 21. The Battle of Hastings, related in the manner of Oxford and dedicated to that university. So careless were the French commanders, or more properly the French commander, for the rest were cowed by the bullying swagger of William, that the night which should have been devoted to some sort of reconnaissance, if not of a preparation of the ground, was devoted to nothing more practical than the religious exercises peculiar to the foreigners. Their army, as we have seen, was not drawn from any one land, but it was in the majority composed of Normans and Bretons. We can therefore understand the extravagant superstition which must bear the blame for what followed. Meanwhile, upon the heights above, the English host calmly prepared for battle. Fires were lit, each in its appointed place, and at these meat was cooked under the stern but kindly eyes of the sergeant-majors. These also distributed an appointed price liquor, of which the British soldier is never willing to be deprived. And as the hours advanced towards morning, the songs in which our adventurous race has ever delighted rose from the heights above the breed. The morning was misty, as is often the case over damp and marshy lands in the month of October, but the inclemency of the weather, or to speak more accurately, the superfluous moisture precipitated from an already saturated atmosphere, was of no effect upon those silent and tenacious troops of herald. It was far other with the so-called Norman host, who were full of four boatings, only too amply to be justified, of the fate that lay before them upon the morrow. It is curious to contrast the quiet skill and sagacity which marked the disposition of herald with the almost childish simplicity of William's plan, if plan it may be called. The Saxon hosts were drawn along the ridge in a position chosen with masterly skill. It afforded, as may still be seen, no dead ground for an attacking force and little cover. The Rotordendrens on the Great Lawn are modern. Their left was arranged in potents, their right was drawn up in echelon. The center followed the plan usual at that time, reposing upon the wings to its right and left and extended. The reserves were, of course, posted behind. Cavalry, as at Amdurman, played but a slight role in this typically national action, and such mounted troops as were present seemed to have been intermixed with the line in the fashion later known in the jargon of the service as the beggars quadrill. The Brigade of Guards is not mentioned in any record that I can discover, but was probably set by reversed companies in a square perpendicular to the main ravine, and a little in front of the Salian Angle, which appears upon the map at the point marked A. The terrain can be clearly determined at the present day in spite of the changes that have taken place in the intervening years. It is a fairly steep slope of hemispherical contour, interspersed with low bushes. The summit, upon which now stands our lovely English village of Battle, and the residents of one of those cultured and leisured men who formed the framework of our commonwealth, was then but a wild heath. Harold himself could be distinguished in the center of the line by his handsome features, restrained deportment, and unfailing, gentlemanly good sense, as he spoke to staff officer, orderly, and even groom with indefatigable skill. In spite of the determination observable from a great distance upon the faces of the tall Saxon line, William, with characteristic lack of balance, opened the action by ordering a charge uphill with cavalry alone. It was a piece of tactics absurdly incongruous, and one even he would never have attempted had he understood the foe that was before him, or the fate to which that foe had doomed him. The lesson dealt him was as immediate as it was severe. The foreigners were thrust headlong down the hill, and a private letter tells us how the men of Kent in particular buffeted the Normans about as though they were boys. But even in the heat of this initial success, Harold had the self-command to order the retirement upon the main position, and with troops such as his the order was equivalent to its execution. This rude blow would have sufficed for any commander less vain than William, but he seems to have lost all judgment in a fit of personal vanity, and to have ordered a second charge which could not but prove as frugal as the first delivered as it was up a perfect glacies strengthened by appalmments, reverses, and countersunk and galvan work, and one whose natural strength was heightened by the saccade which the indomitable energy of Harold's troops had perfected in the early hours of the morning. Many of the stakes in this, the reader may note, with pardonable pride, were of English oak, sharpened at the tip. William's plan, if planned it may be called, was, as we have seen, necessarily futile, and was foredoomed to failure. But Harold had no intention to let the action bear no more fruit than a tactical victory upon this particular field. The brain that had designed the exact synchrony of Stamford Bridge, and the famous march southward from the Humber, was of that sort which is only found once in many centuries of the history of war, and which is, it may be said, without boasting, peculiar to this island. Another general would have awaited the second charge, with its useless butchery, and still more useless contest for the barren name of victory. Not so, Harold. Those commanding cold gray eyes of his swept the line in a comprehensive glance, and though no written record of the detail remains, he must know little of the character of the man, who does not understand that from Harold certainly preceded the order for what followed. The forces at the center, which he commanded in person, deftly withdrew before the futile gallop of William's cavalry, leaving with that coolness which has ever distinguished our troops the laggards to their fate. At the same moment, and with marvelous precision, the left and right were withdrawn from the plateau rapidly, and as by magic, and the old-fashioned tactics of mere impact, which William of Normandy seemed seriously to have relied on, were spent and wasted upon the now evacuated summit of the hill. What followed is famous in history. The cohesion of the Saxon force, and the exactitude and coolness with which its great operation was performed, is of good augury for the future of our country. Though it was now thick night, and by no set road with no cumbersome machinery of train and rearguard, the whole of the vast assembly masked itself behind the woodlands of the wheeled. The Norman horsemen bewildered and fatigued, gazed on the many that had fallen in defense of the masking position, and wondered whether such novel happenings were victory or no. But the army whose concentration upon the Thames it was William's whole object to prevent was already miles northward, each unit proceeding by exact coordinated routes towards London. There is perhaps no more difficult task set before soldiers than the quiet execution of such a maneuver, after the heat of heavy action, and none have performed it more magnificently than the veteran troop of Harold. When luckily all the orders have been finally distributed, a great tragedy marred the completeness of the day. Just before the execution of this masterpiece of strategy, and as the autumn sun was sinking, the inevitable price which wore demands of all its darlings was paid. Harold himself, the artist of the great victory, fell. But we have no reason to believe that his loss retarded the retrograding movement in any degree. Men who create, as Harold created, have not their creations spoiled by death. The shameful history of the close of the campaign is familiar to every schoolboy, and the military historian must be pardoned if he deals with a purely civilian blunder in a few brief words. Parliament interfered, as it always does, with what should have been a matter for soldiers alone, intrigues, bribery, or worse, with which the military historian has no concern, ruin what had been in the field one of the principal achievements of the Saxon arms. And William, who could not count to hold his own against regular forces, and who was astonished to find himself free to retreat precipitately upon Dover, was still more astonished to find himself accepted a few weeks later, after an aimless march to the west and north by the politicians, or worse, at Birkenstead. He and England were equally astounded to find that a broken and defeated invader could actually be accepted by the intrigues at Westminster and crowned King of England as the prize of a secret bargain. Such was the fruit of as great and successful an effort as ever Saxon soldier made, the Battle of Sennlach, for such as I am now free to reveal, was the true name of the field of action. The ineptitude or avarice of the politicians had undone the work of soldiers, and it is no wonder that the last of Harold's veterans, who retired in disgust to impregnable fortresses in Ely, Arthur's seat, and Pudsy, are recorded to have gnashed their teeth and shed tears of indignation at the dispatches from the metropolis. At Creasy they were to be avenged. The Roman Roads in Picardy If a man were asked where he would find upon the map the sharpest impress of Rome and of the memories of Rome, and where he would most easily discover in a few days on foot the foundations upon which our civilization still rests, he might, in proportion to his knowledge of history and of Europe, be puzzled to reply. He might say that a week along the wall from Tyne to Solway would be the answer, or a week in the great Roman cities of the province and their triumphal arches and their vast arenas and their Roman stone cropping out everywhere, in old quays, in rune bridges, in the very pavement of the streets they use today and in the columns of their living churches. Now I was surprised to find myself after many years of dabbling in such things, furnishing myself the answer in quite a different place. It was in Picardy, during the late maneuvers of the French army, that in the intervals of watch those great buzzing flies, the aeroplanes, and the intervals of long cramps after the regiments of, or watching the mass guns, the necessity for perpetually consulting the map brought home to me for the first time this truth. That Picardy is the province, or to be more accurate, Picardy with his marches in the Ildefrance, the edge of Normandy, and the edge of Flanders, which retains today the most vivid impress of Rome. For though the great buildings are lacking, and the Roman work which must here have been mainly of brick has crumbled, and though I can remember nothing upstanding and patently of the empire between the gate of reams and the frontier of our toy, yet one feature, the Roman road, is here so evident, so multiple, and so enduring, that it makes up for all the rest. One discovers the old roads upon the map, one after another, with a sort of surprise. The scheme develops before one has one looks, and always when one thinks one has completed the web, another, and yet another, the straightened arrow of a line reveals itself across the page. The map is a sort of palimpsest, a mass of fine modern roads, a whole red blur of lanes and local ways, the big rare black lines of the railway, and these are the recent writing, as it were, but underneath the whole, more and more apparent, and in greater and greater numbers as one learns to discover them, are the strict, taut lines which Rome stretched over all those plains. There is something most fascinating in noting them, and discovering them one after the other. For they need discovering, no one of them is still in complete use. The greater part must be pieced together from lanes of lanes which turn into broad roads, and then suddenly sink again into footpaths, rights-of-way, or green forest rides. Often, as with our rare Roman roads in England, all trace of the thing disappears under the plow, or in the soft crossings of the river valleys. One marks them by the straightness of their alignment, by the place names which lie upon them, the repeated name Estrie, for instance, which is like the place name Street upon the Roman roads of England. By the recovery of them after a gap, by the discoveries which local archaeology has made. Different man have different pastimes, and I dare say that most of those who read this will wonder that such a search should be a pastime for any man. But I confess it is a pastime for me to discover these things, to recreate them, to dig out on foot the base upon which 2,000 years of history repose is the most fascinating kind of travel. And then the number of them. You may take an oblong country with Marberge at one corner, pointoy at another, if a tow in some frontier town sets its fumes for the other two corners. And in that stretch of country, 150 miles by perhaps 200, you can build up a scheme of Roman ways almost as complete as the scheme of the great roads today. That one which most immediately strikes the eye is the great line which starts upon ruin from Paris. Twice broken at the crossing of the river valleys and lost altogether in the last 12 miles before the capital of Normandy, it still stands on the modern map, a great modern road with every aspect of purpose and of intention in its going. From Amiens again they radiate out these roads, some like the way to Cambrai, in use every mile, some like the old marching road to the sea, to the port of Sidius, to Boulogne, a mere lane, often wholly lost and never used as a great modern road. This was the way along which the French feudal capital retrail to the disaster of Creece. And just beyond Creece it goes and loses itself in that exasperating but fascinating manner which is the whole charm of Roman roads, wherever the hunter finds them. You may lay a ruler along this old forgotten track all the way past Amcure, Nouvelle which is called Nouvelle Anchois, that is Nouvelle on the paved road, on past Estrie, where from the height you overlook the battlefield of Creece. And that ruler so lying on your map points right at Boulogne Harbor, 30 odd miles away. And in all those 30 odd remaining miles I could not find another yard of it. But what an interest, what a hobby to develop. There's nothing like it in all the kinds of hunting that have ever been invented for filling up the whole of the mind. True you will get no sauce of danger, but on the other hand you will hunt for weeks and weeks and you will come back year after year and go on with your hunting. And sometimes you actually find, which is more than can be said for hunting some animals in the wild. How it was lost, this great main road of Europe, this marching road of the legions is linking up Gaul and Britain, the way that Hadrian went, and the way down which the Super Constantine the Third must have come during the short adventure of his, which lends set a romance to the end of the empire. One can I conceive why it should have disappeared. It is a sunken way down the hillside across the light railway which serves Creece. It gets vaguer and vaguer, for all the world like those ridges upon the chalk that mark the Roman roads in England. And then it is gone. It leaves you pointing I say, at that distant harbour, thirty odd miles off. But over all those miles it has vanished. The ghost of the legions cannot march along it any more. In one place you'll find a few yards of it, about three miles south and east of Montreux. It may be that the little lane leading into Istrie shows where it crossed the valley of the Coche. But it is all guesswork, and therefore very proper to the huntsman. Then there is that unbroken line by which St. Martin came, I think, when he rode into Amiens, and at the gate of the town cut his cloak in two to cover the beggar. It drives across the country for Roy and Antinoyan, the old centre of the kings. It is a great modern road all the way, and it stretches before you mile after mile after mile until suddenly, without explanation and for no reason. It ends sharply, like the life of a man. It ends on the slopes of the hill called Choisie, at the edge of the wood which is there, and seek as you will. You will never find it again. From that road also near Amiens branches out another whose object was St. Quentin. First as a great high road, lost in the valley of the psalm, a lesser road again, still in one strict alignment, it reaches on to within a mile of Vermont, and there it stops dead. I do not think that between Vermont and St. Quentin you will find it. Go out northwestward from Vermont and walk perhaps five miles or seven. There is no trace of a road, only the rare country lanes winding in and out, and the open plow of the rolling land. But continue by your compass, though, and you will come suddenly again, and with no apparent reason for its abrupt origin. On the dead straight line that ran from the capital of Nervie, three days march and more, and pointing all the time straight at Vermont. And so it is throughout the province and his neighborhood. Here and there, as at Bivy, a great capital has decayed. Here and there, but more rarely, a town wholly new has sprung up since the Romans. But the plan of the country is the same as that which they laid down, and the roads, as you discover them, mark it out and establish it. The armies that you see marching today in their maneuvers follow for half a morning the line which was taken by the legions. CHAPTER XXIII. THE REWARD OF LETTERS. It has often been remarked that while all countries in the world possess some sort of literature, as Iceland, her sagas, England, her daily papers, France, her prose writers and dramatists, and even Prussia, her railway guides, one nation and one alone, the empire of monomotopia, is utterly innocent of this embellishment or frill. No traveler records the existence of any monomotopian quill-driver. No modern visitor to that delightful island has come across a literature, whether in the worst or in the best hotels, and such reading as the inhabitants enjoy is entirely confined to works imported by large steamers from the neighboring Antarctic continent. The causes of this singular and happy state of affairs were unknown, since the common histories did not mention them, until the recent discovery by Mr. Paley, the chief authority upon monomotopian hieratic script of a very ancient inscription which clearly sets forth the whole business. It seems that an emperor of monomotopia whose date can be accurately fixed by internal evidence to lie after the universal deluge and before the building of the pyramid of Chieps was upon his accession to the throne particularly concerned with the just repartition of taxes among his beloved subjects. It would seem, if we are to trust the inscription, that in a past still more remote the taxes were so light that even the richest men would meet them promptly and without complaining. But this was at a period when the enemies of monomotopa were at once distant and actively engaged in quarreling among themselves. With sickening treachery these distant rival nations had determined to produce wealth and to live in enmity so that it was incumbent upon the monomotopans not only to build ships but actually to provide an army and at last what broke the camel's back to establish fortifications of a very useless but expensive sort upon a dozen points of their imperial coast. Under the increasing strain the old fiscal system broke down. The poor were clearly embarrassed as might be seen in their emaciated visages and from the terrible condition of their boots. The rich had reached the point after which it was inconvenient to them to pay any more. The middle classes were spending the greater part of their time in devising methods by which the exorbitant and intempestive demands of the collectors could be either evaded or more rarely complied with. In a word, a new and juster system of taxation was an imperative need, and the emperor who had just ascended the throne at the age of eighteen and whom a sort of greenness had preserved from the iniquities of this world was determined to affect the great reform. With the advice of his ministers, all of whom had had considerable experience in the handling of money, the emperor at last determined that each man and woman should pay to this date one-tenth and no more of the wealth which he or she produced. Those who produced nothing, it was but common justice and reason to exempt, and the effect of this tardy act of justice upon the very rich was observed in the sudden increase of the death rate from all those diseases that are the peculiar product of luxury and evil living. Pauper's, also the unemployed triples, imbeciles, deaf mutes, and the clergy escaped under this beneficent and equitable statute, and we may sum up the whole policy by saying that never was a law acclaimed with so much happy bewilderment nor subject to less expressed criticism than this. It was moreover easy to estimate in this new fashion the total revenue of the state, since its produce had been accurately set down by statisticians of the utmost eminence, and one of these diverse documents had been taken for the basis of a new fiscal regime. In practice, also, the collection was easy. Others would attend the harvest with large carts, prong the tenth turnip, hoick up the tenth sheaf of wheat, bucket out the tenth gallon of ale, and so forth. In the markets every tenth animal was removed by imperial officers, every tenth newspaper was impounded as it left the presses, and every tenth drink about to be consumed in the hostilities of the empire was, after a simulacrum of proffering it, suddenly removed by the waiter and poured into a receptacle, the keys of which were very jealously guarded. It was the same with the liberal professions of the fee received by a barrister in the criminal courts. A tenth was regularly demanded at the door when the verdict had been given and the prisoner whom he had defended passed out to execution. The tenth knockout in the prize ring received by the professional pugilist was followed by the immediate sequestration of his fee for that particular encounter, and the tenth aria vibrating from the lips of a primidana was either compounded for at a certain rate or taken in kind by the official who attended at every performance of Grand Opera. One form of wealth alone puzzled the beneficent monarch and his Napoleonic advisors, and this was the production, for it then existed, of literary matter. At first this seemed as simple to tax as any one of the other numerous activities upon which the emperor's loyal and loving subjects were engaged. A brief examination of the customs of the tray conducted by an army of officials who penetrated into the very dens and attics in which letters are evolved reported that the method of payment was by the measurement of a number of words. It is your majesty, wrote the prominent official of the department in his minute, the practice of those who charitably employ this sort of person to pay them in classes by the thousand words. Thus one man gets one sequin a thousand, another two bisants, a third as much as a duket, while some who have singularly attracted the notice of the public can command ten, twenty, nay, forty scutches, and in some very exceptional cases. A thousand words command one of those beautiful pieces of stiff paper which your majesty, in his bountiful provision, tenders to his dutiful subjects for acceptance as metal under diverse penalties. The just taxation of these fellows can therefore be easily achieved if your majesty, in the exercise of his almost superhuman wisdom, will but add a schedule to the finance act in which there shall be set down fifteen or twenty classes of writers with their price per thousand words and a compulsory registration of each class enforced by the rude hand of the police. The emperor of Manomatopa immediately nominated a royal commission, unpaid, among whose sons, nephews, and private friends the salaried posts connected with the work were distributed. This commission reported by a majority of one air two years had elapsed. The schedule was designed and such literators had not in the interval fled the country were registered, while a further enactment strictly forbidding their employers to make payment upon any other system completed the scheme. But alas, so full of low cunning and dirty dodges is this kind of man, I mean what we call authors, that very soon after the promulgation of the new law a marked deterioration in the quality of Manomatopa letters was apparent upon every side. The citizen opening his morning paper would be astonished to find the leading article consist of nothing more original than a portion of the sacred scriptures. A novel, bought to ease the tedium of a journey, would consist of long catalogs for the most part, and when it came to descriptions of scenery would fall into the most minute and detailed category of every conceivable feature of the landscape. Some even took advantage of the new regulation, so far as to repeat one single word an interminable number of times, while it was remarked with shame by the ministers of religion, that the morals of their literary friends permitted them only to use words of one syllable and those of the shortest kind. And this, they said, was the only true and original Manomatopa dialect. Such was the public inconvenience that next year a sharper and much more drastic law was passed, by which it was laid down that every literary composition should make sense within the meaning of the act, and should be original so far as the reading of the judge appointed for the trial of the case extended. But though after the first few executions this law was generally observed, the nasty fellows affected by it managed to evade it in spirit, for by the use of obscure terms of words drawn from dead languages and of bold metaphor transferred from one art to another. They would deliberately invite prosecution, and then in the witness box make fools of those plain men, the judge and jury, by showing that this apparently meaningless claptrap could with sufficient ingenuity be made to yield some sort of sense, and during this period no art critic was put to death. Into desperation the emperor changed the whole basis of the remuneration of literary labor, and ordered that it should be by the length of the prose or poetry measured in inches. This reform, however, did but add to the confusion. For while the man of the pen wrote their works entirely in short dialogue, asterisks, and blanks, the publishers who were now thoroughly organized printed the same in smaller and smaller type. In order to avoid the consequences of the law. At this last piece of insolence the emperor's mind was quickly decided. Arresting one night not only all those who had ever written, but all those who had even boasted of letters, or who were so much as suspected by their relatives of secretly indulging in them, he turned the whole two million into a large but enclosed area, and, desiring to kill two birds with one stone, offered the ensuing spectacle as an amusement to the more sober and respectable sections of the community. It is well known that the profession of letters breeds in its followers an undying hatred of each against his fellows. The public were therefore entertained for a whole day with the pleasing sight of a violent but quite disordered battle, in which each of the wretched prisoners seemed animated by no desire but the destruction of as many as possible of his hated rivals, until at last every soul of these detestable creatures had left its puny body, and the state was rid of all. A law which carried to the universities the rule of the primary schools to wit that men should be taught to read but not to write, completed the good work. And there was peace. CHAPTER XXIV The Eye-Openers About any doubt whatsoever the one characteristic of the towns is the lack of reality in the impressions of the many. Now we live in towns, and posterity will be astounded at us. It isn't only that we get our impressions for the most part as imaginary pictures called up by printer's ink, that would be bad enough, but by some curious perversion of the modern mind printer's ink ends by actually preventing one from seeing things that are there, and sometimes when one says to another who has not traveled, one wonders whether, after all, if he does travel he will see the things before his eyes. If he does, he will find a new world, and there is more to be discovered in this fashion today than ever there was. I have sometimes wished that every Anglo-Saxon who from these shores has sailed and seen for the first time the other Anglo-Saxons in New York or Melbourne would write in quite a short letter what he really felt. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred men only write what they have read before they started. Just as Rousseau in an eighteenth-century village believed that every English yokel could vote and that his vote conveyed a high initiative, making and unmaking the policy of the state, or just as people hearing that the birth rate of France is low, travel in that country and say they can see no children, though they would hardly say it about Sussex or Cumberland where the birth rate is lower still. What travel does in the way of pleasure, the providing of new and fresh sensations and the expansion of experience, that it ought to do in the way of knowledge, it ought to do and it does, with the wise, provide a complete course of unlearning the wretched tags with which the sham culture of our great towns has filled us. For instance of Barbary. The lions do not live in deserts, they live in woods. The peasants of Barbary are not Semitic in appearance or in character. Barbary is full to the eye, not of Arab and Oriental buildings, they are not striking, but of the great Roman monuments. They are altogether the most important things in the place. Barbary is not hot as a whole, most of Barbary is extremely cold between November and March. The inhabitants of Barbary do not like a wild life, they are extremely fond of what civilization can give them, such as creme de menthe, rifles, good water works, maps and railways. Only they would like to have these things without the bother of strict laws and of the police and so forth. Travel in Barbary with seeing eyes and you'll find out all this new truth. Now it took the French forty years and more before each of these plain facts, and I have only sighted half a dozen out of as many hundred, got into their letters and their print. They have not yet got into their letters and print of other nations. But an honest man traveling in Barbary on his own account would pick up every one of these truths in two or three days, except the one about the lions. To pick up that truth you must go to the very edge of the country, for the lion is a shy beast and withdraws from men. The wise man who really wants to see things as they are and to understand them does not say, here I am on the burning soil of Africa. He says, here I am stuck in a snow-gift and the train twelve hours late. As it was with me, near Satif in January 1905, he does not say as he looks on the peasant at his plow outside Betana, observe Jan Semite. He says, that man's face is exactly like the face of a dark Sussex peasant, only a little leaner. He does not say, see those wild sons of the desert, how they must hate the new artificial world around them. Contrary wise, he says, see those four Mohammedans playing cards with the French pack of cards and drinking liqueurs in the café. See, they have ordered more liqueurs. He does not say how strange and terrible a thing the railway must be to them. He says, I wish I was rich enough to travel first for the natives pouring in and out of this third-class carriage jabbering like monkeys and treading on my feet, disturb my tranquility. Some hundreds must have got in and out during the last 50 miles. In other words, the wise man has permitted eye openers to reign upon him their full, beneficent, and sacramental influence. And if a man in traveling will always maintain his mind ready for what he really sees and hears, he will become a whole nest of Columbus's, discovering a perfectly interminable series of new worlds. A man can only talk of what he himself knows. Let me give further examples. I had always heard, until I visited the Pyrenees, how French civilization, especially in the matter of roads, motors, and things like that, went up to the Spanish frontier and then stopped dead. It doesn't. The change is at the Aragonese frontier. On the Basque third of the frontier, the people are just as active and fond of wealth, and of scraping of stone, and of cleanliness, and of drawing straight lines, to the north as to the south of it. They are all one people, as industrious, as thrifty, and as prosperous as the Scots. So are the Catalan's one people. And you get much the same sort of advantages and disadvantages, apart from the effect of government, with the Catalan's to the north as with the Catalan's to the south of the border. So with religion, I had thought to find the Spanish churches crowded. I found just the contrary. It was the French churches that were crowded, not the Spanish, and the difference between the truth, what one really sees and hears, and the printed legend, happens to be very subtly illustrated in this case of religion. The French have inherited, and are by this time used to and have perhaps grown fond of, a big religious debate. Those who side with the national religion and tradition emphasize their opinions in every possible way. So do their opponents. You pick up two newspapers from Toulouse, for instance, and it is quite on the cards that the leading article of each will be a disquisition upon the philosophy of religion. The one with the depeche of Toulouse militantly and often solently atheist. The other is militantly Catholic. You don't get that in Pampolona, and you don't get it in Saragossa. What you get there is a profound dislike of being interfered with, ancient and lazy customs, wealth retained by the chapters, the monasteries and the colleges, and with all this, a curious, all-pervading indifference. One might end this little train of thought by considering a converse test of what the eye opener is in travel, and that test is to talk to foreigners when they first come to England, and see how they tend to discover in England what they have read of it at home instead of what they really see. There have been very few fogs in London of late, but your foreigner nearly always finds London foggy. Kent does not show along its main railway line the evidence of agricultural depression. It is like a garden. Yet in a very careful and thorough French book just published by a French traveler, his bird's eye view of the country as he went through Kent just after landing would make you think the place the desert. He seems to have thought the hedges a sign of agricultural decay. The same foreigner will discover a plebeian character in the commons and an aristocratic one in the House of Lords, though he shall have heard but four speeches in each, and though every one of the eight speeches shall have been delivered by members of one family group closely intermarried, wealthy, titled, and perhaps, who knows, of some lineage as well. The moral is that one should tell the truth to oneself and look out for it outside one. It is quite as novel and as entertaining as the discovery of the North Pole, or, in case that has come off, as some believe, the discovery of the South Pole. The end of Chapter 24. This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. First and Last by Hilaer Bellach Chapter 25 The Public I notice a very curious thing in the actions, particularly of businessman today, and of other men also, which is the projection outward from their own inward minds of something which is called the public, and which is not there. I do not mean that a businessman is wrong when he says that the public will demand, such and such an article, and on producing the article finds itself widely. He is obviously and demonstrably rioting his use of the word public in such a connection. Nor is a man wrong or subject to illusion when he says, the public have taken to cinematographic shows, or the public were greatly moved when the whole fishermen were shot at by the Russian fleet in the North Sea. What I mean is, the public has an excuse or scapegoat. The public is a menace. The public is a but. That public simply does not exist. For instance, the publisher will say, as though he were talking of some monster, the public will not buy Jink's work. It is first class work, so it is too good for the public. He is quite right in his statement of fact, of the very small proportion of our people who read, only a fraction by books, and of that fraction, that by books, very few indeed by Jink's. Jink's has a very pleasant up and down style. He loves to use funny words dragged from the tomb, and he has delicate little emotions. Yet, hardly anybody will buy him, so their publisher is quite right in one sense when he says the public won't buy Jink's. But where he is quite wrong, and suffering from a gross illusion, is in the motive and the manner of his saying it. He talks of the public as something gravely to blame, and yet irredeemably stupid. He talks of it as something quite external to himself, almost as something which he has never personally come across. He talks of it as though it were a mammoth or an eskimo. Now if that publisher would wander for a moment into the world of realities, he would perceive his illusion. Modern men do not like realities, and do not usually know the way to come in contact with them. I will tell the publisher how to do so in this case. Let him consider what books he buys himself, what books his wife buys, what books his eldest son, his grandmother, his aunt Jane, his old father, his butler if he runs to one, his most intimate friend, and his curate by. He will find that not one of these people buys Jink's. Most of them will talk Jink's, and if Jink's writes a play, however dull, they will probably go and see it once. But they draw the line at buying Jink's books, and I don't blame them. The moral is very simple. You yourself are the public, and if you will watch your own habits, you will find that the economic explanation of a hundred things becomes quite clear. I've seen the same thing in the offices of a newspaper. Some simple truth of commanding interests to this country, involving no attack upon any rich man, and therefore not dangerous under our laws, comes up for printing. It is discussed in the editor's room. The editor says yes, of course we know it is true, and of course it is important, but the public would not stand it. I remember one newspaper office of my youth in which the public was visualized as a long file of people streaming into a Wesleyan chapel, and another in which the public was supposed to be made up without exception of retired officers and maiden ladies, every one of whom was a communicant of the English-established church, every one of good birth, and yet every one devoid of culture. Without the least out, each of these absurd symbols haunted the brain of each of the editors in question. The editor of the first paper would print at weary-some-length accounts of obscure, Catholic clerical scandals on the continent, and would sweat with alarm if his sub-editors had admitted a telegram concerning the trial of some fraudulent Protestant missionary or other in China. Meanwhile, his rather dull paper was being bought by you and me, and bank clerks and foreign tourists and doctors and publicans and brokers, Catholics, Protestants, atheists, peculiar people, and every kind of man, for many reasons, because it had the best social statistics, because it had a very good dramatic critic, because they had got into the habit and couldn't stop, because he came nearest to hand on the bookstore. Of a hundred readers, ninety-nine skipped the clerical scandal, and either chuckled over the fraudulent missionary or were bored by him, and went on to the gambling news from the stock exchange. But the type for whom all that paper was produced, the menacing God or demon, who was supposed to forbid publication of certain news in it, did not exist. So it was with the second paper, but with this difference, that the editor was right about the social position of those who read his sheet, but quite wrong about the opinions and emotions of people in that social position. It was all the more astonishing from the fact that the editor was born in that very class himself and perpetually mixed with it. No one perhaps read the Stodge, for under this device would I veiled the true name of the organ. More carefully than those retired officers of either service who are found in what are called our residential towns. The editor was himself the son of a colonel of guns, who had settled down in a Midland watering-place. He ought to have known that world, and he did know that world, but he kept his illusion of his public quite apart from his experience of realities. Your retired officer, to take his particular section of this particular paper s audience, is nearly always a man with a hobby, and usually a good scientific or literary hobby at that. He writes many of our best books, demanding research. He takes an active part in public work, which requires statistical study. He always a traveled man, and nearly always a well-read man. The broadest and the most complete questioning and turning and returning of the most fundamental subjects, religion, foreign policy, and domestic economics, are quite familiar to him. But the editor was not selecting news for that real man. He was selecting news for an imaginary retired officer of inconceivable stupidity and ignorance, redeemed by a child like simplicity. If a book came in, for instance, on biology, and there was a chance of having it reviewed by one of the first biologists of the day, he would say, oh, our public won't stand evolution. And he would trot out his imaginary retired officer as though he were a mule. Artists, by which I mean painters and, more specially, art critics, sin in this respect. They say the public wants a picture to tell a story, and they say it with a sneer. Well, the public does want a picture to tell a story because you and I want a picture to tell a story. Sorry, but so it is. The art critic himself wants it to tell a story, and so does the artist. Each would rather die than admit it. But if you set either walking, with no one to watch him, down a row of pictures, you would see him looking at one picture after another with that expression of interest, which only comes on a human face when it is following a human relation. A mere splash of color would bore him. Still more, a mere medley of black and white. The story may have a very simple plot. It may be no more than an old woman sitting on a chair, or a landscape. But a picture, if a man can look at it at all, tells a story right enough. It must interest men, and the less of a story it tells, the less it will interest men. A good landscape tells so vivid a story that children who are unspoiled actually transfer themselves into such a landscape, walk about in it, and have adventures in it. They make another complaint against the public, that it desires painting to be life-like. Of course it does. The statement is accurate, but the complaint is based on an illusion. It is you and I, and all the world, that want painting to imitate its object. There is a wonderful picture in the Glasgow Art Gallery, painted by someone a long time ago, in which a man is represented in a steel karyas, with the fur tip it over it. And the whole point of that picture is that the fur looks like fur, and the steel looks like steel. I never met a critic yet who was so bold as to say that the picture was a bad picture. It is one of the best pictures in the world, but its whole point is the liveliness of the steel and of the fur. Finally there is one proper test to prove that all this jargon about the public is nonsense, which is that it is altogether modern. Who quarreled with the public in the old days when men lived in a healthy corporate life, and painted, wrote, and sang, for the applause of their fellows? If you still suffer from the illusion, after reading these magisterial lines of mine, why, there is a drastic way to cure yourself, which is to go for a soldier, take the shilling, and live in a barracks for a year. Then buy yourself out. You will never despise the public again, and perhaps a better way still is to go round the horn before the mast. But take care that your friend shall send you enough money to valparaiso for your return journey to be made in some comfort. I would not wish my worst enemy to go back the way he came. The end of Chapter 25 This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. First and last by Hilaer Bellach, Chapter 26, On Entries I am always planning in my mind new kinds of guidebooks, or rather new features in guidebooks. One such new feature, which I am sure would be very useful, would be an indication to the traveller of how he should approach a place. I would first presuppose him quite free and able to come by rail, or by water, or by road, or on foot across the fields, and then I would describe how the many places I have seen stand quite differently in the mind, according to the way in which one approaches them. The value of travel, to the eye at least, lies in his presentation of clear and permanent impressions, and these I think, though some would quarrel with me for saying it, are usually instantaneous. It is the first sharp vision of an unknown town, the first immediate vision of a range of hills that remains forever, and is fruitful of joy within the mind, or at least, that is one and perhaps the chief of the fruits of travel. I remember once, for instance, waking from a dead sleep in a train, for I was very tired, and finding it to be evening. What woke me was the sudden stopping of the train. It was in Italy, a man in the carriage said to me that there was some sort of accident, and that we should be waiting a while. The people got out and walked about by the side of the track. I also got out of the carriage and took the air, and when I so stepped out into the cool of that summer evening, I was amazed at the loneliness and tragedy of the place. There were no houses about me that I could see, say, one little place built for the railwaymen. There was no cultivation, either. Close before me began a sort of swamp with reeds, which hardly moved to the hill, and this gradually merged into a sheet of water above and beyond, which were hills, barren, and not very high, which took the last of the daylight, for they looked both southward and to the west. The more I watched the extraordinary and absolute scene, the less I heard of the low voices about me, and indeed a sort of positive silence seemed to close the darkening landscape. It was full of something quite gone down, and one had the impression that it would never be disturbed. As the light lessened, the hills darkened, the sky took on one broad and tender color. The sheet of water gleamed quite white, and the reeds stood up like solid shadows against it. I wish I could express in words the impression of recollection and of savage mourning, which all that landscape imposed, but from that impression I was recalled and startled by the guard, who came along telling us that things were righted and the train would start again. Soon we were in our places, and the rapid movement isolated for me the memory of a singularly vivid scene. I thought the place must have a name, and I asked the neighbor in the carriage what it was called. He told me it was called Lake Trezimine. Now I do not say that this tragic sight is to be visited thus. It was but an accident, though an accident for which I am most grateful to my fate. But what I have said here illustrates my meaning, that the manner of one's approach to any place in travel makes all the difference. This one may note how very different is Europe seen from the water than seen from any other opportunity for travel. So many of the great cathedrals were built to dominate men who should watch them from the wharves of the medieval towns. But I think it is almost a rule if you have leisure and can take your choice to choose this kind of entry to them. Amiens is quite a different thing, seen from the river below it to the north and east from what is seen by a gradual approach along the street of a modern town. The roofs climb up at it, and it stands enthroned. So Chartres seen from the little yore, but the yore is so smaller river that he would be a bold man who would travel up it all the way. Nevertheless, it is a good piece of travel and anyone who will undertake it will see Louvirs and Passanet, where the greatest work of the Renaissance once stood. And it will go through lonely but rich pastures until at last he gets to Chartres by the right gate. Thence he will see something astonishing for so flat a region as the Boos. The great church seems mountainous upon a mountain. Its apse completes the unclimable steepness of the hill, and its buttresses follow the lines of the fall of it. But if you do not come in by the river, at least come in by the Orlians Road. I suppose that nine people out of ten even the day when the roads are in proper use again, come into Chartres by that northern railway entry, which is for all the world like coming into a great house by a big neglected backyard. Then if ever you have business that takes you to Bayonne, come in by river and from the sea, and how well you will understand the little town and its lovely northern Gothic. Some of the great churches all the world knows must be seen from the water, and most of the world also sees them. Ilya's one, Cologne is another. But how many people have looked right up at Durham as at a cliff from that gorge below, or how many have seen the hide of Elby from the Tarn. As for famous cities with their walls, there is no doubt that a man should approach them by the chief high road, which once linked them with their capital or with their nearest port or with Rome. And that altogether, this kind of entry is nowadays often marred by ugly suburbs. You will get much of your finest sight of Segovia as you come in by the road from the Guadarrama and from Madrid. It is from that point that you were meant to see the town. And you will get much of your best grip on Carouson, old Carouson, if you come in by the road from Toulouse at morning as you were meant to come. And so Cusay should be approached by that royal road from the Cusans and from the south, while as for León, the most famous of the hill towns, come to it from the east, for it looks eastward and its lords were eastern lords. Ranges of hills I think are never best first seen from railways. Indeed, I can remember no great sight of hills so seen, not even the Alps. A railway must of necessity follow the floor of the valley and tunnel and creep round the shoulders of the Woolworths. There is perhaps one exception to this rule, which is the side of the Pyrenees from the train as one comes into Tarbes. It is a wise thing if you are visiting those hills to come into Tarbes by night and sleep there. And then next morning the train upon its way to Pau unfolds you all the wall of the mountains. But this is an accident. It is because the railway runs upon a sort of high platform that you see them out and so. With all other hills that I remember, it is best to have them burst suddenly upon you from the top of some pass, lifted high above the level and coming let us say to hide half their own. Certainly the Pyrenees Oberland is more wonderful caught in the moment from Jura than introduced in any other way. And the snows on Atlas over the desert seem like part of the sky when they come upon one after climbing the red rocks of the high plateau and you see them shining over the salt marshes. The Vosges you cannot just see from a half height. There is no platform and that is perhaps why the Vosges have not impressed travelers as they should. But you can so watch the grand chain of all volcanoes which are the rampart of our new yarn. You can stand upon the high wooden ridge of Fouris and see them take the morning across the mists and the flat of Lymane where the Gauls fought Caesar. Further south from the high table of the Ville, you can see the steep backward escarpment of Cervantes, inky, blue, desperately blue, blue like nothing else on earth except the mountains in those painters of North Italy, of the parts North and East of Venice, the name of whose schools escaped me or rather I never knew it. Now as for towns that live in a hollow, it is great fun to come upon them from above. They're not used to being thus taken at a disadvantage and they are both surprised and surprising. There are many towns and holds and trenches of Europe which you can thus play pipu with. Will you come at them by walking? By train they will mean nothing to you. You will probably come upon them out of a long shrieking tunnel and by the high road they mean little more for the high road will follow the veil. But if you come upon them from over their guardian cliffs and scars, you catch them on our wares and this is a good way of approaching them for you master them as it were and spy them out before you enter in. You can act thus with Grenoble and with many a town on the muse and particularly with Obasan which lies in the depths of so dreadful a trench that I could wonder how man ever dreamt of living and building there. The most difficult of all places on which to advise I think would be the very great cities, the capitals. They seem to have today no noble entries and no proper approach. Perhaps we shall only deal with them justly when we can circle down to them through the air and see their vast activity splashed over the plain. Anyhow there is no proper way of entering them now that I know of. Berlin is not worth entering at all. Rome, a man told me once, could be entered by some particular road over the Geniculum. I think, which also, if I remember right, was the way that Shelley came. But I despair of Paris and certainly of London. I cannot even recall an entry for Brussels though. Brussels is a monumental city with great rewards for those who love the combination of building and hills. Perhaps after all the happiest entries of all and the most easy are those of our many market towns, small and not swollen in Britain and in North Gaul and in the Netherlands and in the Valley of the Rhine. These hardly ever fail us and we come upon them in our travels as they desire that we should come and we know them properly as things should properly be known. That is, from the beginning. THE END OF CHAPTER XXVII. This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. First and last by Hilaire Bellock. CHAPTER XXVII. COMPANIONS OF TRAVEL. I write of traveling companions in general and not in particular, making of them a composite photograph as it were and finding what they have in common and what is their type and in the first place I find them to be chance men. For there are some people who cannot travel without a set companion who goes with them from chairing cross all over the world and back to chairing cross again. And there was a pathos in this as Balsak said of marriage. What a commentary on human life that human beings must associate to endure it. So it is with many who cannot endure to travel alone and some will positively advertise for another to go with them. In a glade of the Sierra Nevada which for awful and as it were permanent beauty seemed not to be of this world, I came upon a man slowly driving along the trail a ramshackle cart in which were a few chairs and tables and bedding. He had a long gray beard and wild eyes. He was old and very small like a gnome but he had not the gnome's good humor. I asked him where he was going and I slowed down so as to keep pace with his ridiculous horse. For some time he would not answer me and then he said, out of this. He added, I am tired of it. And when I asked him of what his only answer was an old fashioned oath. But from further complaints which he made I gathered that what he was tired of was clearing forests, digging ground, paying debts and in general living upon this unhappy earth. He did not like me very much and though I would willingly have learned more he would not tell me, he would tell me nothing further. So when we got to a place where there was a little stream I went on and left him. I have never forgotten the sadness of this man where he was going, what he expected to do or what opportunities he had I have never understood. Though some years afterward in quite another place namely Stennying and Sussex I came upon just such another whose coral was with the English climate the rich and the poor and the whole constitution of God's earth. These are the advantages of travel that one meets so many men whom one would otherwise never meet and that one feeds as it were upon the complexity of mankind. Thus in a village called Encomps in the depths of Andorra where no man has ever killed another I found a man with a blue face who was a fossil the kind of man you would never find in the swelling life of western Europe. He was emancipated he had studied in Perpignan over and beyond the Great Hills. He could not see why he should pay taxes to support a priest. The priests he assured me say the most ridiculous things. They narrate the most impossible fables they affirm what cannot possibly be true. All that they say is in opposition to science. If I am ill can a priest cure me? No. Can a priest tell me how to build or how to light my house? He is unable to do so. He is a useless and a lying mouth. Why should I feed him? I questioned this man very closely and discovered that in his view the world slowly changed from worse to better and to accelerate this process enlightenment alone was needed. But what do these brutes? he said alluding to his fellow countrymen. No of enlightenment. They do not even make roads because the priests forbid them. I could write at length upon this man. He was not a skeptic, as you may imagine, nor had he adopted the Lucretian form of Epicureanism. Not a bit of it. He was a hearty atheist with positivist leanings. I further found that he had married a woman older, wealthier, and if possible uglier than himself. She kept the inn and was very kind to him. His life would have been quite happy had he not been tortured by monstrous superstitions of others. Then again in the town of Marseille only two years ago I met a man who looked well fed and had a stalwart, square French face and whose political economic ideal, though it was not mine, greatly moved me. It was just past midnight and I was throwing little stones into the old Greek harbor, the stanch and the glory of which are nearly three thousand years old. I was to be off at dawn upon a tramp steamer and I had so determined to pass the few hours of darkness. I was throwing pebbles into the water, I say, and thinking about Ulysses, when this man came slouching up with his hands in the pockets of his enormous corduroy trousers, and looking at me with some contempt from above, for he was standing, I was sitting. He began to converse with me. We talked first of ships, then of heat and cold, and so on to wealth and poverty. And thus it was I came upon his views, which were that there should be a sort of break-up, and houses ought to be burned and things smashed, and people killed, and over and above this it should be made plain, that no one had a right to govern, not the people, because they were always being bamboozled, obviously not the rich, least of all the politicians, to whom he justly applied the most derogatory epithets. He waved his arm out in the darkness at the Phocians, at the half-million of Marseille, and said, all that should disappear. The constructive side of his political-economic scheme was a negative. He was a practical man. None of your fine theories for him, one step at a time, let there be a shambardment, that is, a noisy collapse, and he would think about what to do afterwards. His was not the narrow, deductive mind. He was objective and concrete. Believe me or not, he was paid an excellent wage by the municipality to prevent people like me, who sit up at night from doing mischief in the harbor. When I had come to an end of his political-economic scheme, the main lines of which were so clear and simple that a child could understand them, we fell to talking of the tides, and I told him that in my country the sea went up and down. He was no rustic and would have no such commonplace truths. He was well acquainted with the phenomenon of the tides. It was due to the combined attraction of the sun and of the moon. But when I told him I knew places where the tides fell thirty or forty feet, we would have had a violent quarrel had I not prudently admitted that it was romantic exaggeration and that five or six was the most that one ever saw it move. I avoided the quarrel, but the little incident broke up our friendship and he shuffled away. He did not like having his leg pulled. There are many others, I remember, those I have written about elsewhere I am ashamed to recall, as the man at Jedburg, who first expounded to me how one knew all about the fate of the individual soul, and then objected to personal questions about his own. The German officer, a man at Eile Chapelle, who had hair the color of toe and gave me minute details of the method by which England was to be destroyed. A man I met upon the Epian Way, who told me the most abominable lies, and another man who met me outside Oxford Station during the vac and offered to show me the sights of the town for consideration, which he did, but I would not pay him, because he was inaccurate, as I easily proved by a few searching questions upon the exact side of Boccardo, of which he had never heard, and the negative evidence against the Roman origin for the sight of the city. Moreover he said that Trinity was St. John's, which was rubbish. Then there was another man who travelled with me from Birmingham, pressed certain tracks upon me, and wanted to charge me six pence each at Paddington. But if I were to speak of even these few, I should exceed. The END OF CHAPTER 27 CHAPTER 28 On the Sources of Rivers There are certain customs in man the permanence of which gives infinite pleasure. And the mood of the schools is against them these customs lie in weight beneath the floors of society, but they never die. And when a decay in pedantry, or despotism, or in any other evil and inhuman influence permits them to reappear, they reappear. One of these customs is the religious attachment of man to isolated high places, peaks, and single striking hills. On these he must build shrines, and though he is a little furtive about it nowadays, yet the instinct is there strong as ever. I have not often come to the top of a high hill with another man, but I have seen him put a few stones together when he got there. Or if he had not the moral courage to so satisfy his soul, he would never fail on such an occasion to say something ritual and quasi-religious, even if it were only about the view and another instinct of the same sort is the worship of the source of rivers. The iconoclast, and the people whose pride it is that their senses are dead, will see in a river nothing more than so much moisture gathered in a narrow place and falling as the mystery of gravitation inclines it. Their mood is the mood of that gentleman who disbared and wrote, A cloud's a lot of vapor, the sky's a lot of air, and the sea's a lot of water that happens to be there. He cannot get further down than that. When you've got as far down as that, all is over. Luckily, God still keeps his mysteries going for you, and you can't get rid, even in that mood, of the certitude that you yourself exist and that things outside of you are outside of you. But when you get into that modern mood, you do lose the personality of everything else, and you forget the sanctity of riverheads. You've lost a great deal when you've forgotten that, and it behooves you to recover what you have lost as quickly as possible, which is to be done in this way. Visit the source of some famous stream and think about it. There was a Scotchman once who discovered the sources of the Nile to the lasting advantage of mankind and the permanent glory of his native land. He thought the source of the Nile looked rather like the sources of the till or the tweed or some such river of Thule. He has been ridiculed for saying this, but he was mystically very right. The source of the greatest of rivers, since it was sacred to him, reminded him of the sacred things of his home. When I consider the sources of rivers which I have seen, there is not one, I think, which I do not remember to have had about it an influence of all. Not only because one could, in imaginings, see the kingdoms of the cities which it was to visit, and the way in which it would bind them all together in one province and one story, but also simply because it was an origin. The sources of the Rhone are famous. The Rhone comes out of a glacier through a sort of ice cave, but if it were not for an enormous hotel quite four square, it would be as lonely a place as there is in Europe, and as remarkable a beginning for a great river as could anywhere be found. Nor when you come to think of it, does any European river have such varied fortunes as the Rhone. It feeds such different religions and looks on such diverse landscapes. It makes Geneva. It makes Avignon. It changes in color and in its nature of going as it goes. It sees new products appearing continually on its journey, until it comes to olives, and it flows past the beginning of human cities when it reflects the huddle of Old Arles. The sources of the Rhone are well known. The Rhone rises by itself in a valley from which there is no issue, like the fabled valley shut in by hills on every side. If it were anything but the Rhone, it would not be able to escape. It would lie in prison there forever. Being the Rhone, it tunnels away for itself right under the High Pyrenees, and comes out again on the French side. There are some that doubt this, but then there are people who would doubt anything. The sources of the river Rhone are not so famous as these two last. And it is a good thing, for they are to be found in one of the loneliest places within an hour of London that any man can imagine. And if you were put down there upon a windy day, you would think yourself upon the moors. There is nothing whatsoever near you at the beginnings of the little sacred stream. Tames had a source once, which was very famous. The water came out plainly at a fountain, under a bleak wood, just west of the Fosse Way, under which it ran by a culvert, a culvert at least as old as the Romans. But when, about a hundred years ago, people began to improve the world in those parts, they put up a pumping station and they pumped Tames dry, since which time its gods have deserted the river. The sources of the river Rhone are in a lonely place, up in a corner of the hills, where everything has strange shapes, and where the rocks make one think of trolls. The great frozen horn side stands up above it, an Ingleborough hill, which is like no other hill in England, but like the flat top maces which you have in America, or as those who have visited tell me, like the flat hills of South Africa, and a little way off, on the other side, is Penyagent, or words to that effect. The little river Ribble rises under such enormous guardianship. It rises quite clean and single in the shape of a little spring upon the hillside, and too few people know it. The other river that flows east while the Ribble flows west is the river Air. It rises in a curious way, for it imitates the Giron, and finding itself blocked by limestone, burrows underneath at a place called Malham Tarn, after which it has no more trouble. The river Sverne, the river Why, and a third unimportant river, or at least important only for its beauty, and who would insist on that, rise all close together on the skirts of the Plinlemon, and the smallest of them has the most wonderful rising, for it falls through the gorge of Lignand, which looks like, and perhaps it is, the deepest cleft in this island, or at any rate the most unexpected. And a fourth source on the mountain, a tarn below its summit, is the source of Riadol, which has a short but adventurous life like Achilles. There is one source in Europe that is properly dealt with, and where the religion due to the sources of rivers has free play, and this is the source of the Sain. It comes out upon the northern side of the hills, which the French call the hills of gold, in a country of pastureage and forest, very high up above the world and thinly peopled. The river Sain appears there in a sort of miraculous manner, pouring out of a grotto. And over this grotto the Prisians have built a votive statue, and there is yet another, of the hundred thousand things, that nobody knows. And last by Hilaer Bellach, Chapter 29, On Error. There is an elusive idea that has floated through the minds of most of us as we grew older, and learnt more and more things. It is an idea extremely difficult to get into set terms. It is an idea very difficult to put, so that we shall not seem nonsensical. And yet it is a very useful idea, and if it could be realized, its realization would be a very practical value. It is the idea of a dictionary of ignorance and error. On the face of it, a definition of the work is impossible. Strictly speaking it would be infinite, for human knowledge, however far extended must always be infinitely small, compared with all possible knowledge, just as any given finite space is infinitely small, compared with all space. But that is not the idea which we entertain when we consider this possible dictionary of ignorance and error. What we really mean is a dictionary of the sort of ignorance and the sort of error which we know ourselves to have been guilty of, which we have escaped by special experience or learning as time went on, and against which we would warn our fellows. Flaubert I think first put down in words, and said that such an encyclopedia was very urgently needed. It will never exist, but we all know that it ought to exist. Bits of it appear from time to time piecemeal and here and there, as for instance in the annotations which modern scholarship attaches to the great text, and the printed criticisms to which sundry accepted doctrines are subject by the younger men today, and the detailed restatement of historical events which we get from modern research, as our fathers could never have them. But the work itself, the complete encyclopedia or dictionary of ignorance and error, will never be printed. It is a great pity. Incidentally, one may remark that the process by which particular error is propagated is as interesting to watch as the way in which a plant grows. The first step seems to be the establishing of an authority, and the giving of that authority a name which comes to connote doctrinal infallibility. A very good example of this is the title, Science. Mere physical research, its achievements, its certitudes, even its conflicting and self-contradictory hypotheses, have got lumped together in many minds under this one title, Science. The title is now sacred. It is used as a priestly title, as an immediate estopor to doubt or criticism. The next step is a very interesting one for the student of psychical pathology to note. It seems to be a disease as native and universal to the human mind as is the decay of the teeth to the human body. It seems as though we all must suffer somewhat from it, and most of us suffer a great deal from it, though in a cool aspect we easily perceive it to be a lesion of thought, and this second step is as follows. The whole lump, having been given its sacred title and erected into an infallible authority, which you are to accept as directly superior to yourself and all personal sources of information, there is attributed to this idol a number of attributes. We give it a soul, and a habit, and manners which do not attach to its stuff at all. The projection of this imagined living character in our authority is comparable to what we also do with mountains, statues, towns, and so forth. Our living individuality lends individuality to them. I might hear digress to discuss whether this habit of the mind were not a distorted reflection of some truth, and whether indeed there be not such things as demons or the souls of things. But to leave that, we take up our authority. This thing, science, for instance, we clothe it with a creed, and appetites, and a will, and all the other human attributes. This is done as we set out in the third step in our progress towards a fixed error. We make the idol speak, of course. Being only an idol, it talks nonsense. But by the previous steps just referred to, we must believe that nonsense, and believe it we do. Thus it is, I think, that fixed error is most generally established. I have already given one example in the hierarchic title, Science. It was but the other day that I picked up a weekly paper in which a gentleman was discussing ghosts, that is, the supposed apparition of the living and the dead, of the dead, though dead, and of the living, though absent. Nothing has been more keenly discussed since the beginning of human discussions. Are these phenomena which undoubtedly happen? What modern people call subjective? Or are they what modern people call objective? In old fashioned English, are the ghosts really there, or are they not? The most elementary use of human reason persuades us that the matter is not susceptible of positive proof. The criterion of certitude and any matter of perception is an inner sense in the perceiver that the thing he perceives is external to himself. He is the only witness. No one can corroborate or dispute him. The seeer may be right, or he may be wrong. But we have no proof, and only according to our temperament, our fancy, our experience, our mood, do we decide with one or the other of the two great schools. Well, the gentleman of whom I am speaking wrote and had printed in plain English this phrase, read it carefully. This teaches us that these phenomena are purely subjective. Now I am quite sure that of the thousands who read that phrase, all but a handful read it in the spirit in which one hears the oracle of a God. Some read it with regret, some with pleasure, but all with acquiescence. That physical science was not competent in the matter, one way or the other. Each of those readers would probably have discovered, even if so simple a corrective as the use of the term physical research instead of the sacred term science had been applied. The hierarchic title science did the trick. I might take another example out of many hundreds to show what I mean. You have an authority, which is called, where the documents are concerned, the best modern criticism. The best modern criticism decides that Tamo Shanter was written by a committee of permanent officials of the Board of Trade, or that Napoleon Bonaparte never existed. As a matter of fact, the Tom Foolery does not usually venture upon grounds so near home, but talks rubbish just as monstrous about a poem a few hundred or a few thousand years old, or a great personality a few hundred or a few thousand years old. Now if you will look at that phrase, the best modern criticism, you will see at once that it simply teams with assumption and tautology. But it does more and worse. It presupposes that an infallible authority must of its own nature be perpetually wrong. Even supposing that I have the most modern, that is merely the latest, criticism to hand, and even supposing that by some omniscience of mine I can tell which is the best, that is which part of it has really proved most ample, most painstaking, most general, and most sincere. Even then the phrase fatally condemns me. It is to say that Wednesday is always infallible as compared with Tuesday and Thursday as compared with Wednesday, which is absurd. The BMC tells me in 1875 that the song of Roland could have no origins anterior to the year 1030. But the BMC 1885, being a BMC and nothing more valuable, has a changed opinion. It must change its opinion, that is the law of its being. Since an integral factor in its value is its modernity. In 1885 BMC tells me that the song of Roland can be traced to origins far earlier. Let us say to 912. In 1895 BMC has come to other conclusions. The song of Roland is certainly as late as 1115 and so forth. Now you would say that an idol of that absurdity could have no effect upon saint men. Change the terms and give it another name and you would laugh at the idea of its having an effect upon any men. But we know as a matter of fact that it commands the thoughts of nearly all men today and makes cowards of the most learned. Perhaps you'll ask me at the end of so long a criticism in what way error may be corrected, since there is a sort of tendency in us to accept it, to which I answer that things correct it, or as the philosopher calls things reality, error does not wash. To go back to that example of ghosts, if ever you see a ghost, my poor reader, I shall ask you afterwards whether he seemed subjective or no. I think you'll find the word subjective an astonishingly thin one, if, at least, I catch you early after the experience. The end of Chapter 29. This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org First and Last by Hilaire Bellach Chapter 30 The Great Sight All night we had slept on straw in a high barn. The wood of its beams was very old, and the tiles upon the roof were green with age. But there hung from beam to beam fantastically a wire caught by nails, and here and there from this wire hung an electric light bulb. It was a symbol of the time and the place and the people. There was no local law to forbid such a thing, or if there was no undreamt of obeying it. Just in the first dawn of that September day we went out, my companion and I, at guesswork, to hunt in the most amusing kind of hunting, which is the hunting of an army. The lane led through one of those lovely ravines at Picardi, which travelers never know, for they only see the planes, and in a little while we thought it wise to strike up the steep bank from the valley to the bare plateau above. But it was all at random and all guesswork. Only we wisely thought that we were nearing the beginnings of things, and that on the bare fields of the high flat we should have a greater horizon and a better chance of catching any indications of men or arms. When we had reached the height the sun had long risen, but as yet gave no shining, and there were no shadows, for a delicate mist hung about all the landscape, though immediately above us the sky was faintly blue. It was the weirdest of sensations to go for mile after mile over that vast plain, to know that it was cut in a regular series by parallel ravines which, in all that extended view, we could not guess at, to see up to the limits of the plateau, the spires of the villages, and the groups of trees about them, and to know that, somewhere in all this, there they concealed a cordy army, and not to see or hear a soul. The only human being that we saw was a man driving a heavy farm cart very slowly up a sideway, just as we came into the great road, which has shot dead across this country in one line ever since the Romans built it. As we went along that road, leaving the fields, we passed by many men indeed, and many houses, all in movement with the early morning, and the chalk numbers on the doors, and here and there an empty tin of polishing paste, or an order scrolled on paper and tacked to a wall, betrayed the passage of soldiers. But of the army, there was nothing at all. Scouting on foot, for that was what it was, is a desperate business, and that especially if you have nothing to tell whether you will get in touch in five, or ten, or twenty miles. It was nine o'clock before a clatter of horses hooves came up the road behind us. At first my companion and I wondered whether it were the first riders of the Dagoons or Curiosers. In that case, the advance was from behind us. But very soon, as the sound grew clearer, we heard how few they were, and then there came into view, trotting rapidly, a small escort and two officers, with the umpire's badges. So there was nothing doing. But when half a mile ahead of us on the road, they turned off to the left over Plough, we knew that that was the way we must follow too. Before we came to the turning place, before we left the road to take to the fields, on the left there came from far off and on our right the sound of a gun. It was my companion who heard it first. We strained to hear it again, twice we thought we had caught it, and then again we doubted. It is not so easily recognizable a sound as you might think in those great plains, cut by islands of high trees and steadying walls. The little seventy-five gun lying low makes a different sound altogether at a distance from the old piece of ninety. At any rate, there was here no doubt that there were guns, to the right and in front of us, and the umpire had gone to the left. We were getting towards the thick and we had only to go straight on to find out where the front was. Just as we had so decided and were still pursuing the high road, there came not half a mile away, and again to our right, in a valley below us, that curious sound which is like nothing at all, unless it be the dumping of flints out of a cart, rifle fire. It cracked and tore in stretches, and then there were little gaps of silence like the gaps in signaling, and then it cracked and tore in stretches again, and then fitfully one individual shot and then another would be heard. And much further off, with little sounds like snaps, the replies began from the hillside beyond the stream. So far so good. Here was contact in the valley below us, and the guns, some way behind and far off northwards, had opened. So we got the hang of it instantly. The front was the sort of crescent lying roughly north and south, and roughly parallel to the great road, and the real or famed mass of the advance was on the extreme left of that front. We were in it now, and that anxious and wearing business in all hunting, finding, was over, but we had been on foot six mortal hours before coming across our luck, and more than half the soldier's day was over. These men had been afoot since three, and certain units on the left had already marched over twenty miles. After that coming in touch with our business, not only did everything become plain, but the numbers we met and what I have called the thick of things, fed us with interest. We passed half the thirty-eighth going down the road singing to extend the line, and in a large village we came to the other half slouching about in the traditional fashion of the service. We had been waiting for an hour. With them, and lined up all along the village street, was one battery, with the drivers dismounted, and all that body were at ease. There were men sitting on the doorstep of the houses, and men trotting to the canteen wagon, or to the village shops to buy food, and there were men reading papers, which a peddler had brought round. Mud and dust had splashed them all. Upon some there was a look of great fatigue. They were of all shapes and sizes, and altogether it was the sort of sight you would not see in any other service in the world. It was the sort of sight which so disgusted the Emperor Joseph when he made his little tour to spy out the land before the Revolutionary Wars. It was the sort of sight which made Massinback before Grand Prix, marvel whether the French forces were soldiers at all, and the sort of sight which made Valmy inexplicable to the King of Prussia and his staff. It was the sort of sight which eighteen months later still convinced to Mac into an eye that the Duke of York's plan was a plan of annihilation. It is a trap for judgment, is the French service. So they lounged about and bought bread and shifted their packs, and so the little drivers stood by their horses, and so they all waited and slouched, until there came not a man with a bugle nor anything with the slightest saver of drama, but a little fellow running along, thumping in his loose leather leggings, who went up to a major of artillery and saluted, and immediately afterwards the major put his hand up and then down a village street, from a point which we could not see came a whistle, and the whole of that mass of men began to swarm. The gray-blue coats of the line swung round the corner of the village street. They had yet a few miles before them. Anything more rapid or less in step it would be difficult to conceive. The guns were off at right angle down to the main road, making a prodigious clatter, and at the same time appeared two parties, one of which it was easy to understand, the other not. They were both parties of sappers. The one party had a great roll of wire on a drum, and as quick as you could think they were un-reeling it, and as they un-reeled it, fastening it to eaves, overhanging branches, at the corners of walls, stretching it out forward. It was the field telephone. The other party came along carrying great beams upon their shoulders. But what they were to do with these beams we did not know. We followed the tail of the line down into the valley, and all that morning long, and passed the food time at midday. And so, till the sun declined in the afternoon, we went with the thirty-eighth in its gradual success from crest to crest. And still the thirty-eighth slouched by companies and mile after mile with checks and halts, and it never seemed to get either less or more tired. The men had had twelve hours of it when they came at last, and we after them on to the critical position. They had carried together with all the line to the left and to the right of them a string of villages which crowned the crest of a further plateau. And over this further plateau they were advancing against the main body of the resistance. The other army corps, which was set up against ours, do simulate an enemy. A railway line ran here across the rolling hedgeless fields, and just at the point where my companion and I struck it, there was a dip in the land and a high embankment which hid the plane beyond. But from that plane beyond, one heard the separate fire of the advancing line in its scattered order. We climbed the embankment, and from its ridge we saw over two miles or more of stubble, the little creeping bunches of the attack. What was resisting, or where it lay, one could only guess. Some hundreds of yards before us to the east, with the sloping sun full on it, a line of thicket, one scattered wood and then another, an imperceptible lifting of the earth here and there, marked the opposing fire line. Two pom-poms could be spotted exactly, for the flashes were clear enough through the underwood, and still the tide of advancing continued to flow, and the little groups came up and fed it, one after another and another, in the center where we were and far away to the north and right away to the south. The countryside was alive with it. The action was beginning to take on something of that final movement and decision which makes the climax of maneuvers look so great a game. But in a little while that general creeping forward was checked. There were orders coming from the umpires, and a sort of lull fell over each position held. My companion said to me, Let us go forward now over the intervening zone and in among Picard's men, and get well behind their line and see whether there is a rally or whether before the end of this day they begin to fall back again. So we did, walking a mile or so until we had long passed their outposts and were behind their forward lines. And standing there upon a little eminence near Wood, we turned and looked over what we had come, westwards towards the sun, which was now not far from its setting. Then it was that we saw the last of the great sight. The level light, mellow and already reddening, illumined all that plain strangely, and with the absolute stillness of the air contrasted the opening of the guns which had been brought up to support the renewal of the attack. We saw the isolated woods standing up like islands with low steep cliffs dotted in a sea of stubble for miles and miles, and first from the cover of one and then from another, the advance, perpetually piercing and deploying. As we so watched, they're buzzed high above us like a great hornet of eye-plane, circling well within our lines, beyond attack from the advance, but overlooking all they concealed behind it. In a few minutes a great blear-up monoplane like the hawk followed, and yet further inwards the two great birds shot round in an arc parallel to the firing line and well behind it, and in a few minutes that seemed seconds. They were dots to the south and then lost in the air. And perpetually as the sun declined, Picard's men were falling back north and south of us, and before us, and the advance continued. Group by group we saw it piercing this hedge, that woodland, now occupying a nearer and a nearer roll of land. It was the greatest thing imaginable, this enormous sweep of men, the dead silence of the air, and the comparatively slight contrast of the ceaseless pattering rifle-fire, and the slight intermittent accompaniment of the advancing batteries, until the sunset and all this human business slackened. And for the first time one heard bugles, which were a command to cease the game. I would not have missed that day, nor lose the memories of it for anything in the world. The end of Chapter 30. This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. First and Last By Hilaer Bellach Chapter 31 THE DECLINE OF ESTATE The decline of a state is not equivalent to a mortal sickness therein. States are organisms, subject to diseases and to decay, as are organisms of man's bodies, but they are not subject to a rhythmic rise and fall as is the body of a man. A state in its decline is never a state doomed or a state dying. States perish slowly or by violence, but never without remedy and rarely without violence. The decline of a state differs with the texture of it. A democratic state will decline from a lowering of its potential, that of its ever ready energy to act in a crisis, to correct and to control its servants in common times, to watch them narrowly and suspect them at all times. A despotic state will decline when the despot is not in point of fact the true depository of despotic power, but some other acting in his name, of whom the people know little and cannot judge. Or when the despot, though fully in view and recognized, lacks will, or when, which is rare, he is so inhuman as to miss the general sense of his subjects. An oligarchic state, or an aristocracy as it is called, will decline principally through two agencies which are first illusion and, secondly, lack of civic aptitude. For an oligarchic state tends very readily to illusion, being conducted by men who live at leisure, satisfy their passions, are immune from the laws, and prefer to shield themselves from reality. Their capacity or appetite for illusion will rapidly pervade those below them, for in an aristocracy the rulers are subject to a sort of worship from the rest of the community. And thus it comes about that aristocracies in their decline, except fantastic histories of their own past, conceive victory possible without armies, wealth to be an indication of ability, and national security to be a natural gift rather than a product of the will. Such communities further fail from the lack of civic aptitude, as was said above, which means that they deliberately elect to leave the mass of citizens incompetent and irresponsible for generations, so that when any more strain is upon them they look at once for some men other than themselves to relieve them, and are incapable of corporate action upon their own account. The decline of a state differs also according to whether it be a great state or a small one, for in the first indifference in the latter faction are apparel, and in the first ignorance and in the latter private spite. Then again the decline of a state will differ according to whether its strength is rooted originally in commerce, in arms, or in production, and if in production then whether in the production of the artisan or that of the peasant. If arms be the basis of the state, then that the army should become professional and a part is a symptom of decline, and a cause of it. If commerce the substitution of hazards and imaginaries for the transport of real goods, and the search after real demand. If production the discontent or apathy of the producer, as with presence an ill system in the taxation of the land, or in the things necessary for its tillage, such as a misgovernment of its irrigation in a dry country, the permission of private extractions and tolls in a fertile one, the toleration of thieves and forestallers, and so forth. Artisans upon the other hand may well flourish, though the state be corrupt in such matters, but they must be secured in a high wage and be given a vast liberty of protest, for if they sink to be slaves in fact they will from the nature of their toil grow both weak and foolish. That is it not the state endangered by the artisans throwing off a refuse of ill-paid and starving men, who are either too many for the work or unskillful at it. Such an excretion would poison a peasantry, remaining in their body as it were, but artisans are purged thereby. This refuse it is for the state to decide upon. It may in an artisan state be used for soldierry, since such states commonly maintain but small armies and are commonly indifferent to military glory. Or it may be set to useful labor, or again destroyed. But this last use is repugnant to humanity, and so in the long run hurtful to the state. In the decline of a state, of whatever nature that state be, two vices will immediately appear and grow. These are avarice and fear, and men will more readily accept the imputation of avarice than of fear, for avarice is the less despicable of the two. Yet in fact fear will be by far the strongest passion of the time. Avarice will show itself not indeed in a mere greed of gain, for this is common to all societies, whether flourishing or failing, but rather in a sort of taking for granted and permeation of the mere love of money, so that history will be explained by it, others judged by their booty or begun in order to enrich a few, love between men and women wholly subordinated to it, especially among the rich, wealth made a test for responsibility and great salaries invented and paid to those who serve the state. This vice will also be apparent in the easy acquaintance of all who are possessed of wealth and their segregation from the less fortunate, for avarice cleaves society flat ways, keeping the scum of it quite clear of the middle, the middle of it quite clear of the dregs, and so forth. It is the further mark of avarice in its last ages that the rich are surrounded with lies in which they themselves believe. Thus in the last phase there are no parasites but only friends, no gifts but only loans, which are more esteemed favors than gifts once were. No one vicious but only tedious, and no one a paltrune but only slack. Of fear in the decline of a state it may be said that it is so much the master passion of such a decline as to eat up all others. Coming by travel from a healthy state to one diseased fear is the first point you can take. Men dare not print or say what they feel of the judges, the public governors, the action of the police, the controllers of fortunes and of news. This fear will have about it something comic, providing infinite joy to the foreigner and modifying with laughter the lament of the patriot. A miserable hack that never had a will of his own but ran to do what he was told for twenty years at the bidding of his masters, being raised to the bench, will be praised for an impartial virtue more than human. A drunken fellow, the son of a drunkard, having stolen control over some half-dozen sheets, must be named under the breath or not at all. A powerful minister may be accused with sturdy courage of something which he did not do, and no one would mind his doing, but under the influence of fear, to tell the least little truth about him will put a whole assembly into a sort of blankness. This vice has for its most laughable effect the raising of a whole host of phantoms, and when a state is so far gone that civic fear is quite normal to the citizens, then you will find them blenching with terror at a piece of print, a whispered accusation, bankruptcy, though they be possessed of nothing, and even the ill will of women. Money lenders under this influence have the greatest power next after them blackmailers of all kind, and the next after these eccentrics who may blurt or break out. Those who have least power in the decline of a state are priests, soldiers, the mothers of many children, the lovers of one woman, and saints.