rhetoric, men dying in great numbers and desiring to kill others as they died. When one considers that statue but the other day with the raging mob of workmen around it, and when one suddenly remembers that the whole thing is, after all, only of the last hundred years, what a multiplicity of life this chief of our European cities possesses in one's eyes. The admirable pictures in this book are drawn as nearly in the European manner as one could expect, but the feeling is an unchanging feeling which we know in eastern things. The mind is, like deep, bed-level water, never stirred by wind, a big lake in a crater of the hills. But the thing drawn is as moving and as living as the air. I wonder whether this artist, as he stood and drew, felt as a European field when he stands and draws in any one of our immemorial sights, by the pool of London, or at the top of the Rue Saint-Jacques, or in the place of the martyrdom of Toulouse, or looking at the most ancient yellow dusts of Toledo, from over the tumbling strength of the Tegus. He may have felt it, perhaps, for all his work, even the little introduction that he has written, shows that astonishing adaptability and exceedingly rapid intelligence, which are the marks of the Japanese today. But if he felt it, he must have felt it by education. For us it is in our blood. We stand upon those sights, and we feel ourselves in and part of a stream of life that seems almost incapable of ending. And that brings me back to where I began. How much longer will our civilization endure? Will it end? It has many enemies, most of them unconscious, as modern Europe. It has men within it who imagine that the correction of some large abuse and the withdrawal of some considerable part of its fabric in the correction of that abuse is a matter concerning only their one generation. These men visibly put in peril the balance of that civilization by their very enthusiasm. It has a lesser number of other enemies within itself, enemies more dangerous who do believe that some quite new thing, holy alien to the soul of Europe, can be imposed upon that soul. These men are always for anarchy. They delight in emphasizing all that seems to diminish the responsibility and the freedom of citizens. And it is their pleasure to accelerate every tendency which may destroy from whatever side our permanent solution of domestic and of natural things, families, properties, armies. The common faith which was, as it were, the cement of our civilization has been hit so hard that some do ask themselves openly the question that was only whispered some little time ago, whether that cement still holds. It is quite certain that if the last symbol and reality disintegrates, if the Catholic Church leaves it, Europe has come to an end. But these questions are not yet to be met by any reply. When I ask myself these questions, and I always do when I see the same, going by the walls that were ceasars parlaying ground with the Chiefs, Dionysius Prison, Julian's Office, Dagoburt's Palace, and which have been subject to everything from Charlemagne to the Bourbons, and which have within the memory of men whom I myself have known, ended the monarchy and seen passing by a holy new society, when I ask myself those questions. I answer less and less with every year. Time was, in the university, say, twenty years ago, one would have said it is all over. Everything that can destroy us has triumphed. Time was, say, ten years ago in the heat of a particular struggle which raged all over the West, one could have said with the enthusiasm of the fight that continuity would win. But today, whether because one has accumulated knowledge or because things are really more confused, it is difficult to reply. A man with our knowledge and our experience of what Europe has been and is, standing in the gray and decayed Roman city of the fifth century, and watching the little barbarian troop riding into Leticia, might have said that a gradual darkness would swallow us all, especially since he knew that just beyond the narrow seas in eastern Britain, a dense pole then covered the corpse of the Roman civilization. A man working on the tour Saint-Jacques, the last of the Gothic, might have seen nothing but anarchy and the end of all good work in the change that was surging round him, the Huguenots, the new Splendor, the cruelty, and the making of lies. Certainly, those who were present in Paris before the 10th of August, 92, thought an ended come and believed the revolution to be most unfruitful and tempestuous death, imagining Europe to have no hope but in the possible extinction of the flame. All three judgments would have been wrong. And when one takes that typical Paris again and handles it and looks at it and thinks of it as the example and the symbol of all our time, just as one is beginning to say, the thing is dying, the memory of similar deaths that were not deaths in the past returns to one, and one must be silent. Never was Europe less conscious of herself. Never did she more freely admit the forces that destroy than she admits them today. Never was evil more insolently or more glaringly in power. Never had it less fear of chastisement than in the whirlwind of our time. If that whirlwind is mechanical, and if this fast anarchy of commerce, these blaring papers, these sudden fortunes, these frequent and unparalleled huge wars, are the breaking up of all that once made Europe, then the answer to the question is plain. But it may be that these things are not mechanical but organic, seeds surviving in the ruin which will grow up into living forms. We shall see. CHAPTER 31 THE HUMAN CHARLOTEN It is curious that the scientific spirit has never tabulated any research, even superficial, upon the human type of charlatan. It is the essence of a charlatan that he aims at the results of certain excellences in the full consciousness that he does not possess those excellences, the material upon which he works is twofold, the ignorance and the noble appetite for reverence in his fellow men. Where animals are concerned, the scientific spirit has tabulated a good deal of careful research in this department. We know fairly well the habits of the cuckoo. What seemingly harmless organisms are poisonous to us, and why, we have discovered and can catalog the successful deception practiced for purposes of secrecy or greed by such and such a creature. We can discover in our books. And no one has tabulated the human charlatan. An admirable example upon which one can test the whole theory of charlatanism is the ridiculous Lombroso. To begin with you have the name. He was no more of an Italian than Disraeli or than the present mayor of Rome, but his Italian name deceives and is intended to deceive, not necessarily that it was assumed, but that it was paraded as national. Hundreds of honest men thought themselves praising the Italian character and Italian civilization when the newspapers, themselves half-duped, had persuaded them to blow the trumpet of Lombroso. One of the characteristics of the charlatan is that he parades the object with which he desires to dupe you and simultaneously hides his methods in pushing the thing forward. The purveyor of cheap jewelry and whitechapel does this. He lets you have the glitter of his article full and strong. Where he got it, of his own connection with it, and what it is, you learn last in the business or not at all. The whole process is one of suggestion, or as our forefathers called it, hoodwinking. Lombroso was true to type in this regard. The European press was deluge one day with notices, praise, views of a book which was called Degeneration. It was a tenth-rate book, but we were compelled to hear of it. No words were fine enough to describe its author. We learnt that his name was no doubt. There was no process of logic in the book, there was no labor. Where it asserted, it was a mass of assertions. It usually trespassed on ground which the author could not pretend to any familiarity with. Those who are already alive through the international trick were suspicious and upon their guard from the very moment that they smelt the thing. The infinitely larger number, who do not understand the nature of international forces, were taken in. For one man who read the pharaoh go, a hundred were talked to magnify the name of Nordau. Only when this process of suggestion had well sunk in did the public casually learn that the said Nordau was a connection of lambrosos. A book of greater value, which is not saying much, proceeded from the pan of one pharaoh. It proposed an examination of the Roman Empire and the Roman people. Its thesis was, of course, a degradation of both. For one man who so much as saw that book, a hundred went away with vague impression that a certain great pharaoh dominated European thought. He gave opinions, among other things, upon the polity of England so absurd and ignorant, that had the process of suggestion not run on before, those opinions would only have attained some small measure of notoriety from their very fatuousness. But the international trick had reversed the common and healthy process of human thought. We were not allowed to judge the man by his work. No, we must accept the work on the authority of the man. Many after the trick had been successfully worked, did it come out that Ferrero was a connection of lambrosos. Lambrosos' own department of charlain-tree was to attack Christian morals in the shape of denying man's power of choice between good and evil. In another epic, and with other human material to work upon, his stock and trade would have taken some other form. But lambroso had been born into that generation immediately preceding our own, whose chief intellectual vice was materialism. A name could be cheaply made upon the lines of materialism, and lambroso took to it as naturally as his spiritual forerunners took to rationalist deism, and his spiritual descendants will take to spurious mysticism. We shall have, in the near future, our lambrosos of the turning table, the wrapping devil, and the manifesting dead great ant. Indeed this development coincided with his old age. But as things were, the easiest charlain-tree in his years of vigor was to be pursued upon materialist lines, and upon materialist lines did the worthy lambroso proceed. His method was childishly simple, and we ought to blush for our time, or rather for that of our immediate seniors, that it should have duped anybody. But it was far from childishly guileless. When the laws are chiefly concerned in defending the possessions of those already wealthy, and when society in the decline or depression of religion takes to the worshiping of wealth, those whom the laws will punish are generally poor. Such a time was that into which lambroso was born. No man was executed for treason. New men were imprisoned for it. Cheating on a large scale was an avenue to social advancement in most of the progressive European countries. The purveying of false news was a way to fortune. The Forstaller and the Breiber were masters of the Senate. The sword was sheathed. The popular instinct which would repress and punish cowardice oppression and the sexual dominations of the rich and their cruelties had no outlet for its expression. The prisons of Europe were filled in the main with the least responsible, the weakest-willed, and the most unfortunate of the very poor. We ought to lambroso the epic-making discovery that the weakest-willed, the least responsible, and the most unfortunate of the very poor often suffer from physical degradation. With such an intellectual equipment lambroso erected the majestic structure of human irresponsibility. Two hundred men and women are arrested for picking pockets in such as such a district in the course of a year. The contempt for human dignity, which is characteristic of modern injustice, permits these poor devils to be treated like so many animals, to be thrashed, tortured, caged, and stripped, measured, recorded, dealt with as vile bodies for experiment. The fact that lambroso, or for that matter anyone possessed of a glimmering of human reason, can see that of these two hundred unfortunate wretches, a large proportion will be diseased or malformed, than would be the case among two hundred taken at random among the better fed or better housed and more carefully nurtured citizens. The charlatan is enclovered. He gathers his statistics. Twenty-three percent, squint, eighteen percent, have lice. Really conclusive, no less than ninety-three percent suffer from metagrobialization of the hyper-dromedaries, which is scientist Greek for the consequences of not having enough to eat. It does not take much knowledge of men and things to see what the charlatan can make of such statistics. Lambroso pumps the method dry and then produces a theory uncommonly comfortable to the well to do, that their fellow man, if unfortunate, can be treated as irresponsible chattels. There is the beginning and the end of the whole humbug. The end of section thirty-three. Section thirty-four. This and that and the other. This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. This and that and the other. By Hilaire Belog. Section thirty-four. Chapter thirty-one continued. The human charlatan. There is the beginning and the end of the whole humbug. With a characteristic lack of reason which is at once the weakness and the strength of this vicious claptrap, a totally disconnected and equally obvious series of facts is dragged in. The men drink too much or if they have inherited insanity or are in any other way afflicted by their own fault or that of others, in the action of the will they will be prone to irresponsibilities and to follies. And where such irresponsibilities and follies endanger the comfort of the well to do, the forces of modern society will be used to restrain them. Their acts of violence or of unrestrained cupidity, being unaccompanied by calculation, will lead to the lock up. And so you have another stream of statistics showing that alcoholism, which is scientists for drinking too much, and epilepsy and lunacy, do not make for material success. On these two disparate legs poses the rickety structure which has probably already done its worst in European jurisprudence and against which the common sense of society is already reacting. Way for man, the charlotte tree of that caliber has no very permanent effect. It is too silly and too easily found out. If Lambroso had for one moment intended a complete theory of materialist morals or had for one moment believed in the stuff which he used for self-advertisement, he would have told us how physically to distinguish the cosmopolitan and unreasonable financier, the fraudulent company worker, the trader, the tyrant, the pornographer, and the coward. These in high places are the curse of modern Europe, not the most wretched of the very poor. Of course Lambroso could tell us nothing of the sort, for there is nothing to tell. Incidentally, it is worthy of a remark that this man was one of those charlatans who are found out in time. The sense revolted and in revolting managed to expose its enemy very effectively, while that enemy was still alive. A hundred tricks were played upon the fellow. It is sufficient to quote two. After a peculiarly repulsive trial for murder in Paris, a wag sent the photograph of two hands, a right hand and a left hand to the great criminologist, telling him they were those of the murderer and asking for his opinion. He replied in a document crammed with the pompous terms of the scientific cheap-jack, hybrid Greek and Latin, and barbarous in the extreme. He discovered malformations in the fingers and twenty other mysteries of his craft, which exactly proved why these hands were necessarily and by the predestination of blind nature the hands of a murderer. Then it was that the wag published his letter and replied with a grave annotation that the left hand was his own, he was a man of letters, and the right hand that of an honest fellow who washed down his carriage. The other anecdote is as follows. L'Ambroso produced a piece of fatuous nonsense about the political criminal woman. He based it upon the skull of Charlotte Corday, which skull he duly analyzed, measured and labeled, with the usual regiment of long and incomprehensible words. Upon the first examination of evidence, it turned out that the skull was no more Charlotte Corday's than Queen Anne's. A medical student had sold it to a humble curiosity shop, and the dealer, who seems to have had some intellectual affinity with the L'Ambroso tribe, had labeled it for purposes of sale, the skull of Charlotte Corday. L'Ambroso swallowed it, the ass. CHAPTER XXXII The use of analogy, which is so wise and necessary a thing in historical judgment, has a knack of slipping into the falsest forms. When ancient civilization broke down, its breakdown was accompanied by the infiltration of barbaric auxiliaries into the Roman armies by the settlement of barbarians, probably in small numbers, upon Roman land, and in some provinces, by devastating, though not usually permanent, eruptions of barbaric hordes. The presence of these foreign elements, coupled with the gradual loss of so many arts, led men to speak of the barbarian invasions, as though these were a principal cause of what was in reality, no more than the old age and fatigue of an antique society. Upon the model of this conception, men watching the dissolution of our own civilization today, or at least its corruption, have asked themselves whence those barbarians would come that should complete its final ruin. The first, the least scholarly, and the most obvious idea, was that of the swapping of Europe by the East. It was a conception which required no learning, nor even any humor. It was widely adopted, and it was ridiculous. Others with somewhat more grasp of reality coined the phrase that the barbarians which should destroy the civilization of Europe were already breeding under the terrible conditions of our great cities. This guess contained indeed a half-truth, for, though the degradation of human life in the great industrial cities of England, and the United States, was not a cause of our decline, it was very certainly a symptom of it. Our over-industrial society, notably in this country and in Germany, while increasing rapidly in numbers, is breeding steadily from the worst and most degraded types. But the truth is that no such mechanical explanation will suffice to set forth the causes of a civilization's decay. Before the barbarian in any form can appear in it, it must already have weakened. If it cannot absorb or reject an alien element, it is because its organism has grown enfeebled, and its powers of digestion and excretion are lost or deteriorated. And whoever would restore any society which menaces to fall must busy himself about the inward nature of that society much more than its external dangers or the mere mechanical and numerical factors of peril to be discovered within it. Whenever we look for the barbarians, whether in the decline of our own society, or that of some past one, whose historical fate we may be studying, we are looking rather for a visible effect of disease than for its source. Nonetheless, to mark those visible effects is instructive, and without some conspectus of them it will be impossible to diagnose the disease. A modern man may therefore well ask where the barbarians are that shall enter into our inheritance, or whose rhymes shall, if it be permitted, at least accompany, even if they cannot affect, the destruction of Christendom. With that word Christendom, a chief part of the curious speculation is at once suggested. Whether the scholar hates or loves, rejects or adopts, ridicules or admires the religious creed of Europe. He must in any case recognize two prime historical truths. The first is that the creed, which we call the Christian religion, was the soul and meaning of European civilization during the period of its active and united existence. The second is that wherever the religion characteristic of a people has failed to react against its own decay, and has in some last catastrophe perished, then that people has lost soon after its corporate existence. So much has passion taken the place of reason in matters of scholarship that plain truths of this kind, to which all history bears witness, are accepted or rejected, rather by the appetite of the reader than by his rational recognition of them, or his rational disagreement. If we will forget for a moment what we may desire in the matter, and merely consider what we know, we shall without hesitation admit both the propositions I have laid down. Christendom was Christian, not by accident or superficially, but in a formative connection. Just as an Englishman is English, or as a poem is informed by definite scheme of rhythm, it is equally true that a sign and probably a cause of society's end is the disillusion of that causative moral thing, its philosophy or creed. Now here we discover the first mark of the barbarian. Note that in the peril of English society today there is no positive alternative to the ancient philosophic tradition of Christian Europe. It has to meet nothing more substantive than a series of negations, often contradictory, but all allied in their repugnance to a fixed certitude in morals. So far has this process gone than to be writing as I am here in public, not even defending the creed of Christendom but postulating its historic place and pointing out that the considerable attack now carried on against it is symptomatic of the disillusion of our society, has about it something tamarious and odd. Next look at a secondary effect and consider how certain root institutions, native to the long development of Europe and to her individuality, are the subject of attack and note the nature of the attack. A fool will maintain that change, which is the law of life, can be presented merely as a matter of degree and that because our institutions have always been subject to change, therefore their very disappearance can proceed without the loss of all that has in the past been ourselves. But an argument of this sort has no weight with a serious observer. It is certain that if the fundamental institutions of a polity are no longer regarded as fundamental by its citizens, that polity is about to pass through the total change, which in a living organism we call death. Now the modern attack upon property and upon marriage, to take but two fundamental institutions of the European, is precisely of this nature. Our peril is not that certain men attack the one or the other and deny their moral right to exist. Our peril, rather, is that quite as much as those who attack, those who defend seem to take for granted the relativness, the artificiality, the non-fundamental character of the institution which they are apparently concerned to support. See how marriage is defended. To those who would destroy it under the plea of its inconveniences and tragedies, the answer is no longer made that good or ill it is an absolute and is intangible. The answer made is that it is convenient or useful or necessary or merely traditional. Most significant of all, the terminology of the attack is on the lips of the defense, but the contrary is never the case. Those opponents of marriage who abound in modern England will never use the term a sacrament, yet how many for whom marriage is still a sacrament will forgo the pseudo-scientific jargon of their opponents. The threat against property is upon the same lines. That property should be restored, that most citizens should enjoy it, and that it is normal to the European family in its healthy state. All this we hear less and less. More and more do we hear it defended however morbid in form or unjust in use, as a necessity, a trick which secures a greater stability for the state, or a mere power which threatens and will break its opponents tyranniously. The spirit is a broad and many another minor matter. In its most grotesque form it challenges the accuracy of mathematics. In its most vicious, the clear process of the human reason. The barbarian is as proud as a savage, in a top hat, when he talks of the elliptical or the hyperbolic universe, and tries to picture parallel straight lines converging, or diverging, but never doing anything so vulgarly old fashion as to remain parallel. The barbarian, when he has graduated, to be a pragmatist, struts like a black man in evening clothes, and believes himself superior to the gift of reason, or free to maintain that definition, limit, quantity, and contradiction are little childish things which he has outgrown. The barbarian is very certain that the exact reproduction in line or color of a thing seen is beneath him, and that a drunken blur for a line, a green sky, a red tree, and a purple cow for color, are the mark of great painting. The barbarian hopes, and that is the very mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at the pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is forever marveling that civilization should have offended him with priests and soldiers. The barbarian wonders what strange meaning may lurk in that ancient and solemn truth. In a word the barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this that he cannot make, that he can be fogged or destroyed, but that he cannot sustain, and of every barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true. We sit by and watch the barbarian, we tolerate him, in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds, refreshes us as we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there is no smile. We permit our jaded intellects to play with drugs of novelty for the fresh sensation they arouse, though we know well there is no good in them, but only wasting at the last. The other is one real interest in watching the barbarian, and one that is profitable. The real interest of watching the barbarian is not the amusement derivable from his antics, but the prime doubt whether he will succeed or no, whether he will flourish. He is, I repeat, not an agent, but merely a symptom, yet he should be watched as the symptom. It is not he in his impotence that can discover the power to disintegrate the great and ancient body of Christendom. But if we come to see him triumphant, we may be certain that that body, from causes much faster than such as he could control, is furnishing him with sustenance and forming him for a congenial soil, and that is, as much as to say, that we are dying. The end of Section 35. The end of Chapter 32 Section 36. This and that and the other This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org This and that and the other by Hilaer Bellach. Section 36. Chapter 33. On knowing the past An apprehension of the past demands two kinds of information. First the mind must grasp the nature of historic change, and must be made acquainted with the conditions of human thought in each successive period, as also with the general aspect of its revolution and progression. Secondly, the actions of men, the times, that is, the dates and hours of such actions, must be strictly and accurately acquired. Neither of these two foundations upon which repose both the teaching and the learning of history is more important than the other. Each is essential. But a neglect of the due emphasis which one or the other demands, though both be present, warps the judgment of the scholar and forbids him to apply this science to its end, which is the establishment of truth. History may be called the test of true philosophy, or it may be called in a very modern and not very dignified metaphor, the object lesson of political science, or it may be called the great story whose interest is upon another plane from all other stories, because its irony, its tragedy, and its moral are real. We're acted by real men and we're the manifestation of God. But whatever brief and epigrammatic summary we make to explain the value of history to men, the formula still remains an imperative formula for them all, and I repeat it. The end of history is the establishment of truth. A man may be ever so accurately informed as to the dates, the hours, the weather, the gestures, the type of speech, the very words, the soil, the color, the color that between them all would seem to build up a particular event. But if he is not seized of the mind which lay behind all that was human in the business, then no synthesis of his detailed knowledge is possible. He cannot give to the various actions which he knows their due sequence and proportion. He knows not what to omit or what to enlarge upon among so many or rather a potentially infinite number of facts, and his picture will not be, as somewhat put it, distorted, it will be false. He will not be able to use history for its end, which is the establishment of truth. All that he establishes by his action, all that he confirms and makes stronger, is untruth, and so far as truth is concerned, it would be far better that a man should be possessed of no history than that he should be possessed of history ill-stated as to the factor of human motive. A living man has to aid his judgment and to guide him in the establishment of truth, contemporary experience. Other men are his daily companions. The consequence and the living principles of their acts and his own are fully within his grasp. If a man is rightly informed of all the past motive and determining mind from which the present has sprung, his information will illumine and expand and confirm his use of that present experience. If he know nothing of the past, his personal observation, and the testimony of his own senses are, so far as they go, an unshakable foundation. But if he brings in aid of contemporary experience and appreciation of the past which is false, because it gives to the past a mind which was not its own, then he will not only be wrong upon that past, but he will tend to be wrong also in his conclusions upon the present. He will forever read into the plain facts before him, origins and predetermining forces, which do not explain them, and which are not connected with them in the way he imagines. And he will easily come to regard his own society, which as a wholly uninstructed man he might fairly though insufficiently have grasped through a veil of illusion and a false philosophy, until at last he cannot even see the things before his eyes. In a word it is better to have no history at all than to have a history which misconceives the general direction and the large lines of thought in the immediate and the remote past. This being evidently the case, one is tempted to say that a just estimate of the revolution and its progression of human motive in the past is everything to history, and that an accurate scholarship in the details of the chronicle in dates especially is of wholly inferior importance. Such a statement would be quite false. Scholarship in history, that is an acquaintance with the largest possible number of facts and an accurate retention of them in the memory, is as essential to this study as of that other background of motive which has just been examined. The thing is self-evident if we put an extreme case. For if a man were wholly ignorant of the facts of history and of their sequence, he could not possibly know what might lie behind the actions of the past, for we only obtain communion with that which is within and that which is foundational in human action by an observation of its external effect. A man's history, for instance, is sound and on the right lines, if he have but a vague and general sentiment of the old pagan civilization of the Mediterranean. So long as that sentiment corresponds to the very large outline and is in sympathy with the main spirit of the affair, but he cannot possess so much as an impression of the truth if he has not heard the names of certain of the great actors, if he is wholly unacquainted with the conception of a city state, and if the names of Rome, of Athens, of Antioch, of Alexandria, and of Jerusalem have never been mentioned to him. Nor will a knowledge of facts, however slight, be valuable. Contrary wise, it will be detrimental and of negative value to his judgment if accuracy in his knowledge be lacking. If he were invariably inaccurate, thinking that red, which was blue, inverting the order of any two events, and putting without fail in the summer what happened in winter or in the Germanys what took place in Gaul, his facts would never correspond with human motives of them, and his errors upon externals would at once close his avenues of access towards internal motives and suggest other and non-existent motive in its place. The End of Section 36 Section 37 This and That and the Other This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This and That and the Other by Hilaire Belock Section 37 Chapter 33 Concluded On Knowing the Past It is, of course, a childish error to imagine that the knowledge of a time grows out of a mere accumulation of observation. External things do not produce ideas. They only reveal them. And to imagine that mere scholarship is sufficient to history is to put oneself on a level with those who, in the sphere of politics, for instance, ignore the necessity of political theory and talk muddily of the working of institutions, as though it were possible to judge whether an institution were working ill or not, when one had no ideal that an institution might be designed to attain. But though scholarship is not the source of judgment in history, it is the invariable and the necessary accompaniment of it. Facts, which, to repeat, do not produce ideas but only reveal or suggest them, do nonetheless reveal and suggest them, and form the only instrument of such suggestion and revelation. Scholarship, accurate and widespread, has this further function, that it lends stuff to general apprehension of the past, which, however just, is the firmer, the larger, and the more intense, as the range of knowledge and its fixity increases. And scholarship has one more function, which is that it connects, and it connects with more and more precision in proportion as it is more and more detailed, the tendency of the mind to develop a general, and perhaps justly apprehended, idea into imaginary regions. For the mind is creative, it will still make and spin, and if you do not feed it with material, it will spin dreams out of emptiness. Thus a man will have a just appreciation of the thirteenth century in England. He will perhaps admire or will perhaps be repelled by its whole spirit, according to his temperament or his acquired philosophy. But in either case, though his general impression was just, he will tend to add to it excretances of judgment, which as the process continued, would at last destroy the true image, were not scholarship there to come in perpetually and check him in his conclusions. He admires it, he will tend to make it more national than it was, to forget its cruelties, because what is good in our own age is not accompanied by cruelty. He will tend to lend it a science it did not possess, because physical science is in our own time and accompaniment of greatness. But if he reads and reads continually, these vagaries will not oppress or warp his vision. More and more body will be added to that spirit, which he does justly, but only vaguely know. And he will at last have, with the English thirteenth century, something of that acquaintance, which one has with a human face and voice. These also are external things, and these also are the product of a soul. Indeed, though metaphors are dangerous in such a manner, a metaphor may with reservation be used to describe the effect of the chronicle of research and of accurate scholarship in the science of history. A man ill provided with such material is like one who sees a friend at a distance. A man well provided with it is like a man who sees a friend close at hand. Both are certain of the identity of the person seen, both are well founded in the absurditude, but there are errors possible to the first which are not possible to the second, and close and intimate acquaintance lends to every part of a judgment a surety which distant and general acquaintance wholly lacks. One can say something true and say it briefly, there is no more to say. The other can fill in and fill in the picture till though perhaps never complete, it is a symptotic to completion. To increase one's knowledge by research, to train oneself to an accurate memory of it, does not mean that one's view of the past is continually changing. Only a fool can think, for instance, that some document somewhere will be discovered to show that the mass of the people of London had forechains the second and ardent veneration, or that the national defence organised by the committee of public safety during the French Revolution was due to the unpopular tyranny of a secret society. But research in either of these cases, and a minute increasing acquaintance with detail, does show one, London largely apathetic in the first place, and does show one large section of rebellious feeling in the armies of the terror. It permits one to appreciate what energy and what initiative were needed for the overthrow of the stewards, and to see from how small a body of wealthy and determined men, that policy proceeded. It permits one to understand how the battles of 93 could never have been fought upon the basis of popular enthusiasm alone. It permits one to assert without exaggeration that the autocratic power of the committee of public safety and the secrecy of its action was a necessary condition of the national defence during the French Revolution. One might conclude by saying what might seem too good to be true, namely that minute and accurate information upon details, the characteristic of our time in the science of history, must of its own nature so corroborate just and general judgments of the past, that through it, when the modern phase of willful distortion is over, mere blind scholarship will restore tradition. I say it sounds too good to be true, but three or four examples of such action are already before us. Consider the Gospel of St. John, for instance, or what is called the higher criticism of the old Hebrew literature, and ask yourselves whether modern scholarship has not tended to restore the long and sane gentleman of men which, when that scholarship was still imperfect, seemed to imperil. The end of Section 37. The end of Chapter 33. Section 38. This and that and the other. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Section 38. Chapter 34. The Higher Criticism. I have long desire to make some protest against the attitude which the very learned take towards literary evidence. I know that the very learned chop and change. I know that they are in this country about fifty years behind the continent. I know that their devotion to the extraordinary, unintelligent German methods will soon be shaken by their discovery that new methods are abroad, in both senses of the word abroad. For new methods have been abroad, thank heaven, for a very long time. But I also know that a mere appeal to reason would be a very little use. So I propose here to give a concrete instance, and I submit it to the judgment of the very learned. The very learned, when they desire to fix the date or authenticity or both of a piece of literature, adopt, among other postulates, these. One, that tradition doesn't count. Two, that common sense, one's general knowledge of the time, and all that multiplex integration, which the same mind effects from a million tiny data to a general judgment, is too tiny to be worthy of their Augusts consideration. Three, that the title very learned, which gives them their authority, is tarnished by any form of general knowledge and can only be acquired by confining oneself to a narrow field in which any fool could become an absolute master in about two years. These are their negative postulates in dealing with the document. As to their positive methods of one hundred insufficient tricks, I choose in particular these. One, the establishment of the date of the document against tradition and general error by illusion discovered within it. The conception that all unusual events recorded in it are mythical, and therefore necessarily anterior to the document. Three, the supposition that religious emotion or indeed emotion of any kind vitiates record. Four, the admission of a single piece of correlative documentary evidence to destroy the reader's general judgment. Five, the fixed dogma that most writers of the past have spent most of their time in forging. Now to test these nincompoops, I will consider a contemporary document which I know a good deal about called The Path to Rome. It professes to be the record of a journey by one H. Bellock in the year 1901 from Toul in Lorraine to Rome in Italy. I will suppose that opus to have survived through some accident into a time which preserved few contemporary documents, but which had, through tradition and through a knowledge of surrounding circumstances, a popular idea of what the opening of the twentieth century was like and a pathetic belief that Bellock had taken this journey in the year 1901. This is how the very learned would proceed to teach the vulgar a lesson in skepticism. A critical examination of the document has confirmed to me in the conclusion that the so-called Path to Rome is composed of three distinct elements which I will call A, W, and Theta. See my article EHR September 13th, 113, pages 233 at sec for Theta. For W. C. Firth in Diquel and Critique, 2nd Semester 3117. Of these documents, A is certainly much earlier than the rather loose criticism of Polter in England and Bergmann upon the continent decided some years ago in the monograph of the one and the discursions which the other has incorporated in his neocatholicism in the 22nd century. The English scholar advances a certain inferior limit of AD 2208 and a doubtful superior limit of 2236. The German is more precise and fixes the date of A in a year certainly lying between 2211 and 2217. I need not here recapitulate the well-known arguments with which this view is supported. See ZM, FSMK II, ARCH, and the very interesting article of my friend Mr. Gouch in the pursuits of the AS. I may say generally that their argument reposes upon two considerations. 1. The Send Time, a coin which is mentioned several times in the book, went out of circulation before the middle of the 21st century, as we know from the only extant letter, undoubtedly genuine, of Hanrae Perot to the Prefect of Aude. This gives them their superior limit, but it is the inferior limit which concerns us most. And here the argument reposes upon one phrase. 2. Perkin's Edition, Page This phase is printed in italics and runs, deleted by the censor. It is advanced that we know that a censorship of books was first established in America, where, as I shall show, the path to Rome was written in the year 2208, and there is ample evidence of the fact that no such institution was in actual existence before the 22nd century in the English-speaking countries. Though there is mention of it elsewhere in the 21st, and a fragment of the 20th appears to allude to something of the kind in Russia at that time. Baker has confused the censorship of books with that of plays, and an unknown form of art called morum, probably a species of private recitation. Now Dr. Blick has conclusively shown in his critical edition of the Mass of Ancient Literature, commonly known as the Statute Book, that the use of italics is common to distinguish later interpolation. This discovery is here of the first importance. Not only does it destroy the case for the phrase, deleted by the censor, as a proof of an inferior limit, 2208, but in his particular instance it is conclusive evidence that we have interpolation here, for it is obvious that after the establishment of a censorship, the right would exist to delete a name in the text, and a contemporary editor would warn the reader in the fashions which he has as a fact employed. So much for the negative argument. We can be certain that after Dr. Blick's epic making discovery that even the year 2208 is not our inferior limit for A, but we have what is much better, conclusive evidence of a much earlier superior limit to which I must claim the modest title of discovery. There is a passage in A, page 170, 171, notoriously corrupt, in which a dramatic dialogue between three characters, the Duchess, Major Charles, and Clara, is no longer readable. All attempts to reconstitute her to fail, then on that account scholars have too much tended to neglect it. Now I submit that, though the passage is hopelessly corrupt, its very corruption affords us a valuable indication. The Duchess in a stage indication is made to address Major Charles. It is notorious that the term Major, applied to a certain functionary in a religious body, probably affiliated to the Jesuits, known to modern scholars under a title drawn from only contemporary fragments concerning it, has old booths ramp. This society was suppressed in America in the year 2012, and the United States were the last country in which it survived. No matter how correct therefore the text is in this passage, we may be certain that even the careless scribe took the contemporary existence of a major for granted, and we may be equally certain that even our existing version of A, incorporated in the only text we possess, was not written later than the first years of the 21st century. We have here therefore a new superior limit of capital importance, but what is even more important, we can fix with fair accuracy a new inferior limit as well. In the preface whose original attachment to A is undoubted, we have the title Captain Monologue, page 12. Note again the word Captain, an allusion to booths ramp, and in an anonymous fragment, BM, manuscript 336 and 60, bearing the title Club Gossip, I have found the following conclusive sentence. He used the Bora Stiff, and old Burton invented a brand new title for him, Captain Monologue, about a year before he died, which the old chap did an hour or two after dinner on Derby Day. Now this phrase is decisive. We have several allusions to dinner, in all eight in a doubtful ninth tabulated by Zethan in his corpus. They all refer to some great public function, the exact nature of which is lost, but which undoubtedly held a great place in political life. At one interval this function occurred we cannot tell, but the coincident allusion to Derby Day settles it. The only Lord Derby canonized by the church died in 1960, and the promulgation of beatification, the earliest date that would permit the use of the word day for this saint, was issued by Pope Bourbon 14th on May 2003. It is therefore absolutely certain that A was written at some time between the years 2003 to 2012. Nearer than that I do not profess to fix it, but I confess that the allusion, page 226 to drinking coffee, coupled with the corresponding allusion to drinking coffee in a license issued for a Lockhart's restaurant in 2006, inclines me to that precise year as the year in which A appeared, or at any rate, was written. I think in the above I have established the date of A beyond dispute. I have no case to bring forward of general conclusions, and I know that many scholars will find my argument however irrefutable disturbing, for it is universally admitted that excluding the manifestly miraculous, episodes of the oracle, the ointment of the epinal, the view of the Alps over a hundred miles, etc., which are all of them properly referred to in W and Theta respectively. A itself contains numerous passages too closely connected with the text to be regarded as additions, yet manifestly legendary, such as the perpetual allusions to spirits, and in particular to a spirit called devil, the inordinate consumption of wine, the gift of tongues, etc., etc. But I submit that a whole century, especially in a time which poolated with examples of credulity such as the flying men, the telephone, wireless telegraphy, etc., is ample to allow for the growth of these mythical features. I take it therefore as now established that A in its entirety is not later than 2012, and probably as early as 2006. Upon W, I cannot yet profess to have arrived at a decision, but I incline to put it at about 40 years later, while Theta, which includes most of the doggerel and is manifestly in another style and from another hand, is admitted to be at least a generation later than W itself. In a further paper I shall discuss the much disputed point of authorship, and I shall attempt to show that Belak, though the subject of numerous accretions was a real historical figure, and that the author of A may even have worked upon fragments preserved by oral tradition from the actual conversation of that character. That is how the damn fool's right. And with brains of that standard, Germans ask me to deny my God.