Normandy and the Normans

There is no understanding a country unless one gets to know the nature of its sub-units. In some way not easy to comprehend, impossible to define, and yet very manifest, each of the great national organisms of which Christendom is built up is itself a body of many regions whose differences and interaction endow it with a corporate life. No one could understand the past of England who did not grasp the local genius of the counties—Lancashire, cut off eastward by the Pennines, southward by the belt of marsh, with no natural entry save by the gate of Stockport; Sussex, which was and is a bishopric and a kingdom; Kent, Devon, the East Anglian meres. No one could (or does) understand modern England who does not see its sub-units to have become by now the great industrial towns, or who fails to seize the spirit of each group of such towns—with London lying isolated in the south, a negative to the rest.

France is built of such sub-units: it is the peculiarity of French development that these are not small territories mainly of an average extent with government answerable in a long day's ride to one centre, such as most English counties are; nor city States such as form the piles upon which the structure of Italy has been raised; nor kingdoms such as coalesced to reform the Spanish people; but provinces, differing greatly in area, from little plains enclosed, like the Rousillon, to great stretches of landscape succeeding landscape like the Bourbonnais or the Perigord.

The real continuity with an immemorial past which inspires all Gallic things is discoverable in this arrangement of Gaul. At the first glance one might imagine a French province to be a chance growth of the feudal ties and of the Middle Ages. A further effort of scholarship will prove it essentially Roman. An intimate acquaintance with its customs and with the site of its strongholds, coupled with a comparison of the most recent and most fruitful hypotheses of historians, will convince you that it is earlier than the Roman conquest; it is tribal, or the home of a group of cognate tribes, and its roots are lost in prehistory. So it is with Normandy.

This vast territory—larger (I think) than all North England from the Humber to Cheviot and from Chester to the Solway—has never formed a nation. It is typical of the national idea in France that Normandy should have "held" of the political centre of the country, probably since the first Gallic confederations were formed, certainly since the organization of the Empire. It is equally typical of the local life of a French province that, thus dependent, Normandy should have strictly preserved its manner and its spirit, and should have readily made war upon the Crown and resisted, as it still resists and will perhaps for ever, the centralizing forces of the national temper.

If you will travel day after day, and afoot, westward across the length of Normandy, you will have, if you are a good walker, a fortnight's task ahead of you; even if you are walking for a wager, a week's. It is the best way in which to possess a knowledge of that great land, and my advice would be to come in from the Picards over the bridge of Aumale across the little River Bresle (which is the boundary of Normandy to the east), and to go out by way of Pontorson, there crossing into Brittany over the little River Couesnon, which is the boundary of Normandy upon the west and beyond which lie the Bretons. In this way will you be best acquainted with the sharp differentiation of the French provinces passing into Normandy from Picardy, brick-built, horse-breeding, and slow, passing out of Normandy into the desolation and dreams of Brittany, and having known between the one and the other the chalk streams, the day-long beechen forests, the valley pastures, and the flamboyant churches of the Normans. You will do well to go by Neufchatel, where the cheese is made, and by Rouen, then by Lisieux to Falaise, where the Conqueror was born, and thence by Vive to Avranches and so to the Breton border, taking care to choose the forests between one town and another for your road, since these many and deep woods—much wider than any we know in England—are in great part the soul of the country.

By this itinerary you will not have taken all you should into view; you will not have touched the coast nor seen how Normandy is based upon the sea, and you will not have known the Cotentin, which is a little State of its own and is the quadrilateral which Normandy thrusts forth into the Channel. If you have the leisure, therefore, return by the north. Pass through Coutances and Valognes to Cherbourg, thence through Caen and Bayeux to the crossing of Seine at Honfleur, and then on by the chalk uplands and edges of the cliffs till you reach Eu upon the Bresle again. In such a double journey the character of the whole will be revealed, and if you have studied the past of the place before starting you will find your journey full. Avranches, Coutances, Lisieux, Bayeux, Rouen are not chance sites. Their great churches mark the bishoprics; the bishoprics in turn were the administrative centres of Rome, and Rome chose them because they were the strongholds or the sacred cities each of a Gallic tribe. The wealth of the valleys permitted everywhere that astonishing richness of detail which marks the stonework in village after village; the connexion with England, especially the last connexion under Henry V, explains the innumerable churches, splendid even in hamlets as are our own. The Bresle and the Couesnon, those little streams, are boundaries not of these last few centuries, but of a time beyond view; the Romans found them so. Diocletian made them the limits of the "Second Lyonesse," "Lugdunensis Secunda," which was the last Roman name of the province.

Here and there, near the west especially, you will discover names which recall the chief adventure of Normandy, the accident which baptized it with its Christian name, the landing of the Scandinavian pirates, the thousandth anniversary of which is now being celebrated. They came—we cannot tell in what numbers, some thousands—and harried the land. The old policy of the Empire, the policy already seven hundred years old, was had recourse to; the barbarians were granted settlement, inheritance, marriage, and partnership with the Lords of the Villae; their chief was permitted to hold local government, to tax and to levy men as the administrator of the whole province; but there followed something which wherever else the experiment had been tried had not followed: something of a new race arose. In Burgundy, in the northeast, in Visigothic Aquitaine the slight admixture of foreign blood had not changed the people, it was absorbed; the slight admixture of Scandinavian blood, coming so much later, in a time so degraded in government and therefore so open to natural influence, did change the Gallo-Romans of the Second Lyonesse. Few as the newcomers may have been in number, the new element transformed the mass, and when a century had permitted the union to work and settle, the great soldiers who founded us appeared. The Norman lords ordered, surveyed, codified, and ruled. They let Europe into England, they organized Sicily, they confirmed the New Papacy, they were the framework of the Crusades.

The phenomenon was brief. It lasted little more than a hundred years, but it transformed Europe and launched the Middle Ages. When it had passed, Normandy stood confirmed for centuries (and is still confirmed) in a character of its own. No longer adventurous but mercantile, apt, of a resisting courage, sober in thought, leaning upon tradition, not imperially but domestically strong: the country of Corneille and of Malesherbes, a reflection of that spirit in letters; the conservative body of to-day—for in our generation that is the mark of Normandy—and, in arms, the recruitment to which Napoleon addressed his short and famous order that "the Normans that day should do their duty."



The Old Things

Those who travel about England for their pleasure, or, for that matter, about any part of Western Europe, rightly associate with such travel the pleasure of history; for history adds to a man, giving him, as it were, a great memory of things—like a human memory, but stretched over a far longer space than that of one human life. It makes him, I do not say wise and great, but certainly in communion with wisdom and greatness.

It adds also to the soil he treads, for to this it adds meaning. How good it is when you come out of Tewkesbury by the Cheltenham road to look upon those fields to the left and know that they are not only pleasant meadows, but also the place in which a great battle of the mediaeval monarchy was decided, or as you stand by that ferry, which is not known enough to Englishmen (for it is one of the most beautiful things in England), and look back and see Tewkesbury tower, framed between tall trees over the level of the Severn, to see also the Abbey buildings in your eye of the mind—a great mass of similar stone with solid Norman walls, stretching on hugely to the right of the Minster.

All this historical sense and the desire to marry History with Travel is very fruitful and nourishing, but there is another interest, allied to it, which is very nearly neglected, and which is yet in a way more fascinating and more full of meaning. This interest is the interest in such things as lie behind recorded history, and have survived into our own times. For underneath the general life of Europe, with its splendid epic of great Rome turned Christian, crusading, discovering, furnishing the springs of the Renaissance, and flowering at last materially into this stupendous knowledge of today, the knowledge of all the Arts, the power to construct and to do—underneath all that is the foundation on which Europe is built, the stem from which Europe springs; and that stem is far, far older than any recorded history, and far, far more vital than any of the phenomena which recorded history presents.

Recorded history for this island and for Northern France and for the Rhine Valley is a matter of two thousand years; for the Western Mediterranean of three; but the things of which I speak are to be reckoned in tens of thousands of years. Their interest does not lie only nor even chiefly in things that have disappeared. It is indeed a great pleasure to rummage in the earth and find polished stones wrought by men who came so many centuries before us, and of whose blood we certainly are; and it is a great pleasure to find, or to guess that we find, under Canterbury the piles of a lake or marsh dwelling, proving that Canterbury has been there from all time; and that the apparently defenceless Valley City was once chosen as an impregnable site, when the water-meadows of the Stour were impassable as marsh, or with difficulty passable as a shallow lagoon. And it is delightful to stand on the earthwork a few miles west and to say to oneself (as one can say with a fair certitude), "Here was the British camp defending the south-east; here the tenth legion charged." All these are pleasant, but more pleasant, I think, to follow the thing where it actually survives.

Consider the track-ways, for instance. How rich is England in these! No other part of Europe will afford the traveller so permanent and so fascinating a problem. Elsewhere Rome hardened and straightened every barbaric trail until the original line and level disappeared; but in this distant province of Britain she could only afford just so much energy as made them a foothold for her soldiery; and all over England you can go, if you choose, foot by foot, along the ancient roads that were made by the men of your blood before they had heard of brick or of stone or of iron or of written laws.

I wonder that more men do not set out to follow, let us say, the Fosse-Way. There it runs right across Western England from the south-west to the north-east in a line direct yet sinuous, characters which are the very essence of a savage trail. It is a modern road for many miles, and you are tramping, let us say, along the Cotswold on a hard metalled modern English highway, with milestones and notices from the County Council telling you that the culverts will not bear a steam-engine, if so be you were to travel on one. Then suddenly this road comes up against a cross-road and apparently ceases, making what map draughtsmen call a "T"; but right in the same line you see a gate, and beyond it a farm lane, and so you follow. You come to a spinney where a ride has been cut through by the woodreeve, and it is all in the same line. The Fosse-Way turns into a little path, but you are still on it; it curves over a marshy brook-valley, picking out the firm land, and as you go you see old stones put there heaven knows how many (or how few) generations ago—or perhaps yesterday, for the tradition remains, and the country-folk strengthen their wet lands as they have strengthened them all these thousands of years; you climb up out of that depression, you get you over a stile, and there you are again upon a lane. You follow that lane, and once more it stops dead. This time there is a field before you. No right of way, no trace of a path, nothing but grass rounded into those parallel ridges which mark the modern decay of the corn lands and pasture—alas!—taking the place of ploughing. Now your pleasure comes in casting about for the trail; you look back along the line of the Way; you look forward in the same line till you find some indication, a boundary between two parishes, perhaps upon your map, or two or three quarries set together, or some other sign, and very soon you have picked up the line again.

So you go on mile after mile, and as you tread that line you have in the horizons that you see, in the very nature and feel of the soil beneath your feet, in the skies of England above you, the ancient purpose and soul of this Kingdom. Up this same line went the Clans marching when they were called Northward to the host; and up this went slow, creaking wagons with the lead of the Mendips or the tin of Cornwall or the gold of Wales.

And it is still there; it is still used from place to place as a high road, it still lives in modern England. There are some of its peers, as for instance the Ermine Street, far more continuous, and affording problems more rarely; others like the ridgeway of the Berkshire Downs, which Rome hardly touched, and of which the last two thousand years has, therefore, made hardly anything; you may spend a delightful day piecing out exactly where it crossed the Thames, making your guess at it, and wondering as you sit there by Streatley Vicarage whether those islands did not form a natural weir below which lay the ford.

The roads are the most obvious things. There are many more; for instance, thatch. The same laying of the straw in the same manner, with the same art, has continued, we may be certain, from a time long before the beginning of history. See how in the Fen Land they thatch with reeds, and how upon the Chalk Downs with straw from the Lowlands. I remember once being told of a record in a manor, which held of the Church and which lay upon the southern slope of the Downs, that so much was entered for "straw from the Lowlands": then, years afterwards, when I had to thatch a Bethlehem in an orchard underneath tall elms—a pleasant place to write in, with the noise of bees in the air—the man who came to thatch said to me: "We must have straw from the Lowlands; this upland straw is no good for thatching." Immediately when I heard him say this there was added to me ten thousand years. And I know another place in England, far distant from this, where a man said to me that if I wished to cross in a winter mist, as I had determined to do, Cross-Fell, that great summit of the Pennines, I must watch the drift of the snow, for there was no other guide to one's direction in such weather. And I remember another man in a little boat in the North Sea, as we came towards the Foreland, talking to me of the two tides, and telling me how if one caught the tide all the way up to Long Nose and then went round it on the end of the flood, one caught a new tide up London river, and so made two tides in one day. He spoke with the same pleasure that silly men show when they talk about an accumulation of money. He felt wealthy and proud from the knowledge, for by this knowledge he had two tides in one day. Now knowledge of this sort is older than ten thousand years; and so is the knowledge of how birds fly, and of how they call, and of how the weather changes with the moon.

Very many things a man might add to the list that I am making. Dew-pans are older than the language or the religion; and the finding of water with a stick; and the catching of that smooth animal, the mole; and the building of flints into mortar, which if one does it in the old way (as you may see at Pevensey) the work lasts for ever, but if you do it in any new way it does not last ten years; then there is the knowledge of planting during the crescent part of the month, but not before the new moon shows; and there is the influence of the moon on cider, and to a less extent upon the brewing of ale; and talking of ale, the knowledge of how ale should be drawn from the brewing just when a man can see his face without mist upon the surface of the hot brew. And there is the knowledge of how to bank rivers, which is called "throwing the rives" in the South, but in the Fen Land by some other name; and how to bank them so that they do not silt, but scour themselves. There are these things and a thousand others. All are immemorial.



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 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 at 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 Brede.

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 Harold. It was far other with the so-called "Norman" host, who were full of forebodings—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 Harold 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. [Footnote: The Rhododendrons on the great lawn are modern.] Their left was arranged en potence, their right was drawn up in echelon. The centre 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 Omdurman, played but a slight role in this typically national action and such mounted troops as were present seem to have been intermixed with the line in the fashion later known, in the jargon of the service, as "The Beggar's Quadrille." 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 salient 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 residence of one of those cultured and leisured men who form the framework of our commonwealth) was then but a wild heath.

Harold himself could be distinguished in the centre 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 futile as the first, delivered as it was up a perfect glacis strengthened by epaulements, reverses and countersunk galvon work and one whose natural strength was heightened by the stockade 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 plan 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 grey 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 proceeded the order for what followed.

The forces at the centre, 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 marvellous 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 seems 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, by no set road and with no cumbersome machinery of train and rear-guard, the whole of the vast assembly masked itself behind the woodlands of the Weald.

The Norman horsemen, bewildered and fatigued, gazed on the many that had fallen in defence 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 exactly co-ordinated routes towards London.

There is perhaps no more difficult task set before soldiers than the quiet execution of such a manoeuvre after the heat of a heavy action, and none have performed it more magnificently than the veteran troop of Harold.

When (luckily) all the orders had 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 war 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 spoilt 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) ruined 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 on 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 Berkhampstead. He and England were equally astounded to find that a broken and defeated invader could actually be accepted by the intriguers at Westminster and crowned King of England as the price of a secret bargain.

Such was the fruit of as great and successful an effort as ever Saxon soldier made: the Battle of Senlac: for such—as I am now free to reveal—was the true name of the field of action.

The ineptitude or avarice of 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 Pudsey, are recorded to have gnashed their teeth and shed tears of indignation at the dispatches from the metropolis. At Crecy 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 Provence with their triumphal arches and their vast arenas and their Roman stone cropping out everywhere: in old quays, in ruined bridges, in the very pavement of the streets they use to-day, 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 manoeuvres of the French Army that, in the intervals of watching those great buzzing flies, the aeroplanes, and in the intervals of long tramps after the regiments or of watching the massed 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 its marches in the Ile de France, the edge of Normandy and the edge of Flanders—which retains to-day 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 Rheims and the frontier of Artois, 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 the other, with a sort of surprise. The scheme develops before one as one looks, and always when one thinks one has completed the web another and yet another straight 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—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 lengths 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 rarer Roman roads in England, all trace of the thing disappears under the plough 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 Estree, 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 men 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 two thousand years of history repose, is the most fascinating kind of travel.

And then, the number of them! You may take an oblong of country with Maubeuge at one corner, Pontoise at another, Yvetot and some frontier town such as Fumes for the other two corners, and in that stretch of country a hundred and fifty miles by perhaps two hundred, you can build up a scheme of Roman ways almost as complete as the scheme of the great roads to-day.

That one which most immediately strikes the eye is the great line which darts upon Rouen from Paris.

Twice broken at the crossing of the river valleys, and lost altogether in the last twelve 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 Cambray, in use every mile; some, like the old marching road to the sea, to the Portus Itius, 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 cavalry trailed to the disaster of Crecy, and just beyond Crecy 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 Domqueur, Novelle (which is called Novelle-en-Chaussee, that is Novelle on the paved road), on past Estree (where from the height you overlook the battlefield of Crecy), and that ruler so lying on your map points right at Boulogne Harbour, thirty odd miles away—and in all those thirty odd remaining miles I could not find another yard of it. But what an interest! What a hobby to develop! There is 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 Weald.

How was it lost, this great main road of Europe, this marching road of the legions, linking up Gaul and Britain, the way that Hadrian went, and the way down which the usurper Constantine III must have come during that short adventure of his which lends such a romance to the end of the Empire? One cannot conceive why it should have disappeared. It is a sunken way down the hillside across the light railway which serves Crecy, 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 legends cannot march along it any more. In one place you find a few yards of it about three miles south and east of Montreuil. It may be that the little lane leading into Estree shows where it crossed the valley of the Cauche, 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 country for Roye and on to Noyon, 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 Choisy, 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 Somme, a lesser road again, still in one strict alignment, it reaches on to within a mile of Vermand, and there it stops dead. I do not think that between Vermand and St. Quentin you will find it. Go out north-westward from Vermand 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 plough of the rolling land. But continue by your compass so and you will come (suddenly again and with no apparent reason for its abrupt origin) upon the dead straight line that ran from the capital of the Nervii, three days' march and more, and pointing all the time straight at Vermand.

And so it is throughout the province and its neighbourhood. Here and there, as at Bavai, 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 to-day in their manoeuvres follow for half a morning the line which was taken by the Legions.



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 Monomotopa, is utterly innocent of this embellishment or frill.

No traveller records the existence of any Monomotopan quill-driver; no modern visitor to that delightful island has come across a litterateur whether in the worse or in the best hotels; and such reading as the inhabitants enjoy is entirely confined to works imported by large steamers from the neighbouring 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 Monomotopan hieratic script, of a very ancient inscription which clearly sets forth the whole business.

It seems that an Emperor of Monomotopa, whose date can be accurately fixed by internal evidence to lie after the universal deluge and before the building of the Pyramid of Cheops, 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 quarrelling among themselves. With sickening treachery these distant rival nations had determined to produce wealth and to live in amity, 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 effect 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 the State 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. Paupers also, the unemployed, cripples, imbeciles, deaf mutes, and the clergy escaped under this beneficent and equable 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 the new fiscal regime.

In practice also the collection was easy. Overseers 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 press, and every tenth drink about to be consumed in the hostelries 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 knock-out 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 prima donna 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 advisers, 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 trade, 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 permanent 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 byzants, a third as much as a ducat, while some who have singularly attracted the notice of the public can command ten, twenty, nay forty scutcheons, 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 Monomotopa 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 ere two years had elapsed. The schedule was designed, and such litterateurs as 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 Monomotopan 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 catalogues 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 Monomotopan 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.

Driven to desperation, the Emperor changed the whole basis of the Remuneration of Literary Labour, 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 men 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.



The Eye-Openers

Without 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 travelled, "Travel!" 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 to-day 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 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 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 waterworks, 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 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 cited half a dozen out of as many hundred) got into their letters and their print: they have not yet got into the letters and the print of other nations. But an honest man travelling 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 snowdrift and the train twelve hours late"—as it was (with me in it) near Setif in January, 1905. He does not say as he looks on the peasant at his plough outside Batna: "Observe yon 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!" Contrariwise, he says: "See those four Mohammedans playing cards with a French pack of cards and drinking liqueurs in the cafe! 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 tranquillity. Some hundreds must have got in and out during the last fifty miles!"

In other words, the wise man has permitted eye-openers to rain upon him their full, beneficent, and sacramental influence. And if a man in travelling will always maintain his mind ready for what he really sees and hears, he will become a whole nest of Columbuses 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 Catalans one people, and you get much the same sort of advantages and disadvantages (apart from the effect of government) with the Catalans to the north as with the Catalans 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 opinion 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, the "Depeche" of Toulouse, militantly, and often solently atheist; the other as militantly Catholic.

You don't get that in Pamplona, 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 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 traveller, his bird's-eye view of the country as he went through Kent just after landing would make you think the place a 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 Public

I notice a very curious thing in the actions particularly of business men to-day, 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 business man is wrong when he says that "the public will demand" such and such an article, and on producing the article finds it sells widely; he is obviously and demonstrably right in his use of the word "public" in such a connexion. Nor is a man wrong or subject to illusion when he says, "The public have taken to cinematograph shows," or "The public were greatly moved when the Hull fishermen were shot at by the Russian fleet in the North Sea." What I mean is "The Public" as an excuse or scapegoat; the Public as a menace; the Public as a butt. 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 Jinks'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 buy books, and of the fraction that buy books very few indeed buy Jinks's. Jinks 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 the publisher is quite right in one sense when he says, "The Public" won't buy Jinks. 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 buy. He will find that not one of these people buys Jinks. Most of them will talk Jinks, and if Jinks writes a play, however dull, they will probably go and see it once; but they draw the line at buying Jinks's books—and I don't blame them.

The moral is very simple. You yourselves 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 have seen the same thing in the offices of a newspaper. Some simple truth of commanding interest 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 doubt each of these absurd symbols haunted the brain of each of the editors in question. The editor of the first paper would print at wearisome 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 it came nearest to hand on the bookstall. 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 veil the true name of the organ) more carefully than those retired officers of either service who are to be 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 is always a travelled 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 childlike 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 especially 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 colour 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 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 unspoilt) 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 lifelike. 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 cuirass with a fur tippet 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 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 quarrelled with the Public in the old days when men lived a healthy corporate life, and painted, wrote, or 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 friends 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.



On Entries

I am always planning in my mind new kinds of guide books. Or, rather, new features in guide books.

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 its 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 for ever 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 save one little place built for the railway men. There was no cultivation either.

Close before me began a sort of swamp with reeds which hardly moved to the air, 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 clothe 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 colour, 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 that 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 a neighbour in the carriage what it was called; he told me it was called Lake Trasimene.

Now I do not say that this tragic site 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.

Thus 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 mediaeval 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 it 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 Eure; but the Eure is so small a river that he would be a bold man who would travel up it all this way. Nevertheless it is a good piece of travel, and anyone who will undertake it will see Louviers and will pass Anet, where the greatest work of the Renaissance once stood, and 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 Beauce. The great church seems mountainous upon a mountain. Its apse completes the unclimbable 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 Orleans road. I suppose that nine people out of ten, even to-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 so sees them. Ely is 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 height of Albi 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 although this kind of entry is nowadays often marred by ugly suburbs. You will get much your finest sight of Segovia as you come in by the road from the Guadarama and from Madrid. It is from that point that you were meant to see the town, and you will get much your best grip on Carcassonne, old Carcassonne, if you come in by the road from Toulouse at morning as you were meant to come, and so Coucy should be approached by that royal road from Soissons and from the south, while as for Laon (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 bulwarks. There is perhaps one exception to this rule, which is the sight 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 the mountains 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 a height half their own. Certainly the Bernese Oberland is more wonderful caught in one moment from the 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 plateaux and you see them shining over the salt marshes. The Vosges you cannot thus see from a half-height; there is no platform, and that is perhaps why the Vosges have not impressed travellers as they should. But you can so watch the grand chain of old volcanoes which are the rampart of Auvergne. You can stand upon the high wooden ridge of Foreze and see them take the morning across the mists and the flat of the Limagne, where the Gauls fought Caesar. Further south from the high table of the Velay you can see the steep backward escarpment of the Cevennes, 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 school escapes 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 are not used to being thus taken at a disadvantage and they are both surprised and surprising. There are many towns in holes and trenches of Europe which you can thus play "peep-bo" with if you will come at them 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 vale. But if you come upon them from over their guardian cliffs and scars you catch them unawares, 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 Meuse, and particularly with Aubusson, 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 to-day 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 Janiculum, 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 Northern 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.



Companions of Travel

I write of travelling 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 Charing Cross all over the world and back to Charing Cross again. And there is a pathos in this: as Balzac 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 grey beard and wild eyes; he was old, and very small like a gnome, but he had not the gnome's good-humour. 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 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, and what he expected to do, or what opportunities he had, I have never understood. Though some years after, in quite another place—namely, Steyning, in Sussex—I came upon just such another, whose quarrel 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 Encamps, 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, "know 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 Sceptic 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 the monstrous superstitions of others.

Then, again, in the town of Marseilles, only two years ago, I met a man who looked well fed, and had a stalwart, square French face, and whose politico-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 harbour, the stench 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 Phoceans, at the half-million of Marseilles, and said, "All that should disappear." The constructive side of his politico-economic scheme was negative. He was a practical man. None of your fine theories for him. One step at a time. Let there be a Chambardement—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 harbour. When I had come to an end of his politico-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 that 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 Jedburgh, 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 man at Aix-la-Chapelle, who had hair the colour of tow, and gave me minute details of the method by which England was to be destroyed; a man I met upon the Appian Way, who told 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 a 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 site of Bocardo (of which he had never heard), and the negative evidence against a Roman origin for the site 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 tracts upon me, and wanted to charge me sixpence each at Paddington. But if I were to speak of even these few I should exceed.



On the Sources of Rivers

There are certain customs in man the permanence of which gives infinite pleasure. When the mood of the schools is against them these customs lie in wait beneath the floors of society, but they never die, and when a decay in pedantry or in 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 so to 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 sources 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 despaired and wrote:

A cloud's a lot of vapour, The sky's a lot of air, And the sea's a lot of water That happens to be there.

You cannot get further down than that. When you have 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 river heads.

You have lost a great deal when you have forgotten that, and it behoves 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 awe. 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, and 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 and it makes Avignon; it changes in colour and in the nature of its 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 Garonne are well known. The Garonne rises by itself in a valley from which there is no issue, like the fabled valleys shut in by hills on every side. And if it were anything but the Garonne it would not be able to escape: it would lie imprisoned there for ever. Being the Garonne it tunnels a way 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 Arun 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.

Thames 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 Thames dry—since which time its gods have deserted the river.

The sources of the Ribble 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 Whernside stands up above it, and Ingleborough Hill, which is like no other hill in England, but like the flat-topped Mesas which you have in America, or (as those who have visited it tell me) like the flat hills of South Africa; and a little way off on the other side is Pen-y-ghent, 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 Ayr. It rises in a curious way, for it imitates the Garonne, and finding itself blocked by limestone burrows underneath at a place called Malham Tarn, after which it has no more trouble.

The River Severn, the River Wye, 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 Plinlimmon, and the smallest of them has the most wonderful rising, for it falls through the gorge of Llygnant, which looks like, and perhaps 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 Rheidol, 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 Seine. It comes out upon the northern side of the hills which the French call the Hills of Gold, in a country of pasturage and forest, very high up above the world and thinly peopled. The River Seine appears there in a sort of miraculous manner, pouring out of a grotto, and over this grotto the Parisians have built a votive statue; and there is yet another of the hundred thousand things that nobody knows.



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 of 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 it down in words, and said that such an encyclopaedia 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, in the printed criticisms to which sundry accepted doctrines are subjected by the younger men to-day, in 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 Encyclopaedia or Dictionary of Ignorance and Error, will never be printed. It is a great pity.

Incidentally one may remark that the process by which a 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, having 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 estopper 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 here digress to discuss whether this habit of the mind were not a distorted reflection of some truth, and whether, indeed, there be not such beings as demons or the souls of things. But, to leave that, we take our authority—this thing "Science," for instance—we clothe it with a creed and appetites and a will, and all the other human attributes.