The Project Gutenberg eBook ofOn Anything

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofOn AnythingThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: On AnythingAuthor: Hilaire BellocRelease date: March 3, 2020 [eBook #61550]Most recently updated: October 17, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: E-text prepared by Tim Lindell, Martin Pettit, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON ANYTHING ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: On AnythingAuthor: Hilaire BellocRelease date: March 3, 2020 [eBook #61550]Most recently updated: October 17, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: E-text prepared by Tim Lindell, Martin Pettit, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)

Title: On Anything

Author: Hilaire Belloc

Release date: March 3, 2020 [eBook #61550]Most recently updated: October 17, 2024

Language: English

Credits: E-text prepared by Tim Lindell, Martin Pettit, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON ANYTHING ***

The Project Gutenberg eBook, On Anything, by Hilaire Belloc

[These Essays, with one exception, first appeared in theMorning PostandMorning Leader, by courtesy of the Editors of which they are here reprinted.]

title page

ON ANYTHING

H. BELLOC

LONDONCONSTABLE & CO.Ltd.1910

Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,bread street hill, e.c., andbungay, suffolk.

TOGEORGE MACDONALD LEMMI

ON ANYTHING

One day in the town of Perpignan I was poking about to see where I could best get something to eat, when I saw a door open into a charming garden; and in the hope of finding it to be the garden of an inn, and at any rate of seeing the garden during the process of asking whether it were an inn, I walked in, but I found everything deserted.

There was a little house at the end with everything shut against the blinding sun, but the main door of it wide open. I walked in there too and heard no noise of men, and my curiosity took me up the stairs until I came out quite unexpectedly upon another little garden built on the flat roof of this dwelling and on its shady side. And there I saw a man sitting and looking dreamily towards the mountains.

He did not ask me how I came there, but I desired to tell him, for it was evidently his roof.

We spoke a little together until I asked him why he watched the mountains and why his gaze wastowards Spain; then at great length he spoke to me, but dreamily still.

"Long before I knew that the speech of men was misused by them and that they lied in the hearing of the gods perpetually—in those early days through which all men have passed, during which one believes what one is told, an old and crusty woman of great wealth, to whom I was describing what I intended to do with life (which in those days seemed to me of infinite duration), said to me, 'You are building castles in Spain.' I was too much in awe of this woman—not on account of the wealth, but on account of the crust—to go further into the matter, but it seemed to me a very foolish thing to say, for I had never been to Spain, and I had nothing wherewith to build a castle—and indeed such a project had never passed through my head.

"For many years I returned to this phrase. I heard it upon several occasions. And in those years through which a man approaches maturity it still remained in my mind, possessing a singular fascination. Though I had found long since that phrases mean at the best something different from their words, and often something exactly opposite to them, yet this phrase kept about it something mystical and sincere; and I never read of Spain nor saw a map of Spain without thinking of the castles in that land, and wondering whether, as that ancient sybil had prophesied to me, I should come to build them there or no.

"It so happened that the feeling grew upon me until, in my thirtieth year, I determined to travel in that country, and I did so, arriving at one of the Spanish ports by sea; and the first thing I did when I had landed was to ask in my own tongue whether there were any castles in the neighbourhood, and especially whether any of them were at that moment in process of being built. Hearing which, the gentleman whom I had addressed bade me stay a moment where I was, upon the quay, and returned with a policeman who wore a helmet in the English manner, but whose face betrayed him. This official beckoned me to follow him; I was closely interrogated by a member of the superior or educated classes who was also a magistrate, and after some deliberation as to whether I should not be imprisoned, I was escorted to the frontier between two armed men. Nor in the course of my journey, which was hot and uncomfortable, did I see any one building castles, so I returned as wise as I had come, but, I am glad to say, not any the poorer, for the Spanish State had taken charge of me and had paid for all that part of my journey which had taken place upon Spanish soil.

"Coming, therefore, into the Roussillon by way of the pass in the mountains, I went very sadly, but a free man, in by the Gypsies' Gate at Perpignan, and ate by myself at the Red Lion. Then, saying nothing to any one, I went over the mountains in another manner, with nothing to carry but a sack, and determined to trust only to a considerable sumof money which I carried in my pocket. So I came down into Aragon, and when I got there I found it very unsuitable for the building of castles. For you must know that Aragon is almost completely composed of mud, so that any very large building, at least in the northern part, would very probably sink. Moreover, those rare rocks on which anything enduring can be founded are already occupied in that country by the priests, who have for ages forbidden the building of castles in any form, and that under the most dreadful penalties. But I found a man in Huesca who told me that, though he himself had never seen such a thing, I would no doubt find it in Saragossa, which was a capital city of enormous dimensions, and one that contained every human thing. So then I went on down the valley of the river Gallego (which was full of mud, as everything is in that district), and at last I saw before me the towers and the spires of Saragossa. But before I went into the town I thought I would first ask for information, and save myself the trouble of further walking. There was sitting with his back against a very dirty and ancient wall a man much dirtier than the wall and almost as old. Round his head was a handkerchief, and in his eyes was the stern pride of Aragon, which, though it be made out of mud, is full of courage, and breeds men who will kill you for nothing. Remembering this, and knowing that in their contempt for wealth the Aragonese will often unite good blood with poverty, I took off my hat andswept it about, and asked him whether his family motto were not 'Prince ne daigne,' to which he replied only by shaking his head in a decisive way. I then asked him whether I should find them building a castle in Saragossa, to which he said very sharply, 'No!' for the Aragonese are as terse as they are courageous. Then I said to him, 'Days, knight!' (for in this manner does one take leave in Aragon), and he replied, 'Go with God,' which is their common salutation, even to duns.

"When I had gone a little way on to the bridge which here crosses the muddy Ebro, whether there is water in the river or not, I saw a man riding on a mule who seemed to me more promising, for he was singing a song in quarter notes, which is the Spanish way. I asked him whether they were building castles in Saragossa, at which he laughed heartily, and said, 'No. Believe me, if we have any (which I doubt) it is more in our line to let them fall down than to build them.' And with these words he spoke affectionately to his mule and went his way, and I, knowing I should get no luck after such an omen, turned back and took the train into my own country."

"Did you not then," said I, "ever see building a castle in Spain?"

"Yes," said he very sadly; "it was in this way: there are parts of Spain which are included by mistake upon our side of the mountains, so that they have French water and forests, and one can live decentlythere; and going in to one of these valleys upon business one day, I saw before me a very hideous thing—but there was no mistaking it: it was a castle! It was built—or rather building—of very glaring white stone; it had four turrets with very staring red tiles, half a hundred false Gothic windows, and at least twenty gargoyles, each one of which exactly resembled its neighbour, and all of which had been done by contract in Toulouse. Two statues of an offensive kind guarded the entrance to the place, and the main door of it was one of those that turn round like a turnstile so as to keep out the air; and in front of this thing was a lawn with a net. There were two trees just planted and looking as though they would rather die than live, and a little further off the workmen were digging for a fountain. It was a very saddening sight. I went up to the foreman, who by his dress seemed to be a countryman of my own, and I said, 'This is a castle that you are building, is it not?' He stared at me and said yes, wondering why I asked. 'And I think,' I went on, 'that I am in Spain, am I not?' 'Yes,' said he, wondering still more, 'the frontier lies there'—and he pointed to a little stream in the grounds. 'I thought as much,' I said, sighing profoundly. 'At last I have come upon a man building a castle in Spain.'

"Since then I have seen no other such sight, nor do I wish to see one. And ever since then I have made it my business, when I had need to buildcastles in Spain (the appetite for which comes upon me at least twice a week), to come up here on to this roof and survey the Roussillon, the Canigou and the Mediterranean Sea, and build castles in my head, for I have discovered realities to be appalling."

With these words he begged me to leave him.

Let us be Antean: let us touch earth. Let us look at the pit out of which we were digged: let there be no false shame; let us talk of clay: of all the things in which the modern world has gone wrong there is nothing in which it has gone wrong more than in the point of clay. Our fathers before us, who were great men and wise—they knew what the thing was. When they had robbed a monastery or killed a king, or in some other way acquired an estate in land, what did they? They said to the steward or to the fathers of the village: "Is there no clay about?" And when they heard there was, there did they found their house. And in this way it has come about that all great Englishmen, or very nearly all great Englishmen have been born and brought up on clay.

That noble and regal city, the City of London, the second city of the West, the city which was founded by Brutus himself, the city which is directly descended from ancient Ilion and bears its glories—London, I say, could not be built save upon clay. For though at first, in their folly, the builders of London put up their wretched wattled huts ongravel, yet when the spirit took them that they would grow, and they determined to make a town of it, on to the clay they went.

Then again, the clay bred the wheat that used to grow in England, and it grew the barley also, and man, who was made of clay, lived on the clay, drank out of the burnt clay, and ate the fruit of the clay; nor is this all that clay has done for us (and what have we done for clay!), for when I speak of drinking out of the burnt clay it recalls to me another function of this admirable ungotten mineral—at least it is for the greater part ungotten. But for clay where should we be for pipkins, pannikins, porcelain of all kinds, and but for clay what should we do for the olla, for the cream jug, and for those large flat basins in which people pour milk that the cream may rise on top of it? At least the wise people, who go by the old fashions and will not use a separator—for if you know anything of the matter you will know that no pig will thrive upon skim milk unless the cream has risen from it in the old manner: and there I make an end of this digression.

You may think I have exhausted the matter of clay, but you are wrong. Clay has a further quality: it is a mystery. Any one can see how granite came about. And as for chalk, it was made by a vast number of little fishes. Sand is a thing a tom-fool can understand; limestone is self-evident; and I never knew any one yet who was puzzled by alluvial soil; but clay is a harder nut to crack. How was itmade? Those who were there when the foundations of the earth were laid and who pretend that they know everything, those whose god is matter and whose infallible authority is printer's ink, boast like Lucifer their father, and will explain everything to you on their eight fingers and two thumbs—but they confess that they cannot explain clay. It is all very well to say that clay is full of alumina; that it is the breaking up of granite rocks, but no one can tell you how all this came about, nor why it is so pasty. "It is not known" (says my Encyclopædia) "why certain specimens of granite are rapidly corroded and crumbled down, while others have resisted for ages the same causes of decay." No! No, by heaven! it is not known. And it is a great day in modern times when one can get one of the scientists to admit that he is not possessed of universal knowledge. No man living knows how clay came to be. I repeat it is a mystery and is crammed with the virtue of all mysterious things. And should it not be mysterious, seeing what are its powers?

For remember that all this does but touch upon the edge and fringe of the greatness of clay. Records were first kept in clay, and but for clay would never have survived. They were scratched on clay tablets and burnt, and they have come down to our own time. Bricks have to be made from clay, and with bricks did men first learn to build small and reasonable houses, for before they thought of bricks the rich man could live in stone, but the poor manhad to do as best he could in wood and wattles. But the moment they thought of clay and of making bricks, reasonable houses for the middle-class appeared; and with the middle-class there came also public opinion, common-sense, good manners, verse, sculpture, and the art of living.

You may very reasonably prove, and to the satisfaction of most men, that without clay there could be no middle-class; nor does this great service which the clay has done us by any means exhaust the debt we owe to clay. There would be no dew ponds on the chalk heights of England had not our ancestors long before history carefully puddled clay. And very probably there would be no statues in the world had it not been for clay, for it is clay that suggests the statue. So whenever you see a good statue (of which there are so many in this world, as for instance: the Madonna over the south porch of Rheims; the Mary Magdalen at Brou; the statue of Our Lady of Paris in Notre Dame; the Venus of Milo, which is by no means the first-comer among statues; the headless Victory with wings, which is a first-rate statue and looks as if it was going to fly down the steps of the Louvre; the statue of the archer in that same gallery; the statue of St. John the Baptist in South Kensington, which is a copy of the one in the Luxembourg—or indeed of any other statue)—I say, when you see a statue that is good and pleases you, remember clay. But for clay that statue could never have been.

Do you think that with this we have come to the end of what clay has done? Why, we have not, so to speak, begun the first page of the volume!

But for clay there would be no smoking: clay made pipes. And but for clay we should not be able to drain our fields. From clay also comes aluminium, which has some purpose or other, I forget what; and clay made the Sologne. For that great heath and desert, which so few men know, owes its very life to clay. It is the clay holding the water which has turned it into the forest it is, full of little pools and cram full of wild boars and other ingenious beasts.

Roses adore the clay—they are as native to clay as salt is to the sea; and there is another thing we owe to clay, for if we had no clay we should have no roses; and talking of that, the oak is a clay tree. All that gnarled, hard, native stuff which you clap your hand on when you strike an oak beam is nourished and made strong by clay. An oak may be called the living son of the dead clay; it is a sort of clay turned vegetable, a slow, a fundamental, and an enduring thing.

Now by way of ending! Being a modern man you will grumble and say, "Yes, but it is bad to live on." You are wrong. It is the best soil of any to live on. True, if you are a town man you find that your feet get wet on it; you cannot walk about after a shower as you can in London; therefore you prefer to be upon gravel or sand. That is because you areartificial and a snob. You were intended, my lamb, to plunge about in mud when the weather is muddy—it is an excellent discipline for the soul. And all that love of sand and gravel goes with rhododendrons, copper beeches, and villas of red brick, and the death of the soul. You will then object that the house built upon clay goes up and down, heaving, as it were, with the weather. Why not? All things that live and are worthy have in themselves the principle of motion. Would you inhabit something dead? Aristotle has said it, that death, the absence of life, is essentially rigidity, the absence of motion. Give thanks then that your house should shift, and that the water that you must drink on clay is of a muddy kind; it is better for your health than that sparkling stuff which gives men goitre in the high hills.

In a word, there is nothing human nor anything about man which is not the better for clay. He was made of clay, he should live on clay, his wood must be the fruit of clay, and so must his food, and so must his drink, and so must the flowers that are his ornament. And when he dies the very best soil in which you can bury him is clay.

AND ITS ADVANTAGES AS A COMPANION TO TRAVEL

I know very well that there are men going about who will pretend that when a thing is not there it may be neglected, and that existence is the only thing that counts, but these are ignorant and common men who have not read the philosophers of North Germany, and in particular the divine Hegel. For to us who live upon the summit of human thought it is manifest that there is no such thing as nothing, and that the absence of a thing or the nonexistence of a thing is but another aspect of its presence or its existence. So Bergmann (I translate him into Latin, for German is a difficult tongue) "esse antequam non esse esse satis constat." So also Biggs, his greatest living pupil at Oxford, "The moment we grant potentiality to entity——" Hold!

What I am driving at, good people, is that a man who takes no book upon a holiday forms very worthily one of the series of men who do, and I will confess that this No Book is the book I invariablytake with me, in every distant journey which those who meet me upon them may think holidays, but which I myself have always considered to be occupation and life.

Its many advantages!... Up in Bigorre, branching northward from the main Roman Road across the Pyrenees, runs a torrent which falls in perhaps a thousand falls from the height and the mountains, and whose valley forms a very difficult approach to Spain. Now if a man be cut off by this torrent, rising after fresh rain and threatening his life, and if he attempts to ford it, what book do you think would survive? So the Peña Blanca; it is not a rock for mountaineers, but for true travelling men. Your mountaineer, your Alpine Club mountaineer, travels with a bath, a tent, and in general a baggage train; he can carry books if he likes; he climbs with a weight on his back or compels a servant to do so, but no man can get down the Peña Blanca or up it on the steep side with a Liddell and Scott or a London Directory on his back. There are places on Peña Blanca where everything you brought with you, including your boots, you wish were away, and these places are places where the body is in the shape of an X, the right foot, the left foot, the right hand and the left hand each trying to persuade itself that it has a hold, and the co-ordinating spirit within also asserting by sheer faith that the surface of the rock does not lean outwards. What would a man do with a book in such a place as this?—I mean with a bookin its aspect of existence? No Book is worth more than a whole library to a man so placed and so thinking.

Consider the sea. There is only room to cook forward on condition the hatch is up; aft, the other men are playing cards. Then again, it is either calm or rough. If it is calm the boat sways intolerably and everything reminds you of oil. What book can suit that mood? And when, contrariwise, the boat is taking it green every few seconds, and your eyes are bleared trying to see through the spindrift and the snow, what would you do with a book—is there any book in the world that would help you to drive her through? Are there oilskins for books?

The horse also: for whether a rich man has lent you one, or whether it is your own, or whether it is one you have hired (and this sort go lame), the horse enters into every bit of travel. Who will read a book where a horse is concerned? Indeed I have often considered that men who will learn everything from books and go into court or throw the family fortune into chancery on the strength of "The Pocket Lawyer"; all men who will build a boat after instructions printed upon paper and then wonder where they have failed; all men who consider life from printed things, would be the better for receiving, closely reading, annotating and thoroughly mastering a volume called "The Horse and How to Ride Him." It is a large flat book with diagrams, something like an atlas in shape and weight. This, I say, whenthey have mastered it, let them take under the right arm, holding it as a bird would hold a thing under its wing, and so accoutred let them climb upon a mustang, and digging those enormous Mexican spurs which are the glory of the West deep and hard into the brute's hide, they will discover as in a lightning flash of revelation the value of books in the large concerns of life. No Book is the book for all the plains between the Sangre de Cristo and the Sierras.

The same is true of the desert, though why I cannot tell, unless it be that by day it is too hot, and by night there is nothing to read by. Soldiers—real soldiers I mean—carry no books until they have reached the grade of general officer; and what books do you think were regretfully laid down when theBrunswickwent into action on the first of June, 1794?

I can indeed consider no active occupation for a man in which No Book is not a true companion, and that book shall be my companion in future, as it has been in the past, all over the world.

Irony is that form of jest in which we ridicule a second person in the presence of a third. It is most complete when the second person is most ignorant of our intention, the third person most alive to it. Irony exists and is full even when the second person thus attacked is alone in suffering the attack, and irony exists and is full when the third person is restricted to our own expectant selves or even to God who made us and in whom is mirrored the universal truth of things. Irony enjoys an exuberant life, whether the second person so attacked is universal and the third as restricted as can be; or whether the second person so attacked is particular and singular, and the third person, the onlooker and the audience, comprehends the whole world.

It is in the intention of irony that it should do good, because it is of the nature of irony that it should avenge the truth. I say "avenge" because irony would not be irony were it not destined to inflict a fatal, or at least a grievous, wound. There is not in irony any measure of pity for the enemy, though irony could not exist without some vastmotive of pity for a victim in whose defence it was aroused. Irony is a sword, and must be used as a sword. It has this quality about it, that, like some faery sword, it cannot be used with any propriety save in God's purpose; and those who have been the most expert swordsmen, when they take a wrong reward for their service, or use that weapon for an unworthy end, find it fail in their hands. Nay, like any faery sword, in hands that use it unworthily it will disappear. And the history of Letters is full of men who, tempted by this or by that, by money or by ease, or by random friendship, or by some appetite lower than the hunger and thirst after justice, have found their old strong irony grow limp and fruitless after they had sold their souls.

Irony, therefore, is unknown in those societies where the love of ease dominates all men. It is most powerful in those societies which are by their temper military. You will find irony treated angrily, as though it were an acid or a poison, where men love ease. And you will find it merely ignored when men have wholly lost the sense of justice. In such societies it retires from the realm of letters to that more powerful sphere in which divine vengeance and divine necessity have their action over things; and many such a society no longer capable of producing or of appreciating irony when it proceeds from the mouth or the pen of a man, learn it most dreadfully in the catastrophes of war.

To the young, the pure, and the ingenuous, irony must always appear to have in it a quality of something evil, and so it has, for, as I have said, it is a sword to wound. It is so directly the product or reflex of evil that, though it can never be used, nay, can hardly exist, save in the chastisement of evil, yet irony always carries with it some reflections of the bad spirit against which it was directed. How false it is to say that vengeance and the hatred of the evil men are in themselves evil, all human history can prove. Nay, but for irony in the last times of a decline no breath of health would remain to man. Nevertheless, as it is called into being by evil things, it works in an evil light. It suggests most powerfully the evil against which it is directed, and those innocent of evil shun so terrible an instrument.

Alone of the powers of expression possessed by the human spirit wherewith to defend right against wrong, irony is invulnerable, and alone of those powers it can always strike. Nor is anything invulnerable against it save that death of the intelligence which comes so shortly before the death of the society suffering it, that there is no need in the interval to attack the evil of that society or to attempt to remedy it; for when stupidity comes upon a State all is over.

A happy world, such as the world of children, or any society of men who have still preserved the general health of the soul, such a society as may be found in many mountain valleys, needs none of thissalt for the curing and the preservation of morals. But even where men have so protected primal virtue, old men, old proverbs, dim records of past misfortunes leave some savour of irony in the traditions of the tribe. And irony is proved native to the scheme of things and not of its own self unnatural or rebellious by the manner in which the mere course of human happenings is perpetually filled with it. A dreadful irony is present when a man, having heard of the death of a friend, receives later his living letter posted from far off before that death. There is irony when, every defence having been made against some natural accident, that accident yet enters by another gate unsuspected to man. There is an irony in every unfulfilled prophecy and in every lengthy and worthless calculation. No man having purchased an honour defends unpurchased honour without the spirit of irony surrounding all his words. No man praises courage being himself but a rhetorician, or praises justice being himself a lawyer or a magistrate, without some savour of irony in the air of his audience, and it may be presumed without too much phantasy that spirits equal and undisturbed and of a high intelligence can see in every action of human life save the most holy an irony as strong as that which inhabits the tragedies of the great poets.

There is a last use for irony, or rather a last aspect of it which this general irony of Nature, and of Nature's God, suggests: I mean that irony which can only appear in the letters of a country whencorruption has gone so far that the mere truth is vivid with ironical power.

For there comes a time—it is brief, as must be all final moments of decay—but there comes a time in the moral disruption of a State when the mere utterance of a plain truth laboriously concealed by hypocrisy, denied by contemporary falsehood, and forgotten in the moral lethargy of the populace, takes upon itself an ironical quality more powerful than any elaboration of special ironies could have taken in the past. Some truth too widely put aside and quietly thrust forward, a detail in general conversation about a powerful man strikes, in such societies, exactly like the point of a spear. Blood flows: and the blood is drawn by irony. Yet was here no act nor any fabric of words. Mere testimony to the truth was enough: and this should prove that irony is in touch with the divine and is a minister to truth. In such awful moments in the history of a State that which makes the dreadful jest is not the jester, but the eternal principle of truth itself. That which is jested at is the whole texture of the universal society upon which the truth falls, and for the audience, for the third person who shall see the jest at the second person's expense, there is present nothing less than the power by which truth is of such effect among men.

No man possessed of irony and using it has lived happily; nor has any man possessing it and using it died without having done great good to his fellows and secured a singular advantage to his own soul.

That is simple which, when you have long looked at it, and when you have carefully considered it, you cannot justly discover to be built up of other unities. That is simple which, when we will divide it, divides into things like itself, and which, when we divide it, divides, not of its own nature, but violently and unnaturally by our volition. The acute mind will divide what is simple as freely as it will divide what is complex, but the just mind recognises simplicity and will not attempt its division. For in all analysis it is the business of the analyser to get at the ultimate unities; when he has reached the ultimate unities it is also his business to respect them: further division will show acuteness, but it will not show judgment.

The simplest thing we know is the soul of man, for it has about it a quality as it were crystalline and one. So that the more fundamentally it does a thing the more that thing is one. The powers of the soul, its instruments, and therefore the parts of its machinery, are innumerable and perhaps infinite(for we are said to be made in the image of the Infinite); but the thing itself is utterly simple.

Now the soul of man impresses, receives and expresses certain things: for instance, it impresses its unity upon things outside of it, it talks of "London," "mankind," "this landscape." It receives and it says of a colour, "This is such and such a colour"; of a tone, "This is such and such a tone"; of a truth hitherto unheard, "This is true—this is consonant with my nature, and with my making (for I was made); this has Authority, for Authority is authorship."

The soul of man impresses, receives and expresses. And, note you, in this business the soul of man has designed an instrument, and this instrument is the Word. Those who question whether the soul of man so acts, can only question from one of two causes: either they have not considered how we think and do, or else, like many men in our modern diliquescence, they believe all knowledge to be equally futile, and they despair equally of all kinds of careful view, whether of things that can be handled or of immaterial things.

The soul of man impresses, receives and expresses, and its instrument is the Word. It impresses its unity upon this mass of houses and people ("houses" and "people" are themselves words), and it stamps that impression as a word: "London." The soul of man receives. A certain physical impression (which a modern theory would have depend uponproportionate undulation—but this, like most physical hypotheses, is not proved) stirs in the mind a sentiment of colour and of a certain colour; and the mind records its reception in a word: blue. The soul of man expresses. It is cognisant and, in its own manner, sure of existence, secure in existence. To express this, to put forward its certainty exteriorly, out of itself, its instrument is again a word. It says, "I am."

Well then, the Word is all-important, for without the Word the soul of man would live within itself, and therefore stand imprisoned and null, a sort of death. And the Word is all-important in a second way, for by the Word the soul of man not only lives but also communicates. It is by the Word that soul and soul recognise, fertilise and enrich among themselves, each all its fellows. But there is a third character of dignity attaching to the Word, which is this: that the Word reflects and carries on, inherits, shows forth in little, presents, that great origin the soul of man, whence it proceeded; and here it is that I come to the kernel of my subject.

For it is my business to argue here that there is a mystical quality—that is, a quality not contradictory of reason but superior to it—inhabiting the right use of Words. I would say more: I would say that upon the exactitude of that quality in use depended the magic of the poets.

Very certainly men at random, any men, may experience the unexpressed emotion, but thefunction of the poet—in which he is a sort of splendid servant—is to bring words to his master, his fellow-man, the innumerable, and to untie his tongue.

Two things are most noticeable in this character of the poet: first, that he has the capacity to put these words before his fellow-men for their use, and of the right sort and in the right order; and secondly, that neither does he know how he does it nor can mortal man in any place or under any influence explain how it is done. Consider these three lines—

Πἑμπε δε μιν πομροἱσιν ἁμα κραιπνοἱσι φἑρεσθαιὙπνω καἱ Θανἁτω διδυμἁοσιν; ὁἱ ῥἁ μεν ωκαΚἁτθεσαν ἑν Λυκἱης εὑρεἱης πἱονι δἡμω

Πἑμπε δε μιν πομροἱσιν ἁμα κραιπνοἱσι φἑρεσθαι

Ὑπνω καἱ Θανἁτω διδυμἁοσιν; ὁἱ ῥἁ μεν ωκα

Κἁτθεσαν ἑν Λυκἱης εὑρεἱης πἱονι δἡμω

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