An apprehension of the past demands two kinds of information.
First, the mind must grasp the inner nature of historic change, and therefore must be made acquainted with the conditions of human thought in each successive period, as also with the general scheme of its revolution.
Secondly, the external actions of men, the sequence in dates and hours of such actions, and their material conditions and environment must be strictly and accurately acquired.
Neither of these two foundations, upon which repose both the teaching and the learning of history, is more important than the other. Each is essential. But a neglect of the due emphasis which one or the other demands, though both be present, warps the judgment of the scholar and forbids him to apply this science to its end, which is the establishment of truth.
History may be called the test of true philosophy, or it may be called in a very modern and not very dignified metaphor the object-lesson of political science, or it may be called the great story whoseinterest is upon another plane from all other stories because its irony, its tragedy, and its moral are real, were acted by real men, and were the manifestation of God.
Whatever brief and epigrammatic summary we make to explain the value of history to men, that formula still remains an imperative formula for them all, and I repeat it: the end of history is the establishment of truth.
A man may be ever so accurately informed as to the dates, the hours, the weather, the gestures, the type of speech, the very words, the soil, the colour, that between them all would seem to build up a particular event. But if he be not seized of the mind which lay behind all that was human in the business, then no synthesis of his detailed knowledge is possible. He cannot give to the various actions which he knows their due order and proportion; he knows not what to omit, nor what to enlarge upon among so many, or rather a number potentially infinite of, facts; and his picture will not be (as some would put it) distorted: it will be false. He will not be able to use history for its end, which is the establishment of Truth. All that he establishes by his action, and all that he confirms and makes stronger, is Untruth. And so far as truth is concerned it would be far better that a man should be possessed of no history than that he should be possessed of history ill-stated as to its prime factor, which is human motive.
A living man has, to aid his judgment and to guide him in the establishment of truth, contemporary experience. Other men are his daily companions. The consequence and the living principles of their acts and of his own are fully within his grasp. If he is rightly informed of all the past motive and determining mind from which the present has sprung, that information of his will illumine and expand and confirm his use of present experience. If he know nothing of the past his personal observation and the testimony of his own senses are, so far as they go, an unshakable foundation. But if he brings to the aid of contemporary experience an appreciation of the past which is false because it gives to the past a mind which was not its own, then he will not only be wrong upon that past, but he will tend to be wrong also in his conclusions upon the present. He will for ever read into the plain facts before him origins and predetermining forces which do not explain them and which are not connected with them in the way he imagines. He will come to regard his own society—which, as a man wholly uninstructed, he might fairly though insufficiently have grasped—through a veil of illusion and of false philosophy, until at last he will not even be able to see the things before his eyes. In a word, it is better to have no history at all than to have history which misconceives what were the general direction and the large sweeps of thought in the immediate and the remoter past.
This being evidently the case, one is tempted to say that a just estimate of the revolution and the progression of human motive in the past is everything to history, and that an accurate scholarship in the details of the chronicle, in dates especially, is of wholly inferior importance. Such a statement would be quite false. Scholarship in history (that is, an acquaintance with the largest possible number of facts, and an accurate retention of them in the memory) is as essential to this study as is that other background of motive which has just been examined.
The thing is self-evident if we put an extreme case. For if a man were wholly ignorant of the facts of history and of their sequence, he could not possibly know what might lie behind the actions of the past, for we only obtain communion with that which is within and that which is foundational in human action by an observation of its external effect. A man's history, for instance, is sound and on the right lines if, though he have but a vague and general sentiment of the old pagan civilisation of the Mediterranean, that sentiment corresponds to the very large outline and is in sympathy with the main spirit of the affair. But he cannot possess so much as a sketch of the truth if he has not heard the names of certain of the great actors, if he is wholly unacquainted with the conception of a City State, and if the names of Rome, of Athens, of Antioch, of Alexander, and of Jerusalem have never been mentioned to him.
Nor will a knowledge of facts be valuable (contrariwise, it will be detrimental and of negative value to his judgment), if accuracy in his knowledge be lacking. If he were invariably inaccurate, thinking that red which was blue, inverting the order of any two events, and putting without fail in the summer what happened in winter, or in the Germanies what took place in Gaul, his facts would never correspond with the human motive of them, and his errors upon externals would at once close his avenues of access towards internal motive and suggest other and non-existent motive in its place.
It is, of course, a pedantic and negligible error to imagine that the knowledge of a time grows out of a mere accumulation of observation. External things do not produce ideas, they only reveal them. And to imagine that mere scholarship is sufficient to history is to put one's self on a level with those who, in the sphere of politics for instance, ignore the necessity of political theory and talk muddily of the "working" of institutions—as though it were possible to judge whether an institution were working ill or not when one had no ideal of what that institution might be designed to attain. But though scholarship is not the source of judgment in history, it is the invariable and the necessary accompaniment of it. Facts which (to repeat) do not produce ideas, but only reveal or suggest them, do none the less reveal and suggest them, and form the only instrument of such suggestion and revelation.
Scholarship, accurate and widespread, has this further function: that it is necessary to a general apprehension of the past, which, however just, is the firmer, the larger, and the more intense as the range of knowledge and its fixity increase. And scholarship has one more function, which is that it corrects, and it corrects with more and more precision in proportion as it is more and more detailed, the tendency of the mind to extend a general and perhaps justly apprehended idea into the region of unreality. For the mind is creative; it will still make and spin; and if you do not feed it with material it will spin dreams out of emptiness. Thus a man will have a just appreciation of the Thirteenth Century in England, he will perhaps admire or will perhaps be repelled by its whole spirit according to his temperament or his acquired philosophy; but in either case, though his general impression was once just, he will, if he considers it apart from reading, tend to add to it excrescences of judgment, which, as the process continues, will at last destroy the true image; scholarship, like a constant auditor, comes in regularly to check and tally his conclusions. Does he admire the Thirteenth Century? Then he will tend to make it more national than it was because our time is national, and to forget its cruelties because the good enthusiasms of our own age happen for the moment not to be accompanied by cruelty. He will tend to lend the Thirteenth Century a science it did not possess, because physical science is in our owntime an accompaniment of greatness. But if he reads and reads continually, these vagaries will not oppress or warp his vision. More and more body will be added to that spirit which he does justly, but only vaguely, know. And he will at last have with the English Thirteenth Century something of that acquaintance which one has with a human face and voice: these also are external things, and these also are the product of a soul. Indeed—though metaphors are dangerous in such a matter—a metaphor may with reservation be used to describe the effect of the chronicle, of research, and of accurate scholarship in the science of history. A man ill provided with such material is like one who sees a friend at a distance; a man well provided with it is like a man who sees a friend close at hand. Both are certain of the identity of the person seen, both are well founded in that certitude; but there are errors possible to the first which are not possible to the second, and close and intimate acquaintance lends to every part of judgment a surety which distant and general acquaintance wholly lacks. The one can say something true and say it briefly: there is no more to say. The other can fill in and fill in the picture, until though perhaps never complete it is asymptotic to completion.
To increase one's knowledge by research, to train one's self to an accurate memory of it, does not mean that one's view of the past is continually changing. Only a fool can think, for instance, thatsome document somewhere will be discovered to show that the mass of the people of London had for James II an ardent veneration, or that the national defence organised by the Committee of Public Safety during the French Revolution was due to the unpopular tyranny of a secret society. But research in either of these cases, and a minute and increasing acquaintance with detail, does show one a London largely apathetic in the first case, and does show one large sections of rebellious feeling in the armies of the Terror. It permits one to appreciate what energy and what initiative were needed for the overthrow of the Stuarts, and to see from how small a body of wealthy and determined men that policy proceeded. It permits one to understand how the battles of '93 could never have been fought upon the basis of popular enthusiasm alone; it permits one to assert without exaggeration that the autocratic power of the Committee of Public Safety and the secrecy of its action were necessary conditions of the national defence during the French Revolution.
One might conclude by saying what might seem too good to be true: that minute and accurate information upon details (the characteristic of our time in the science of history) must of its own nature so corroborate the just and general judgments of the past that when the modern phase of wilful distortion is over mere blind scholarship will restore tradition.
I have sometimes wondered whether it might not be possible to have guide-books written for the great routes of modern travel—I mean of modern pleasure-travel—which should make the whole road a piece of history; for history enlarges everything one sees, and gives a fulness to flat experience, so that one lives more than one's own life in contemplating it, and so that new landscapes are not only new for a moment, but subject to centuries of varieties in one's mind.
It is true that those who write good guide-books do put plenty of history into them, but it is sporadic history, as it were; it is not continuous or organic, and therefore it does not live. You are told of a particular town that such was its Roman name; that centuries later such a mediæval contest was decided in its neighbourhood. If it is connected in some way with the military history of this country you will be given some detailed account of an action fought there, and that is particularly the case in Spain, which one leaves with the vague impression that it was created to serve as a terrain for the Peninsular War.
All knowledge of that sort interests the traveller, but it hardly remains, nor does it "inform" in the full sense of that word. Now, to be "informed" is the object, and the process of it is the pleasure, of learning. To give life to the history of places there must be connection in it, and it so happens that withourtravel to-day—especially our pleasure-travel—a connection stands ready to the writer's hand: for we go in herds to-day along the great roads which have made Europe. It is the railways that have done this. Before they were built the network of cross-roads—already excellent in the end of the Eighteenth Century and the beginning of the Nineteenth—tempted men of leisure in every direction; towns that had something curious to show were visited as easily, whether they lay on the main roads or no. The fruit of that time you may see in the great inns which still stand, though often half deserted, in places eccentric to modern travel. It may be that this old universality of travel will return with our new ease of going wherever there is a good surface for wheels—it has in part returned—but still much the most of us go along the lines laid down fast for us by the first great expenditure upon railways, and this was invested, necessarily, along some at least of the immemorial tracks which—from long before history—were the framework of Western society.
If you are from the North and go to the Riviera—from thence on, down the coast to Rome, you gomile for mile along the central highway that bound together the Roman Empire, the road that Hadrian went and Constantine descended. York, London, Dover, Boulogne, Laon, Dijon, Lyons, Marseilles are the posts strung along it, and the same long line is the line of advance which the Creed took when Christianity came up northwards from the Mediterranean. It is the line the second advent of that influence took when St. Augustine brought it back to this island after the breakdown of the Empire. Or if you will consider that short eight hours of tearing speed which so many thousands know, the main line from London to Paris, see what a thick past there is gathered all along it. The crossing of the Darent, where stood one of the string of Canterbury palaces, and just to the left of your train the field where Edmund Ironside met the Danes, further on Wrotham, another of the archbishops' line of houses, and on the hills above and in the plain below the sacred monoliths that the savages put up for worship before letters or buildings were known, and beyond the valley Kit's Coty House and the bare place where stood the Rood of Boxley and Aylesford, the first bridge where the pirates first drove the British in their conquest of this country, and much further the British camp which the Tenth Legion stormed, standing above the Stour. Canterbury, where there is fixed continuity with Rome and with the history before Rome, the little Roman bricks in St. Martin's Church, the Romanroads radiating to the ports of the Channel, and the British tracks on which they lay or which they straightened, deep under the site of the city the group of lake-dwellings when its defence was a lagoon, now meads—and, in the site of the great Central Tower, the end of the Middle Ages with which that town is crammed. Or if you reach it by the northern way, then everywhere you are following the great military road whereby for two thousand years travel has come from the Straits to London; Rochester, the armed defence of the river-crossing, the capture of whose castle twice gave an army the South of England, and all but saved Henry III against his Barons; the second bishopric of England; the garrison which stood central and sheltered the halt of forced marches from the sea upon London—and every step of the way Chaucer.
If you cross by Boulogne you see above you, on the last of English land, the hill forts they built to overlook the broad shallow harbour of Lemanus, now dry; you cross upon the narrow sea the track of Cæsar, who, when he first invaded, drifted here under a light breeze and with the tide for hours, coming with the transports from Boulogne and beaching at last upon the flats of Deal. Also in Boulogne that broad valley was a land-locked harbour in Cæsar's day, and there he built his ships.
If you cross by Calais you come, some three miles from French land, over that good holding ground where the Armada lay at anchor on a summerevening waiting to take aboard the unconquered soldiery which was designed for the assault of England; but Howard and the flock of little English boats came up after, just thwart of Griz-nez, which you see tall and huge to your right: they lay there at anchor out of range against the stormy sunset, and when night came drove in their fire-ships against the Spanish Fleet and broke its formation, and next day the tempest drove them up that flat coast to your left, and so on to destruction in the open sea.
Then see how the French road is full also. Here, just beyond Étaples, is the place where the two ambassadors passed in '93, neither knowing the other: the one returning, driven out of London, the other posting thither at full speed to avert war. They missed, and so war came. A little further on to your left is a patch of wood; to your right, beyond the flats, is a broad estuary of which you may see the lighthouse towers. That wood is the wood of Crécy: through it there marched the English host on their way to victory in the rising ground beyond. The river mouth is that whence William started with his hundreds of ships on the way to Hastings: he lay gathered there with the wind in his teeth for days, until the equinox sent him a south-wester and he bowled across to Pevensey and landed there: every stretch of this road is alive with stories and things done.
The way down into Italy by Bourg is a way of armies also, though not a way of English armies,and it is a way of great influences too. Thus, if you would see the Gothic North and the Southern Renaissance first meeting, like salt water and fresh at the turn of a river-tide, get out at Bourg and drive a mile to Brou and see there the tombs of the House of Savoy. There is no sight like it in Europe, yet how few know it out of all who whirl down that line—often by night—on the way to the Alps or to Italy?
There are other roads: each tempts one to a list of wonders. The road northeastward from Paris, every step of which is the line of the last Napoleonic struggle. The road eastward into Germany by Metz, every step of which is the history of the Revolution, or of invasion, or of success in the field. A little station which your eyes will hardly catch as the express goes by is neighbour to the camp that Attila made before he was defeated in those plains of Champagne; another little station, the station of a hidden hamlet, is called Valmy; half-an-hour on, beyond Les Islettes, you see quite close by the forest path that Drouet took when he intercepted the flight of the King and so destroyed the French Monarchy.
All these roads are known roads, but there is one which the railway has abandoned and which is therefore half derelict; many motors rediscover it, for it has half the story of Europe strung along it—I mean the road from Paris by Tours and Poictiers to Perigueux, to Toulouse, over the High Pyrenees andon to Saragossa. No one line serves it. Across the mountains for a day and more of travel there is no line at all, but this is the road up which Islam came a thousand years ago to end us. The host got past Poictiers. Charles met them from Tours and they were destroyed. You may see the place to-day, and this is the road by which all the Frankish and Gothic invasions moved on Spain, and this is the road that Charlemagne must have taken when he first marched across the hills against the Valley of Ebro. I know of no road more holy with past wars, none more wonderful where it meets the mountains, none better made for all sorts of going—and none more deserted than it is upon the high places between France and Spain—but of this road I will write later to prove how much there may be in travel.
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 the fate of English mediæval 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 the Abbey buildings in your eye of the mind—a great mass of similar stone with solid Norman walls, standing to the right of the building.
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 to-day, 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 or even chiefly in things that disappeared. It is indeed a great pleasure to rummage in the earth and find the polished stones of the men who came so many centuries before us, but 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 beyond Chilham 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 England is 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, but in this distant province of Britain she would only spend just so much energy as made them a foothold for her soldiery; and all over England you 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, let us say; and thereyou are tramping 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 travelling in one. Then suddenly it comes up against a cross-road and apparently ceases, making what map draughtsmen call a "T"; but right in the same line you will see a gate, and beyond it a farm lane, and so you follow. You come to a spinney where a ride is cut through by the wood-reeve, and it is all in the same line. The Fosse-way turns into a little path, but you are still on it; it curls over a marshy brook-valley, keeping on firm land, and as you go you see old stones put there Heaven knows how many generations ago—or perhaps yesterday, for the tradition remains and the countryfolk 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 decay of the corn lands and pasture taking the place of agriculture. 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 someother 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 feel 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. Iremember 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." Then 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 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, one 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 our language or religion; and the finding of water with a stick; and the catching of that difficult animal, the mole; and the building of flints into mortar, which if one does it the old way (as you may see at Pevensey) lasts for ever, and if you do it the new way does not last ten years; and 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 they do not silt, but scour themselves. There are these things and a thousand others. All are immemorial, but I have no space for any now.
The letters of a people reflect its noblest as architecture reflects its most intimate mind and as its religion (if it has a separate or tribal religion) reflects its military capacity or incapacity. The word "noblest" is vague, and nobility must here be defined to mean that steadiness in the soul by which it is able to express a fixed character and individuality of its own. Thus a man contradicts himself from passion or from a variety of experience or from the very ambiguity and limitation of words, but he himself resides in all he says, and when this self is clearly and poisedly expressed it is then that we find him noble.
The poet Milton, according to this conception, has best expressed the nobility of the English mind, and in doing a work quite different from any of his peers has marked a sort of standard from which the ideal of English letters does not depart.
Two things are remarkable with regard to English literature, first that it came late into the field of European culture, and secondly that it has proved extraordinarily diversified. The first point isimmaterial to my subject; the second is material to it; for it might be superficially imagined that such bewildering complexity and, as it were, lawless exuberance of method and of matter would never find a pole, nor ever be symbolised by but one aspect of it. Yet Milton has found that pole, and Milton's work has afforded that symbol.
In any one moment of English literary history you may contrast two wholly different masterpieces from the end of the Fourteenth to the end of the Eighteenth Centuries. After the first third of the Nineteenth, indeed, first-rate work falls into much more commonplace groove, and it is perceptible that the best verse and the best prose written in English are narrowing in their vocabulary, and, in what is far more important, their way of looking at life. The newspapers have levelled the writers down as with a trowel; you have not side by side the coarse and the refined, the amazing and the steadfast, the grotesque and the terrible; but in all those earlier centuries you had side by side manner and thought so varied that a remote posterity will wonder how such a wealth could have arisen upon so small an area of national soil.Piers Plowmanand theCanterbury Talesare two worlds, and a third world separate from each is the world of those lovely lyrics which are now so nearly forgotten, but which the populace, spontaneously engendered and sang throughout the close of the Middle Ages. The Sixteenth Century was perhaps less modulated, and flowed, especiallytowards its end, in one simpler stream, but in the Seventeenth what a growth of variety from the Jacobean translation of the Bible to Swift. The very decade in whichParadise Lostwas published corresponded with the first riot of the Restoration.
If we look closely into all this diversity we can find two common qualities which mark out all English work in a particular manner from the work of other nations. To qualities of this kind, which are like colours rather than like measurable things, it is difficult to give a title; I will hazard, however, these two words, "Adventure" and "Mystery." There is no English work of any period, especially is there no English work of any period later than the middle of the Sixteenth Century, which has not got in it all those emotions which proceed from the love of Adventure. How notable it is, for instance, that Landscape appears and reappears in every diverse form of English verse. Even in Shakespeare you have it now and then as vivid as a little snapshot, and it runs unceasingly through every current of the stream; it glows in Gray'sElegy, and it is the binding element ofIn Memoriam. It saves the earlier work of Wordsworth, it permeates the large effect of Byron, and those two poems, which to-day no one reads,ThalabaandThe Curse of Kehama, are alive with it. It is the very inspiration of Keats and of Coleridge. Now this hunger for Landscape and this vivid sense of it are but aspects of Adventure; for the men who thus feel andspeak are the men who, desiring to travel to unknown places, are in a mood for sudden revelations of sea and land. So a living poet has written—
When all the holy primal part of meArises up within me to saluteThe glorious vision of the earth and seaThat are the kindred of the destitute....
When all the holy primal part of meArises up within me to saluteThe glorious vision of the earth and seaThat are the kindred of the destitute....
When all the holy primal part of meArises up within me to saluteThe glorious vision of the earth and seaThat are the kindred of the destitute....
When all the holy primal part of me
Arises up within me to salute
The glorious vision of the earth and sea
That are the kindred of the destitute....
The note of those four lines is the note of Landscape in English letters, and that note is the best proof and effect of Adventure. If any man is too poor to travel (though I cannot imagine any man so poor), or if he is constrained from travel by the unhappy necessities of a slavish life, he can always escape through the door of English letters. Let such a one read the third and fourth books ofParadise Lostbefore he falls asleep and he will find next morning that he has gone on a great journey. Milton by his perpetual and ecstatic delight in these visions of the world was the normal and the central example of an English poet.
As when far off at sea a fleet descri'dHangs in the clouds....
As when far off at sea a fleet descri'dHangs in the clouds....
As when far off at sea a fleet descri'dHangs in the clouds....
As when far off at sea a fleet descri'd
Hangs in the clouds....
or, again,
.... Hesperus, that ledThe Starry Host, rode brightest 'til the Moon,Rising in cloudy majesty, at lengthApparent Queen, unveiled....
.... Hesperus, that ledThe Starry Host, rode brightest 'til the Moon,Rising in cloudy majesty, at lengthApparent Queen, unveiled....
.... Hesperus, that ledThe Starry Host, rode brightest 'til the Moon,Rising in cloudy majesty, at lengthApparent Queen, unveiled....
.... Hesperus, that led
The Starry Host, rode brightest 'til the Moon,
Rising in cloudy majesty, at length
Apparent Queen, unveiled....
He everywhere, and in a profusion that is, as it were, rebellious against his strict discipline of words, sees and expresses the picture of this world.
If Landscape be the best test of this quality ofadventure in English poets and the Milton as their standard, so the mystic character of English verse appears in them and in him. No period could be so formal as to stifle or even to hide this demand of English writers for Mystery and for emotions communicable only by an art allied to music. The passion is so strong that many ill-acquainted with foreign literature will deny such literature any poetic quality because they do not find in it the unmistakable thrill which the English reader demands of a poet as he demands it of a musician. As Landscape might be taken for the best test of Adventure, so of this appetite for the Mysterious the best measurable test is rhythm. Highly accentuated rhythm and emphasis are the marks and the concomitants of that spirit. As powerful a line as any in the language for suddenly evoking intense feeling by no perceptible artifice is that line inLycidas—
Smooth-sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds.
Smooth-sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds.
Smooth-sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds.
Smooth-sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds.
I confess I can never read that line but I remember a certain river of twenty years ago, nor does revisiting that stream and seeing it again with my eyes so powerfully recall what once it was to those who loved it as does this deathless line. It seems as though the magical power of the poet escaped the effect of time in a way that the senses cannot, and a man curious in such matters might find the existence of such gifts to be a proof of human immortality. The pace at which Milton rides his verse,the strong constraint within which he binds it, deeply accentuate this power of rhythm and the mystical effect it bears. Now you would say a trumpet, now a chorus of human voices, now a flute, now a single distant song. From the fortieth to the fifty-fifth line of the third bookParadise Losthas all the power and nature of a solemn chant; the large complaint in it is the complaint of an organ, and one may say indeed in this connection that only one thing is lacking in all the tones Milton commanded; he disdained intensity of grief as most artists will disdain intensity of terror. But whereas intensity of terror is no fit subject for man's pen, and has appealed only to the dirtier of our little modern fellows, intense grief has been from the very beginning thought a just subject for verse.
Τἡλε δ' ἁπὁ κρατὁς χἑε δἑσματα σιγαλὁενταΑμπυκα κεκρὑφαλὁν τ', ἡδἑ πλεκτἡν ἁναδἑσμηνΚρἡδεμνὁν Θ', δ ῥἁ οἱ δὡκε χρυσἑη 'ΑφροδἱτηΗματι τὩ, ὁτε μιν κορυθαἱολος ἡγἁγεθ' Εκτωρ'Εκ δὁμου 'Ηετἱωνος, ἑπεἱ πὁρε μυρἱα ἑδνα.
Τἡλε δ' ἁπὁ κρατὁς χἑε δἑσματα σιγαλὁενταΑμπυκα κεκρὑφαλὁν τ', ἡδἑ πλεκτἡν ἁναδἑσμηνΚρἡδεμνὁν Θ', δ ῥἁ οἱ δὡκε χρυσἑη 'ΑφροδἱτηΗματι τὩ, ὁτε μιν κορυθαἱολος ἡγἁγεθ' Εκτωρ'Εκ δὁμου 'Ηετἱωνος, ἑπεἱ πὁρε μυρἱα ἑδνα.
Τἡλε δ' ἁπὁ κρατὁς χἑε δἑσματα σιγαλὁενταΑμπυκα κεκρὑφαλὁν τ', ἡδἑ πλεκτἡν ἁναδἑσμηνΚρἡδεμνὁν Θ', δ ῥἁ οἱ δὡκε χρυσἑη 'ΑφροδἱτηΗματι τὩ, ὁτε μιν κορυθαἱολος ἡγἁγεθ' Εκτωρ'Εκ δὁμου 'Ηετἱωνος, ἑπεἱ πὁρε μυρἱα ἑδνα.
Τἡλε δ' ἁπὁ κρατὁς χἑε δἑσματα σιγαλὁεντα
Αμπυκα κεκρὑφαλὁν τ', ἡδἑ πλεκτἡν ἁναδἑσμην
Κρἡδεμνὁν Θ', δ ῥἁ οἱ δὡκε χρυσἑη 'Αφροδἱτη
Ηματι τὩ, ὁτε μιν κορυθαἱολος ἡγἁγεθ' Εκτωρ
'Εκ δὁμου 'Ηετἱωνος, ἑπεἱ πὁρε μυρἱα ἑδνα.
[Greek: Têle d' apo kratos chee desmata sigaloentaAmpyka kekryphalon t', êde plektên anadesmênKrêdemnon th', ho rha hoi dôke chryseê AphroditêHêmati tôi, hote min korythaiolos êgageth' HektôrEk domou Êetiônos, epei pore myria hedna.]
[Greek: Têle d' apo kratos chee desmata sigaloentaAmpyka kekryphalon t', êde plektên anadesmênKrêdemnon th', ho rha hoi dôke chryseê AphroditêHêmati tôi, hote min korythaiolos êgageth' HektôrEk domou Êetiônos, epei pore myria hedna.]
[Greek: Têle d' apo kratos chee desmata sigaloentaAmpyka kekryphalon t', êde plektên anadesmênKrêdemnon th', ho rha hoi dôke chryseê AphroditêHêmati tôi, hote min korythaiolos êgageth' HektôrEk domou Êetiônos, epei pore myria hedna.]
[Greek: Têle d' apo kratos chee desmata sigaloenta
Ampyka kekryphalon t', êde plektên anadesmên
Krêdemnon th', ho rha hoi dôke chryseê Aphroditê
Hêmati tôi, hote min korythaiolos êgageth' Hektôr
Ek domou Êetiônos, epei pore myria hedna.]
Milton will have none of it. It is the absence of that note which has made so many hesitate before the glorious achievement ofLycidas, and in this passage which I quote, where Milton comes nearest to the cry of sorrow, it is still no more than what I have called it, a solemn chant.
.... Thus with the yearSeasons return; but not to me returnsDay, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn,Or sign of vernal bloom, or Summer's Rose,Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;But cloud instead, and ever-during darkSurrounds me, from the chearful waies of menCut off, and, for the Book of knowledge fair,Presented with a Universal blancOf Nature's works, to mee expung'd and ras'd,And wisdome at one entrance quite shut out.So much the rather thou, Celestial light,Shine inward, and the mind through all her powersIrradiate; there plant eyes, all mist from thencePurge and disperse, that I may see and tellOf things invisible to mortal sight.
.... Thus with the yearSeasons return; but not to me returnsDay, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn,Or sign of vernal bloom, or Summer's Rose,Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;But cloud instead, and ever-during darkSurrounds me, from the chearful waies of menCut off, and, for the Book of knowledge fair,Presented with a Universal blancOf Nature's works, to mee expung'd and ras'd,And wisdome at one entrance quite shut out.So much the rather thou, Celestial light,Shine inward, and the mind through all her powersIrradiate; there plant eyes, all mist from thencePurge and disperse, that I may see and tellOf things invisible to mortal sight.
.... Thus with the yearSeasons return; but not to me returnsDay, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn,Or sign of vernal bloom, or Summer's Rose,Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;But cloud instead, and ever-during darkSurrounds me, from the chearful waies of menCut off, and, for the Book of knowledge fair,Presented with a Universal blancOf Nature's works, to mee expung'd and ras'd,And wisdome at one entrance quite shut out.So much the rather thou, Celestial light,Shine inward, and the mind through all her powersIrradiate; there plant eyes, all mist from thencePurge and disperse, that I may see and tellOf things invisible to mortal sight.
.... Thus with the year
Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn,
Or sign of vernal bloom, or Summer's Rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the chearful waies of men
Cut off, and, for the Book of knowledge fair,
Presented with a Universal blanc
Of Nature's works, to mee expung'd and ras'd,
And wisdome at one entrance quite shut out.
So much the rather thou, Celestial light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.
There is one other character in Milton wherein he stands not so much for English Letters as for a feature in English nature as a whole, which is a sort of standing apart of the individual. Where this may be good and where evil it is not for a short appreciation to discuss. It is profoundly national and nowhere will you see it more powerfully than in the verse of this man. Of his life we all know it to be true, but I say it appears even in his verse. There is a sort ofnoli me tangerein it all as though he desired but little friendship and was not broken by one broken love, and contemplated God and the fate of his own soul in a lonely manner; of all the things he drew the thing he could never draw was a collectivity.
What a great thing it is in this perplexed, confused, and, if not unhappy at least unrestful time, to come across a thing which is cleanly itself! What a pleasure it is amid our entwining controversies to find straightness, and among our confused noises a chord. Hans Christian Andersen is a good type of that simplicity; and his own generation recognised him at once; now, when those contemporaries who knew him best are for the most part dead, their recognition is justified. Of men for whom so much and more is said by their contemporaries, how many can stand the test which his good work now stands, and stands with a sort of sober triumph? Contemporary praise has a way of gathering dross. We all know why. There is the fear of this, the respect for that; there is the genuine unconscious attachment to a hundred unworthy and ephemeral things; there is the chance philosophy of the moment over-weighing the praise-giver. In a word, perhaps not half-a-dozen of the great men who wrote in the generation before our own would properly stand this test of a neat and unfringed tradition. It is not tobe pretended that according to that test so must men be judged. Many of the very greatest, Hugo for instance, and in his line, Huxley (a master of English); or, again, to go further back, the great Byron, would not pass the test.
Things have been said about most men, great or little, in our fevered time, so exaggerated, so local and so lacking balance, whether of experience or of the fear of posterity, that contemporary opinion should not be allowed by its misfortunes to weigh them down. But a man has a quality of his own when he is so made that even his contemporaries do him justice, and that was the case with Hans Christian Andersen. I will bargain that if our letters survive five hundred years, this excellent writer will quietly survive. Even the French may incorporate him. And next it is the business of one who praises so much to ask in what the excellence of this writer consists. It is threefold: in the first place, he always said what he thought; in the second place, he was full of all sorts of ways of saying it; and, in the third place, he said only what he had to say.
To say what one thinks, that is, to tell the truth, is so exceedingly rare that one may almost call it a grace in a man. Just those same manifold strings which pull contemporary criticism hither and thither, and which have made me suggest above that contemporary criticism commonly belittles a man in the long run, just those same strings pull at every writer to make him conform to what he knows to be falsein his time. But some men—with limitations, it is true, and only by choosing a particular framework—manage to tell the truth all their lives; those men, if they have other literary qualities, are secure of the future.
And this leads me to the second point, which is that Andersen could not only tell the truth but tell it in twenty different ways, and of a hundred different things. Now this character has been much exaggerated among literary men in importance, because literary men, perceiving it to be the differentiation which marks out the great writer from the little, think it to be the main criterion of letters. It is not the main criterion; but it is a permanent necessity in great writing. There is no great writing without this multiplicity, which is sometimes called imagination, sometimes experience, and sometimes judgment, but which is in its essence a proper survey of the innumerable world. This quality it is which makes the great writers create what are called "characters"; and whether we recognise those "characters" as portraits drawn from the real world (they are such in Balzac), or as figments (they are such in Dickens), or as heroines and heroes (they are such in Shakespeare and in Homer, if you will excuse me), yet that they exist and live in the pages of the writer means that he had in him that quality of contemplation which corresponds in our limited human nature to the creative power.
Lastly, I say that Andersen said what he had tosay and no more. This quality in writers is not restraint—a futile word dear to those who cannot write—it is rather a sort of chastity in the pen. The writer of this kind is one who unconsciously does not add; if any one were to ask him why he should not add an ornament or anything supposititious, he would be bewildered and perhaps might answer: "Why should I?" The instinct behind it is that which produces all terseness, all exactitude, and all economy in style.
Andersen, then, had all those three things which make a great writer, and a very great writer he is.
Note that he chose his framework, or, at any rate, that he was persuaded to it. He could not have been so complete had he not addressed himself to children, and it is his glory that he is read in childhood. There is no child but can read Hans Christian Andersen, and I at least have come across no man who, having read him in childhood, does not continue to read him throughout life. He wrote nothing that was not for the enlivening or the sustenance or the guiding of the human soul; he wrote nothing that suggested questions only. If one may speak of him in terms a trifle antiquated (or rather for the moment old-fashioned), he was instinct with charity, and therefore he is still full of life.
Having said so much of Andersen in general, something should be said of him in particular. He was Northern; you always feel as you read him that if his scene is laid in the open air, the air is freshand often frosty; that if he is talking indoors the room is cosy and often old. Certain passions which the North lacks are lacking in him, both upon their good and upon their evil side. He is never soldierly, and he is never revengeful; he is never acute with the desire for life, but, again, he is never envious. Those who read him and who are also Northern may well be in love with Denmark. It is a triumph of our civilisation that this little land, quite outside the limits of the Roman Empire, not riven by any of the Empires' great vital resurrections, undisturbed by the vision of the Twelfth and of the Thirteenth Centuries, spared from the march of Napoleon's armies, should be so completely European. What could be more European to-day than that well-organised, contented, peasant State? It is a good irony to put against the blundering prophecies of barbaric people that beyond the Germanies this secure and happy State exists. One might put it in a phrase a little too epigrammatic and say that as one reads Hans Christian Andersen one remembers Elsinore, and one recalls the good architecture of Copenhagen. If ever any misfortune again shall threaten that State, and if barbarism attempts to play the fool with it, something that really is the conscience of Europe and not the empty and sham organisation to which that phrase is too often prostituted will arise and protect the Danes.
No British Army in force has capitulated in Europe for many generations. It is the peculiar historical position of this country. That historical fact lends to the common history of the schools and universities an attitude towards military history in general which is commonly distorted, but it lends to the policy of the country as a whole a confident tradition, the strength and value of which it is impossible to exaggerate.
The nearest touch to such a disaster, if we except the sieges, was passed during the days in which these words are written and read; the close thing came about in the days just before and just after Christmas, one hundred and two years ago. I will attempt to describe as simply as I can the nature of that adventure.
It must first of all be premised that, in the words of Napier, position determines the fate of armies. No truth is more apparent to the soldier, none more forgotten by the civilian—and more especially by the civilian touched with the unmilitary vice of Jingoism. Position determines the fate of armies,and, armaments being supposedly equal, he is a great or a fortunate general who, in the critical moment, has so arranged matters that disposition is upon his side, or who by some stroke of luck is in that advantage. There are exceptions to this truth. Certain decisive battles (though very few) have utterly determined campaigns; and among these battles some, again, have been won at a drive, and by a sort of impetus, the factor of position being so simple as to be negligible, or so equally balanced as to advantage neither side and be eliminated. But, as a rule, it is true even of decisive actions, that position is the determining factor. It is necessarily true of the strategy of a campaign, and it is with this consideration that I return to the particular crisis of the British Army at the close of December 1808.
Sir John Moore, as every one knows, had raided right into the North of Spain, with the object of withdrawing the pressure of the French upon the South of that country. It was in the South that French ambition had found its first check, and that Napoleon's plan had been warped by the unexpected and, as it were, impossible capitulation of Baylen. Close upon twenty thousand of the French forces had there laid down their arms. The Emperor came in person to restore the fortunes of his house; it was in the South that resistance could best be expected; by the occupation of the South that he might put himself at ease over the whole territory,and from the South that the English operations were destined to draw him.
On the 21st of December, a Wednesday, Lord Paget, with the Tenth and Fifteenth Hussars, surprised an advanced body of French Cavalry at Sahagun. It was the extreme limit of Moore's great raid; the town was occupied, and all the Thursday, all the Friday, Moore halted there with his force of some twenty-three thousand and sixty guns. He was nearly two hundred miles from the port on the sea-coast, whereto he must retire if he would escape. In front of him was Soult, against whom it was his business, if he were undisturbed, to march from Sahagun immediately; but upon his right, nearly as far off as the sea, though not quite so far, a matter of a hundred and fifty to a hundred and seventy miles, Napoleon, at Madrid, commanded the best and the largest of the armies in Spain. Sixty thousand men, with a hundred and fifty guns, lay at the gates of Madrid, and during those same hours in which the British Army had marched into Sahagun, Napoleon's great force began to move northward over the Guadarrama.
I will not here describe that famous march: I have done so elsewhere at greater length: but the reader, to appreciate the conditions of this great duel, must imagine a country denuded and largely mountainous, deep in snow, and subject throughout those days to intolerable weather; and the race upon the issue of which depended so manyand such final things was run at a time and in a place when one would have thought that no man could be abroad. But the protagonists of the Revolutionary wars were not men like ourselves.
Christmas Day fell upon the Sunday. Moore had got ahead of his supplies; they had reached him on the Friday, and on the Saturday, Christmas Eve, he had intended to go forward and attack the opponent before him. But on that same Friday when, in the night, his Infantry were already beginning to march eastward, he heard of Napoleon's amazing feat; he knew that he had succeeded in drawing the great commander northward, but he knew also, since that commander could work miracles, that the distance separating them would be crossed with a swiftness not to be measured by the old rules of war, and that the vast force three times his own would, if he hesitated, be found holding the snow-blocked roads between his position and the sea. The order to advance was cancelled, the order to retreat was given. By Christmas Eve Baird and Hope were on the line of the Esla River; on Christmas Day, Sunday, the troops were passing that obstacle. On Monday, the 26th, the baggage and the last of the army, under Moore's own eye, were crossing by the bridge of Castro Gonzalo before Benevente, and the trick was done. There was a thick fog, the passage was far slower than the strained intelligence of the imperilled commander had designed. On that same day, the 26th, Napoleon was at Tordesillas,one long day's march away from the Esla River. He had covered in that dash of three days and a half a hundred and twenty miles, but he was too late. He was too late by half a day.
In the dark and storm-driven night of that Monday the extreme van of Napoleon's horse rode up to the bridge of Castro Gonzalo. They were unsupported, of course, and rode far before the army to discover; but, though it was not contact in any serious sense, there is something very worthily dramatic in the appearance of those tall horsemen suddenly in the night through the blinding snow, come up just too late to do more than watch the escape of Moore's column.
By the next day the purpose of the British commander was achieved: Napoleon knew he could no longer intercept: the bridge was destroyed. The opportunity of recording the envelopment and destruction of a British force was lost to Napoleon; he abandoned to Soult the further long pursuit, which is called in history the retreat upon Corunna.
There is nothing more curious in the material change which is passing so rapidly over the modern world than what I may call the Romance of Communication.
With the Romance of Discovery every one is thoroughly acquainted. The modern world is saturated with that form of romance; it has permeated all our literature and is still the theme of most of our books of travel. But like all things which have attained a literary position, the Romance of Discovery already belongs to the past. Not that nothing remains to be discovered: on the contrary, the modern world has hardly yet begun to appreciate how it may penetrate from detail to detail and find perpetually something new in that which it thinks it knows, but the great broad unknown spaces, the horizons quite new to Europeans which break upon them for the first time, are now no longer left to the explorer. With the romance of communication, luckily for us, there is another, a newer and, in a certain sense, a much wider field. Many who have travelled largely have felt this, but it has not yet, I think, been expressed.
What I mean by the Romance of Communication is this: that the establishment of regular lines for ocean traffic, the building of railways and, above all, of good roads, have made it possible for a multitude of men to see those contrasts which travel can afford, and this development of modern travel has just begun to afford our generation, and will afford with much greater generosity the generation to come, an opportunity for feeling physically the complexity and variety and wonder of the world. This is a good thing.
Not so long ago it was a difficult matter for a man to go from some Northern part of Europe, such as England, to so isolated a community as that which inhabits the Island of Majorca. Now it is easy for a man and costs him but a few pounds to go from England to Barcelona, and from Barcelona he can sail with a rapid and regular service to the port of Palma. When he reaches that port he cannot but feel the Romance, finding this little isolated State wealthy and contented in the midst of the sea. Corsica, of which men know so little, is similarly at hand to-day, and so are the Valleys of the Pyrenees, especially of the Spanish valleys upon which as yet there is hardly any Northern literature or experience. In a year or two we shall have the railway through the Cerdagne, and another line will take one up the Valley of the Ariège into the middle part of Northern Spain.
But of all these benefits to the mind which themodern charge is procuring, I know of none more remarkable than the entry into the Desert.
That portion of Northern Africa which the French have reclaimed for Europe, and which was throughout the existence of the Roman Empire an integral part of European civilisation, consists of the great tableland buttressed to the north and the south by mountain ranges, and crossed in its middle part by parallel outcrops of high rock. This plateau stretches for somewhat more than a thousand miles all along the southern shore of the Western Mediterranean. If the reader will take a map he will see jutting out from the general contour of Africa, an oblong as it were, the eastern end of which is Tunis, the western end Morocco. All that oblong is the tableland of which I speak. The coast is warm, fertile, densely cultivated and populous; full of ports and cities and the coming and going of ships. The highlands behind and to the south of the coast line are more arid, very cold in winter, baking in summer, and always dry and rugged to our Northern eyes. But they are habitable, the population is spreading upon them, and they contain the past relics of the old Roman civilisation which prove what man can do with them when their water supply is stored and their soil is cultivated.
Now this habitable land suddenly ceases, and falls into the Desert of Sahara. The demarkation is abrupt and is everywhere noticeable to the eye. It is indeed more noticeable in the eastern than in thewestern part. The limit between what Miss Bell has called, in a fine book of hers, "the Desert and the Sown," is more than a day's march in width upon the Moroccan frontier; indeed it is several days' march, and one is not over-sure when one has left the habitable soil and when one has reached the inhospitable sand at the eastern end. The limits are not only marked sharply by a differentiation in the climate and the vegetation, but also by an abrupt escarpment. The Atlas (as the plateau of Northern Africa is generally called) falls in huge, precipitous red cliffs right down upon the Sahara. It so happens that these cliffs, just at the point where they are most abrupt and most rugged, and most romantic, are cleft by a profound gorge through which the Wady Biskra runs very clear and cold, filled with the melting of the snow upon the high mountain of Aures to the north of it. This gap in the cliffs the Romans knew well. They had a military station here to guard them against the ravages of the nomad tribes who afterwards, in the form of the Arabian Invasion, overran their African province and turned it from an European and a Christian to an Asiatic and Mohammedan thing. The Romans called that gorge "The Kick of Hercules," as though the god had here by a stroke of his foot broken away from the cultivated north toward the Desert. Through this gap ran their military road, and here, as a formation of the gorge demanded, they carried that road over the river, theWady Biskra, upon the bridge the stones of which still remain, though renovated and supported by modern work, to recall the greatness of the empire.
The Arabs, in their turn, have called this astonishing breach "Foum es Sahara"—the mouth of the Sahara; and, as is always the case where they found a Roman bridge, they have added the name El Kantara, the bridge. For it is remarkable that the Arabs were unable to continue Roman work, especially in masonry, save where they had a large Roman population to help them after their conquest, and the bridges which the Romans had built were regarded by them with a sort of superstitious reverence.
Now this Mouth of the Sahara, this gap in the glaring wall of the Desert, has, by a coincidence which has its obvious geographical cause, and which is to be discovered in many another pass throughout Europe and Northern Africa, served for modern methods of communication the purpose which it served for the ancients. It is the nearest approach which the Desert makes to the sea-coast; it is the approach involving the least engineering effort, the most obvious and the most natural entry from the northern cultivated land on to the waterless sandy waste. Therefore, modern civilisation has used it, and you get here more than anywhere else that romance of sudden contrast with which, as I have said, modern methods of travel have gifted the modern world. The French first built down thistrack a military road, as hard, excellent and well graded as any that you will find in Europe. It not only goes through the gorge, but right on into the sand of the desert, bounded upon either side by masonry, and it has reached, or very soon will reach, Biskra without a break.
Some time after this road had been planned, a railway was constructed along the same track, with certain divergences where the gradient of the highway was too steep for the rails and where therefore long curves were necessary. Whether a man goes by the road or the rail, this is what he sees—and he had best see it in early spring, or what is with us in England late winter. As the road and the rail wind downwards from the little plateaux, by great steps as it were from one level to another, the traveller has about him such scenery as has accompanied him for the last hundred miles: fields of cotton, the trees proper to a temperate climate, and rugged, rocky ridges cropping up from the cultivated soil. There is nothing around him to remind him of what is called "The East," except the camel preceding its master up or down the great highway and the distinctive dress of the natives; for the climate, the crops, and the temperature, the quality of the sunlight, he might be on one of the plains of Western America, which indeed this part of Africa most nearly resembles.
He comes to a clean little inn entirely French in architecture, surrounded by a cool and quiet garden,and with the river running behind it. He walks on a few hundred yards through the gorge, and quite suddenly at the turning of a corner the Desert and all its horizon breaks upon his eyes. He sees a waste of hot, red, unusable sand, a brilliant oasis of palm trees, and even the sun, small and glaring above that plain, seems something different from the familiar light which he had received but an hour before.
It is the most complete contrast, the most sudden and memorable revelation which modern travel affords. And if I had to advise any one who with short leisure desired some experience of modern travel, at least in the way of landscape, I would advise him to visit this astounding place. It has already found its way into many English books, but the great mass of people who could enjoy it do not yet know how exceedingly easy is its access. For travellers even to so near a place like to put on an air of mystery. There is no one with a fortnight to spare and £20 to spend who cannot walk or bicycle or motor to this place at the right time of the year (for in summer the heat is insupportable and in winter the snow on the high northern plains makes travel difficult). Any one who will take that journey would have a memory to last him all his life.
There are those who say that the popularisation of wonderful things is the spoiling of them. I have never been able to agree. Places are not spoiled by the multitude of those who reach them, but by thecharacter of those who reach them, and no one will journey to this meeting place of the East and the West, I think, save with a desire to wonder and to observe, which of itself breeds reverence. Such men may come in any numbers and the place will be the better for them. At any rate, I repeat, it ought to be known to any one who has the sum or the time to spare, that a revelation of such a kind is quite close at hand, for as yet hundreds of Englishmen with far more than that leisure and infinitely more than that wealth are ignorant of the place and its opportunities; and your quickest way is by Marseilles and Bona, and on your way I beseech you to stop and see Timgad, which is a dead Roman city lying silent and empty under the sun upon the Edge of the Desert.