But he was rich! Doubtless by the custom of his country he is now in some great position plotting the ruin of Britannia and certainly she deserves it in his case. He was most unmercifully ragged.
One day as I was walking along the beach at Southsea, I saw a little man sitting upon a camp-stool and very carefully drawing the Old Round Stone Fort which stands in the middle of the shallow water, one of the four that so stand, and which looks from Southsea as though it were about half-way across to the Island.
I said to him: "Sir, why are you drawing that old Fort?"
He answered: "I am a German Spy, and the reason I draw that Fort is to provide information for my Government which may be useful to it in case of war with this country."
When the gentleman sitting upon the camp-stool, who was drawing the Old Round Stone Fort in the middle of the water, talked like this he annoyed me very much.
"You merely waste your time," said I."These Forts were put up nearly sixty years ago, and they are quite useless."
"I know nothing about that," said the little man—he had hair like hemp and prominent weak blue eyes of a glazed sort, and altogether he struck me as a fool of no insignificant calibre—"I know nothing about that. I obey orders. I was told to draw this Fort, and that I am now doing."
"You do not draw well," said I, "but that is neither here nor there. I mean that what you draw is not beautiful. What I really want to know is why in thunder you were told to draw that round stone barrel, for which no one in Europe would give a five-pound note."
"I have nothing to do with all that," said the little man again, still industriously drawing. "I was told to draw that Fort, and that Fort I draw." And he went on drawing the Old Round Stone Fort.
"Can you not tell me for whom you are drawing it?" said I at last.
"Yes," said he, "with great pleasure. I amdrawing it for his King-like and Kaiser-like Majesty By the Grace of God and the Authority of the Holy See, William, King of Prussia, Margrave of Brandenburg, Duke of Romshall, Count Hohenzollern and of the Great German Empire, Emperor."
With that he went on drawing the Old Round Stone Fort.
"I do assure you most solemnly," said I again, "that you can be of no use whatever to your master in this matter. There are no guns upon that ridiculous thing; it has even been turned into a hotel."
But the little man paid no attention to what I said. He went on obeying orders. He had often heard that this was the strength of his race.
"How could there conceivably be any guns on it?" said I imploringly. "Do think what you are at! Do look at the range between you and Ryde! Do consider what modern gunnery is! Do wake up, do!"
But the little man with hair like hemp saidagain: "I know nothing about all that. I am a lieutenant in the High Spy Corps, and I have been told to draw this Fort and I must draw it." And he went on drawing the Old Round Stone Fort.
Then gloom settled upon my spirit, for I thought that civilization was in peril if men such as he really existed and really went on in this fashion.
However, I went back into Southsea, into the town, and there I bought a chart. Then I struck off ranges upon the chart and marked them in pencil, and I also marked the Fairway through Spithead into Portsmouth Harbour. Then I came back to the little man, and I said: "Do look at this!"
He looked at it very patiently and carefully, but at the end of so looking at it he said: "I do not understand these things. I do not belong to the High Map-making Corps; I belong to the Spy Corps, and I have orders to draw this Fort." And he went on drawing the Old Round Stone Fort.
Then, seeing I could not persuade him, I went into a neighbouring church which is dedicated to the Patron of Spies, to wit, St. Judas, and I prayed for this man. I prayed thus:
"Oh, St. Judas! Soften the flinty heart of this Spy, and turn him, by your powerful intercession, from his present perfectly useless occupation of drawing the Old Round Stone Fort to something a little more worthy of his distinguished mission and the gallant profession he adorns."
When I had prayed thus diligently for half an hour something within me told me that it was useless, and when I got back to the seashore I found out what the trouble was. Prayers went off my little man like water off a cabbage-leaf. My little man with hair like hemp was a No-Goddite, for he so explained to me in a conversation we had upon the Four Last Things.
"I have done my drawing," he said at the end of this conversation (and he said it in a tone of great satisfaction). "Now I shall go back to Germany."
"No," said I, "you shall do nothing of the kind. I will have you tried first in a court, and you shall be sent to prison for being a Spy."
"Very well," said he, and he came with me to the court.
The Magistrate tried him, and did what they call in the newspapers "looking very grave," that is, he looked silly and worried. At last he determined not to put the Spy in prison because there was not sufficient proof that he was a Spy.
"Although," he added, "I have little doubt but that you have been prying into the most important military secrets of the country."
After that I took the Spy out of court again and gave him some dinner, and that night he went back home to Germany with his drawing of the Old Round Stone Fort.
It is certainly an extraordinary way of doing business, but that is their look-out.Theythink they are efficient, andwethink they are efficient, and when two people of opposite interests are agreed on such a matter it is not for third parties to complain.
One of my amusements, a mournful one I admit, upon these fine spring days, is to watch in the streets of London the young people, and to wonder if they are what I was at their age.
There is an element in human life which the philosophers have neglected, and which I am at a loss to entitle, for I think no name has been coined for it. But I am not at a loss to describe it. It is that change in the proportion of things which is much more than a mere change in perspective, or in point of view. It is that change which makes Death so recognisable and too near; achievement necessarily imperfect, and desire necessarily mixed with calculation. It is more than that. It is a sort of seeing things from that far side of them, which was only guessed at or heard of at second hand in earlier years, but which is now palpable andpart of the senses: known. All who have passed a certain age know what I mean.
This change, not so much in the aspect of things as in the texture of judgment, may mislead one when one judges youth; and it is best to trust to one's own memory of one's own youth if one would judge the young.
There I see a boy of twenty-five looking solemn enough, and walking a little too stiffly down Cockspur Street. Does he think himself immortal, I wonder, as I did? Does the thought of oblivion appal him as it did me? That he continually suffers in his dignity, that he thinks the passers-by all watch him, and that he is in terror of any singularity in dress or gesture, I can well believe, for that is common to all youth. But does he also, as did I and those of my time, purpose great things which are quite unattainable, and think the summit of success in any art to be the natural wage of living?
Then other things occur to me. Do these young people suffer or enjoy all our oldillusions? Do they think the country invincible? Do they vaguely distinguish mankind into rich and poor, and think that the former from whom they spring are provided with their well-being by some natural and fatal process, like the recurrence of day and night? Are they as full of the old taboos of what a gentleman may and may not do? I wonder!—Possibly they are. I have not seen one of them wearing a billycock hat with a tail coat, nor one of them smoking a pipe in the street. And is life divided for them to-day as it was then, into three periods: their childhood; their much more important years at a public school (which last fill up most of their consciousness); their new untried occupation?
And do they still so grievously and so happily misjudge mankind? I think they must, judging by their eyes. I think they too believe that industry earns an increasing reward, that what is best done in any trade is best recognised and best paid; that labour is a happy business; and that women are of two kinds: the youngwho go about to please them, the old to whom they are indifferent.
Do they drink? I suppose so. They do not show it yet. Do they gamble? I conceive they do. Are their nerves still sound? Of that there can be no doubt! See them hop on and off the motor 'buses and cross the streets!
And what of their attitude towards the labels? Do they take, as I did, every man much talked of for a great man? Are they diffident when they meet such men? And do they feel themselves to be in the presence of gods? I should much like to put myself into the mind of one of them and to see if, to that generation the simplest of all social lies is Gospel. If it is so, I must suppose they think a Prime Minister, a Versifier, an Ambassador, a Lawyer who frequently comes up in the Press, to be some very superhuman person. And doubtless also they ascribe a sort of general quality to all much-talked-of or much-be-printed men, putting them on one little shelf apart, and all the rest of England in a ruck below.
Then this thought comes to me. What of their bewilderment? We used all to be so bewildered! Things did not fit in with the very simple and rigid scheme that was our most undoubted creed of the State. The motives of most commercial actions seemed inscrutable save to a few base contemporaries no older than ourselves, but cads, men who would always remain what we had first known them to be, small clerks upon the make. At what age, I wonder, to this generation will come the discovery that ofthesemen and ofsuchmaterial the Great are made; and will the long business of discovery come to sadden them as late as it came to their elders?
I must believe that young man walking down Cockspur Street thinks that all great poets, all great painters, all great writers, all great statesmen, are those of whom he reads, and are all possessed of unlimited means and command the world. Further, I must believe that the young man walking down Cockspur Street (he has got to Northumberland Avenue by now),lives in a static world. For him things are immovable. There are the old: fathers and mothers and uncles; the very old are there, grandfathers, nurses, provosts, survivors. Only in books does one find at that age the change of human affection, child-bearing, anxiety for money, and death. All the children (he thinks) will be always children, and all the lovely women always young. And loyalty and generous regards are twin easy matters reposing natively in the soul, and as yet unbetrayed.
Well, if they are all like that, or even most of them, the young people, quite half the world is happy. Not one of that happy half remembers the Lion of Northumberland House, or the little streets there were behind the Foreign Office, or the old Strand, or Temple Bar, or what Coutts's used to be like, or Simpson's, or Soho as yet uninvaded by the great and good Lord Shaftesbury. No one of the young can pleasantly recall the Metropolitan Board of Works.
And for them, all the new things—houseswhich are veils of mud on stilts of iron, advertisements that shock the night, the rush of taxi-cabs and the Yankee hotels—are the things that always were and always will be.
A year to them is twenty years of ours. The summer for them is games and leisure, the winter is the country and a horse; time is slow and stretched over long hours. They write a page that should be immortal, but will not be; or they hammer out a lyric quite undistinguishable from its models, and yet to them a poignantly original thing.
Or am I all wrong? Is the world so rapidly changing that the Young also are caught with the obsession of change? Why, then, not even half the world is happy.
In the parish of East Knoyle, in the county of Wiltshire, and towards the western side of that parish, there is an isolated knoll, gorse covered, abrupt, and somewhat over 700 feet above the sea in height. From the summit of it a man can look westward, northward, and eastward over a great rising roll of countryside.
To the west, upon the sky-line of a level range of hills, not high, runs that long wood called Selwood and there makes an horizon. To the north the cultivated uplands merge into high open down: bare turf of the chalk, which closes the view for miles against the sky, and is the watershed between the Northern and the Southern Avon. Eastward that chalk land falls into the valley which holds Salisbury.
From this high knoll a man perceives the two days' march which Alfred made with his levieswhen he summoned the men of three Shires to fight with him against the Danes; he overthrew them at Ethandune.
The struggle of which these two days were the crisis was of more moment to the history of Britain and of Europe than any other which has imperilled the survival of either between the Roman time and our own.
That generation in which the stuff of society had worn most threadbare, and in which its continued life (individually the living memory of the Empire and informed by the Faith) was most in peril, was not the generation which saw the raids of the fifth century, nor even that which witnessed the breaking of the Mahommedan tide in the eighth, when the Christians carried it through near Poitiers, between the River Vienne and the Chain, the upland south of Chatellerault. The gravest moment of peril was for that generation whose grandfathers could remember the order of Charlemagne, and which fought its way desperately through the perils of the later ninth century.
Then it was, during the great Scandinavian harry of the North and West, that Europe might have gone down. Its monastic establishment was shaken; its relics of central government were perishing of themselves; letters had sunk to nothing and building had already about it something nearly savage, when the swirl of the pirates came up all its rivers. And though legend had taken the place of true history, and though the memories of our race were confused almost to dreaming, we were conscious of our past and of our inheritance, and seemed to feel that now we had come to a narrow bridge which might or might not be crossed: a bridge already nearly ruined.
If that bridge were not crossed there would be no future for Christendom.
Southern Britain and Northern Gaul received the challenge, met it, were victorious, and so permitted the survival of all the things we know. At Ethandune and before Paris the double business was decided. Of these twin victories the first was accomplished in thisisland. Alfred is its hero, and its site is that chalk upland, above the Vale of Trowbridge, near which the second of the two white horses is carved: the hills above Eddington and Bratton upon the Westbury road.
The Easter of 878 had seen no King in England. Alfred was hiding with some small band in the marshes that lie south of Mendip against the Severn sea. It was one of those eclipses which time and again in the history of Christian warfare have just preceded the actions by which Christendom has re-arisen. In Whitsun week Alfred reappeared.
There is a place at the southern terminal of the great wood, Selwood, which bears a Celtic affix, and is called "Penselwood," "the head of the forest," and near it there stood (not to within living memory, but nearly so) a shire-stone called Egbert's Stone; there Wiltshire, Somerset, and Dorset meet. It is just eastward of the gap by which men come by the south round Selwood into the open country. There the levies, that is the lords of Somersetand of Wiltshire and their followers, come also riding from Hampshire, met the King. But many had fled over sea from fear of the Pagans.
"And seeing the King, as was meet, come to life again as it were after such tribulations, and receiving him, they were filled with an immense joy, and there the camp was pitched."
Next day the host set out eastward to try its last adventure with the barbarians who had ruined half the West.
Day was just breaking when the levies set forth and made for the uplands and for the water partings. Not by mere and the marshes of the valley, but by the great camp of White Sheet and the higher land beyond it, the line of marching and mounted men followed the King across the open turf of the chalk to where three Hundreds meet, and where the gathering of the people for justice and the courts of the Counts had been held before the disasters of that time had broken up the land.
It was a spot bare of houses, but famous for a tree which marked the junction of theHundreds. No more than three hundred years ago this tree still stood and bore the name of the Iley Oak. The place of that day's camp stands up above the water of Deveril, and is upon the continuation of that Roman road from Sarum to the Mendips and to the sea, which is lost so suddenly and unaccountably upon its issue from the great Ridge wood. The army had marched ten miles, and there the second camp was pitched.
With the next dawn the advance upon the Danes was made.
The whole of that way (which should be famous in every household in this country) is now deserted and unknown. The host passed over the high rolling land of the Downs from summit to summit until—from that central crest which stands above and to the east of Westbury—they saw before them, directly northward and a mile away, the ring of earthwork which is called to-day "Bratton Castle." Upon the slope between the great host of the pirates came out to battle. It was there fromthose naked heights that overlook the great plain of the Northern Avon, that the fate of England was decided.
The end of that day's march and action was the pressing of the Pagans back behind their earthworks, and the men who had saved our great society sat down before the ringed embankment watching all the gates of it, killing all the stragglers that had failed to reach that protection and rounding up the stray horses and the cattle of the Pagans.
That siege endured for fourteen days. At the end of it the Northmen treatied, conquered "by hunger, by cold, and by fear." Alfred took hostages "as many as he willed." Guthrum, their King, accepted our baptism, and Britain took that upward road which Gaul seven years later was to follow when the same anarchy was broken by Eudes under the walls of Paris.
All this great affair we have doubtfully followed to-day in no more than some three hundred words of Latin, come down doubtfullyover a thousand years. But the thing happened where and as I have said. It should be as memorable as those great battles in which the victories of the Republic established our exalted but perilous modern day.
Up in the higher valley of the River Sarthe, which runs between low knolls through easy meadow-land, and is a place of cattle and of pasture, interspersed with woods of no great size, upon a summer morning a troop of some hundreds of men was coming down from the higher land to the crossings of the river. It was in the year 866. The older servants in the chief men's retinue could remember Charlemagne.
Two leaders rode before the troop. They were two great owners of land, and each possessed of commissions from the Imperial authority. The one had come up hastily northwards from Poitiers, the other had marched westward to join him, coming from the Beauce, with his command. Each was aComes, a LordAdministrator of a countryside and its capital, and had power to levy free men. Their retainers also were many. About them there rode a little group of aides, and behind them, before the footmen, were four squadrons of mounted followers.
The force had already marched far that morning. It was winding in line down a roughly beaten road between the growing crops of the hillside, and far off in the valley the leaders watched the distant villages, but they could see no sign of their quarry. They were hunting the pirates. The scent had been good from the very early hours when they had broken camp till lately, till mid-morning; but in the last miles of their marching it had failed them, and the accounts they received from the rare peasantry were confused.
They found a cottage of wood standing thatched near the track at the place where it left the hills for the water meadows, and here they recovered the trace of their prey. A wounded man, his right arm bound roughlywith sacking, leaned against the door of the place, and with his whole left arm pointed at a group of houses more than a mile away beyond the stream, and at a light smoke which rose into the still summer air just beyond a screen of wood in its neighbourhood. He had seen the straggling line of the Northern men an hour before, hurrying over the Down and coming towards that farm.
Of the two leaders the shorter and more powerful one, who sat his horse the less easily, and whose handling of the rein was brutally strong, rode up and questioned and requestioned the peasant. Could he guess the numbers? It might be two hundred; it was not three. How long had they been in the countryside? Four days, at least. It was four days ago that they had tried to get into the monastery, near the new castle, and had been beaten off by the servants at the orchard wall. What damage had they done? He could not tell. The reports were few that he had heard. His cousin from up the valley complained thatthree oxen had been driven from his fields by night. They had stolen a chain of silver from St. Giles without respect for the shrine. They had done much more—how much he did not know. Had they left any dead? Yes, three, whom he had helped to bury. They had been killed outside the monastery wall. One of his fields was of the monastery benefice, and he had been summoned to dig the graves.
The lord who thus questioned him fixed him with straight soldierly eyes, and, learning no more, rode on by the side of his equal from Poitiers. That equal was armoured, but the lord who had spoken to the peasant, full of body and squat, square of shoulder, thick of neck, tortured by the heat, had put off from his chest and back his leather coat, strung with rings of iron. His servant had unlaced it for him some miles before, and it hung loose upon the saddle hook. He had taken off, also, the steel helm, and it hung by its strap to the same point. He preferred to take the noon sun upon his thick hair and to risk its action thanto be weighed upon longer by that iron. And this though at any moment the turn of a spinney might bring them upon some group of the barbarians.
Upon this short, resolute man, rather than upon his colleague, the expectation of the armed men was fixed. His repute had gone through all the North of Gaul with popular tales of his feats in lifting and in throwing. He was perhaps forty years of age. He boasted no lineage, but vague stories went about—that his father was from the Germanies; that his father was from the Paris land; that it was his mother who had brought him to court; that he was a noble with a mystery that forbade him to speak of his birth; that he was a slave whom the Emperor had enfranchised and to whom he had given favour; that he was a farmer's son; a yeoman.
On these things he had never spoken. No one had met men or women of his blood. But ever since his boyhood he had gone upwards in the rank of the empire, adding, also, one village toanother in his possession, from the first which he had obtained no man knew how; purchasing land with the profits of office after office. He had beenComesof Tours,Comesof Auxerre,Comesof Nevers. He had the commission for all the military work between Loire and Seine. There were songs about him, and myths and tales of his great strength, for it was at this that the populace most wondered.
So this man rode by his colleague's side at the head of the little force, seeking for the pirates, when, unexpectedly, upon emerging from a fringe of trees that lined the flat meadows, his seat in the saddle stiffened and changed, and his eyes fired at what he saw. Two hundred yards before him was the stream, and over it the narrow stone bridge unbroken. Immediately beyond a group of huts and houses, wood and stone, and a heavy, low, round-arched bulk of a church marked the goal of the pirates—and there they were! They had seen the imperial levy the moment that it left the trees, and they were running—tall,lanky men, unkempt, some burdened with sacks, most of them armed with battle-axe or short spear. They were making for cover in the houses of the village.
Immediately the two leaders called the marshallers of their levies, gave orders that the foot-men should follow, trotted in line over the bridge at the head of the squadron, and, once the water was passed, formed into two bodies of horse and galloped across the few fields into the streets of the place.
Just as they reached the market square and the front of the old church there, the last of the marauders (retarded under the weight of some burden he would save) was caught and pinned by a short spear thrown. He fell, crying and howling in a foreign tongue to gods of his own in the northland. But all his comrades were fast in the building, and there was a loud thrusting of stone statues and heavy furniture against the doors. Then, within a moment, an arrow flashed from a window slit, just missing one of the marshals. The Comes of Poitiersshouted for wood to burn the defence of the door, and villagers, misliking the task, were pressed. Faggots were dragged from sheds and piled against it. Even as this work was doing, man after man fell, as the defenders shot them at short range from within the church-tower.
The first of the foot-men had come up, and some half-dozen picked for marksmanship were attempting to thread with their whistling arrows the slits in the thick walls whence the bolts of the Vikings came. One such opening was caught by a lucky aim. For some moments its fire ceased, then came another arrow from it. It struck the Comes of Poitiers and he went down, and as he fell from his horse two servants caught him. Next, with a second shaft, the horse was struck, and it plunged and began a panic. No servant dared stab it, but a marshal did.
Robert, that second count, the leader, had dismounted. He was in a fury, mixed with the common men, and striking at the great church door blow upon blow, having in his hand a stoneso huge that even at such a moment they marvelled at him.
Unarmoured, pouring with sweat, though at that western door a great buttress still shaded him from the noonday sun, Robert the Strong thundered enormously at the oak. A hinge broke, and he heard a salute of laughter from his men. He dropped his instrument, lifted, straining, a great beam which lay there, and trundled it like a battering-ram against the second hinge. But, just as the shock came, an arrow from the tower caught him also. It struck where the neck joins the shoulder, and he went down. Even as he fell, the great door gave, and the men of the imperial levy, fighting their way in, broke upon the massed pirates that still defended the entry with a whirl of axe and sword.
Four men tended the leader, one man holding his head upon his knee, the three others making shift to lift him, to take him where he might be tended. But his body was no longer convulsed; the motions of the arms had ceased;and when the arrow was plucked at last from the wound, the thick blood hardly followed it. He was dead.
The name of this village and this church was Brissarthe; and the man who so fell, and from whose falling soldier songs and legends arose, was the first father of all the Capetians, the French kings.
From this man sprang Eudes, who defended Paris from the Sea-Rovers: Hugh Capet and Philip Augustus and Louis the Saint and Philip the Fair; and so through century after century to the kings that rode through Italy, to Henri IV, to Louis XIV in the splendour of his wars, and to that last unfortunate who lost the Tuileries on August 10th, 1793. His line survives to-day, for its eldest heir is the man whom the Basques would follow. His expectants call him Don Carlos, and he claims the crown of Spain.
Why do they pull down and do away with the Crooked Streets, I wonder, which are my delight, and hurt no man living?
Every day the wealthier nations are pulling down one or another in their capitals and their great towns: they do not know why they do it; neither do I.
It ought to be enough, surely, to drive the great broad ways which commerce needs and which are the life-channels of a modern city, without destroying all the history and all the humanity in between: the islands of the past. For, note you, the Crooked Streets are packed with human experience and reflect in a lively manner all the chances and misfortunes and expectations and domesticity and wonderment of men. One marks a boundary, another the kennel of an ancient stream, a third the track someanimal took to cross a field hundreds upon hundreds of years ago; another is the line of an old defence, another shows where a rich man's garden stopped long before the first ancestor one's family can trace was born; a garden now all houses, and its owner who took delight in it turned to be a printed name.
Leave men alone in their cities, pester them not with the futilities of great governments, nor with the fads of too powerful men, and they will build you Crooked Streets of their very nature as moles throw up the little mounds or bees construct their combs. There is no ancient city but glories, or has gloried, in a whole foison and multitude of Crooked Streets. There is none, however wasted and swept by power which, if you leave it alone to natural things, will not breed Crooked Streets in less than a hundred years and keep them for a thousand more.
I know a dead city called Timgad, which the sand or the barbarians of the Atlas overwhelmed fourteen centuries ago. It lies betweenthe desert and the Algerian fields, high up upon a mountain-side. Its columns stand. Even its fountains are apparent, though their waterways are choked. It has a great forum or market-place, all flagged and even, and the ruined walls of its houses mark its emplacement on every side. All its streets are straight, set out with a line, and by this you may judge how a Roman town lay when the last order of Rome sank into darkness.
Well, take any other town which has not thus been mummified and preserved but has lived through the intervening time, and you will find that man, active, curious, intense, in all the fruitful centuries of Christian time has endowed them with Crooked Streets, which kind of streets are the most native to Christian men. So it is with Arles, so it is with Nîmes, so it is with old Rome itself, and so it is with the City of London, on which by a special Providence the curse of the Straight Street has never fallen, so that it is to this day a labyrinth of little lanes. It was intended after the Great Fire toset it all out in order with "piazzas" and boulevards and the rest—but the English temper was too strong for any such nonsense, and the streets and the courts took to the natural lines which suit us best.
The Renaissance indeed everywhere began this plague of vistas and of avenues. It was determined three centuries ago to rebuild Paris as regular as a chessboard, and nothing but money saved the town—or rather the lack of money. You may to this day see in a square called the "Place des Vosges" what was intended. But when they had driven their Straight Street two hundred yards or so the exchequer ran dry, and thus was old Paris saved. But in the last seventy years they have hurt it badly again. I have no quarrel with what is regal and magnificent, with splendid ways of a hundred feet or more, with great avenues and lines of palaces; but why should they pull down my nest beyond the river—Straw Street and Rat Street and all those winding belts round the little Church of St.Julien the Poor, where they say that Dante studied and where Danton in the madness of his grief dug up his dead love from the earth on his returning from the wars.
Crooked Streets will never tire a man, and each will have its character, and each will have a soul of its own. To proceed from one to another is like travelling in a multitude or mixing with a number of friends. In a town of Crooked Streets it is natural that one should be the Moneylenders' Street and another that of the Burglars, and a third that of the Politicians, and so forth through all the trades and professions.
Then also, how much better are not the beauties of a town seen from Crooked Streets! Consider those old Dutch towns where you suddenly come round a corner upon great stretches of salt water, or those towns of Central France which from one street and then another show you the Gothic in a hundred ways.
It is as it should be when you have the back of Chartres Cathedral towering up above youfrom between and above two houses gabled and almost meeting. It is what the builders meant when one comes out from such fissures into the great Place, the parvis of the cathedral, like a sailor from a river into the sea. Not that certain buildings were not made particularly for wide approaches and splendid roads, but that these, when they are the rule, sterilize and kill a town. Napoleon was wise enough when he designed that there should lead all up beyond the Tiber to St. Peter's a vast imperial way. But the modern nondescript horde, which has made Rome its prey, is very ill advised to drive those new Straight Streets foolishly, emptily, with mean façades of plaster and great gaps that will not fill.
You will have noted in your travels how the Crooked Streets gather names to themselves which are as individual as they, and which are bound up with them as our names are with all our own human reality and humour. Thus I bear in mind certain streets of the town where I served as a soldier. There was the Street ofthe Three Little Heaps of Wheat, the Street of the Trumpeting Moor, the Street of the False Heart, and an exceedingly pleasant street called "Who Grumbles at It?" and another short one called "The Street of the Devil in His Haste," and many others.
From time to time those modern town councillors from whom Heaven has wisely withdrawn all immoderate sums of money, and who therefore have not the power to take away my Crooked Streets and put Straight ones in their places, change old names to new ones. Every such change indicates some snobbery of the time: some little battle exaggerated to be a great thing; some public fellow or other, in Parliament or what not; some fad of the learned or of the important in their day.
Once I remember seeing in an obscure corner a twist of dear old houses built before George III was king, and on the corner of this row was painted "Kipling Street: late Nelson Street."
Upon another occasion I went to a littleNorman market town up among the hills, where one of the smaller squares was called "The Place of the Three Mad Nuns," and when I got there after so many years and was beginning to renew my youth I was struck all of a heap to see a great enamelled blue and white affair upon the walls. They had renamed the triangle. They had called it "The Place Victor Hugo"!
However, all you who love Crooked Streets, I bid you lift up your hearts. There is no power on earth that can make man build Straight Streets for long. It is a bad thing, as a general rule, to prophesy good or to make men feel comfortable with the vision of a pleasant future; but in this case I am right enough. The Crooked Streets will certainly return.
Let me boldly borrow a quotation which I never saw until the other day, and that in another man's work, but which, having once seen it, I shall retain all the days of my life.
"Oh, passi graviora, dabit Deus his quoquefinem," or words to that effect. I can never be sure of a quotation, still less of scansion, and anyhow, as I am deliberately stealing it from another man, if I have changed it so much the better.
Little pen, be good and flow with ink (which you do not always do) so that I may tell you what came to me once in a high summer and the happiness I had of it.
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One Summer morning as I was wandering from one house to another among the houses of men, I lifted up a bank from a river to a village and good houses, and there I was well entertained. I wish I could recite the names of those chance companions, but I cannot, for they did not tell me their names. June was just beginning in the middle lands where there are vines, but not many, and where the look of the stonework is still northern. The place was not very far from the Western Sea.
The bank on which the village stood above that river had behind it a solemn slope ofwoodland leading up gently to where, two miles or more away, yet not three hundred feet above me, the new green of the tree-tops made a line along the sky. Clouds of a little, happy, hurrying sort ran across the gentle blue of that heaven, and I thought, as I went onward into the forest upland, that I had come to very good things: but indeed I had come to things of a graver kind.
A path went on athwart the woods and upwards. This path was first regular, and then grew less and less marked, though it still preserved a clear-way through the undergrowth. The new leaves were opened all about me, and there was a little breeze: yet the birds piped singly and the height was lonely when I reached it, as though it were engaged in a sort of contemplation. At the summit was first one small clearing and then another, in which coarse grass grew high within the walls of trees; men had not often come that way, and those men only the few of the countryside.
Just where the slope began to go downwardsagain upon the further side, these little clearings ceased and the woods closed in again. The path, or what was left of it, wholly failed, and I had now to push my way through many twigs and interlacing brambles, till in a little while that forest ceased abruptly upon the edge of a falling sward, and I saw before me the Valley.
Its floor must have lain higher than that river which I had crossed and left the same morning, for my ascent had been one of two miles or so, and my pushing downward on the further slope far less than one; moreover, that descent had been gentle.
The Valley opened to the right at my issue from the wood. To my left hand was a circle of the same trees as those through which I had passed, but to the right and so away northward, the pleasant empty dale.
Let me describe it.
Upon the further bank (for it was not steep enough to call a wall), the western bank which shut that valley in, grew a thick growth of low chestnuts with here and there a tall silver birchstanding up among them. All this further slope was so held, and the chestnuts made a dark belt from which the tall graces of the birches lifted. The sunlight was behind that long afternoon of hills.
Opposite, the higher eastern slope stood full though gentle to the glorious light, and it was all a rise of pasture land. Its crest, which followed up and away northward for some miles, showed here and there a brown rock, aged and strong but low and half covered in the grass. These rocks were warm and mellow. The height of this eastern boundary was enough to protect the hollow below, but not so high as to carry any sense of savagery. It warned rather than forbade the approach of human kind. Between it and its opposing wooded fellow the narrowing floor of that Eden lay; winding, closing slowly, until it ended in a little cuplike pass, an easy saddle of grass where the two sides of the valley converged upon its northern conclusion. This pass was perhaps four miles away from me as I gazed, or perhaps a little less.The sun as I have said was shining upon all this: it made upon the little cuplike place a gentle shadow and a gentle light, both curved as the light might fall low and aslant upon a wooden bowl clothed in a soft green cloth. This was a lovely sight, and it invited me to go forward.
Therefore I went down the sward that fell from the abrupt edge of the wood, and set out to follow northward along the lower grasses of this single and most unexpected vale.
So strange was the place, even at this first sight, that I thought to myself: "I have happened upon one of those holidays God gives us." For we cannot give ourselves holidays: nor, if we are slaves, can our masters give us holidays, but God only: until at last we lay down the business and leave our work for good and all. And so much for holidays. Anyhow, the valley was a wonder to me there.
It was not as are common and earthly things. There was a peace about it which was not a mere repose, but rather something active whichinvited and intrigued. The meadows had a summons in them; and all was completely still. I heard no birds from the moment when I left the woodland, but a little brook, not shallow, ran past me for a companion as I went on. It made no murmur, but it slid full and at once mysterious and prosperous, brimming up to the rich field upon either side. I thought there must be chalk beneath it from its way of going. The pasture was not mown yet it was short, but if it had been fed there was no trace of herds anywhere; and indeed the grass was rather more in height than the grass of fed land, though it was not in flower. No wind moved it.
There were no divisions in this little kingdom; there were no walls or fences or hedges: it was all one field, with the woods upon the western slope to my left, and the tilted green of the eastern ridge to my right on which the sunlight softly and continually lay. Never have I found a place so much its own master and so contentedly alone.
If any man owned that Valley, blessed be that man, but if no man owned it, and only God, then I could better understand the benediction which it imposed upon me, a chance wanderer, for something little less than an hour. Here was a place in which thought settled upon itself, and was not concerned with unanswerable things; and here was a place in which memory did not trouble one with the incompletion of recent trial, but rather stretched back to things so very old that all sense of evil had been well purged out of them. The ultimate age of the world which is also its youth, was here securely preserved. I was not so foolish as to attempt a prolongation of this blessedness: these things are not for possession: they are an earnest only of things which we may perhaps possess, but not while the business is on.
I went along at a good sober pace of travelling, taking care to hurt no blossom with my staff and to destroy no living thing, whether of leaves or of those that have movement.
So I went until I came to the low pass atthe head of the place, and when I had surmounted it I looked down a steep great fall into quite another land. I had come to a line where met two provinces, two different kinds of men, and this second valley was the end of one.
The moor (for so I would call it) upon the further side fell away and away distantly, till at its foot it struck a plain whereon I could see, further and further off to a very distant horizon, cities and fields and the anxious life of men.
I wish I could put before men who have not seen that sight, the abrupt shock which the Northern eye receives when it first looks from some rampart of the Pyrenees upon the new deserts of Spain.
"Deserts" is a term at once too violent and too simple. The effect of that amazement is by no means the effect which follows from a similar vision of the Sahara from the red-burnt and precipitous rocks of Atlas; nor is it the effect which those stretches of white blinding sand give forth when, looking southward toward Mexico and the sun, a man shades his eyes to catch a distant mark of human habitation along some rare river of Arizona from the cliff edge of a cut tableland.
Corn grows in that new Spain beneath one: many towns stand founded there; ChristianChurches are established; a human society stands firmly, though sparsely, set in that broad waste of land. But to the Northern eye first seeing it—nay, to a Northerner well acquainted with it, but returning to the renewal of so strange a vision—it is always a renewed perplexity how corn, how men, how worship, how society (as he has known them) can have found a place there; and that, although he knows that nowhere in Europe have the fundamental things of Europe been fought for harder and more steadfastly maintained than they have along this naked and burnt valley of the Ebro.
I will suppose the traveller to have made his way on foot from the boundaries of the Basque country, from the Peak of Anie, down through the high Pyrenean silences to those banks of Aragon where the river runs west between parallel ranges, each of which is a bastion of the main Pyrenean chain. I will suppose him to have crossed that roll of thick mud which the tumbling Aragon is in all these lower reaches, to have climbed the further range (which iscalled "The Mountains of Stone," or "The Mountains of the Rock"), and, coming upon its further southern slope, to see for the first time spread before him that vast extent of uniform dead-brown stretching through an air metallically clear to the tiny peaks far off on the horizon, which mark the springs of the Tagus. It is a characteristic of the stretched Spanish upland, from within sight of the Pyrenees to within sight of the Southern Sea, that it may thus be grasped in less than half a dozen views, wider than any views in Europe; and, partly from the height of that interior land, partly from the Iberian aridity of its earth, these views are as sharp in detail, as inhuman in their lack of distant veils and blues, as might be the landscapes of a dead world.
The traveller who should so have passed the high ridge and watershed of the Pyrenees, would have come down from the snows of the Anie through forests not indeed as plentiful as those of the French side, but still dignified by manyand noble trees, and alive with cascading water. While he was yet crossing the awful barriers (one standing out parallel before the next) which guard the mountains on their Spainward fall, he would continuously have perceived, though set in dry, unhospitable soil, bushes and clumps of trees; something at times resembling his own Northern conception of pasture-land. The herbage upon which he would pitch his camp, the branches he would pick for firewood, still, though sparse and Southern, would have reminded him of home.
But when he has come over the furthest of these parallel reaches, and sees at last the whole sweep of the Ebro country spread out before him, it is no longer so. His eye detects no trees, save that belt of green which accompanies the course of the river, no glint of water. Though human habitation is present in that landscape, it mixes, as it were, with the mud and the dust of the earth from which it rose; and, gazing at a distant clump in the plains beneath him, far off, the traveller asks himselfdoubtfully whether these hummocks are but small, abrupt, insignificant hills or a nest of the houses of men—things with histories.
For the rest all that immeasurable sweep of yellow-brown bare earth fills up whatever is not sky, and is contained or framed upon its final limit by mountains as severe as its own empty surface. Those far and dreadful hills are unrelieved by crag or wood or mist; they are a mere height, naked and unfruitful, running along wall-like and cutting off Aragon from the south and the old from the new Castile, save where the higher knot of the Moncayo stands tragic and enormous against the sky.
This experience of Spain, this first discovery of a thing so unexpected and so universally misstated by the pens of travellers and historians, is best seen in autumn sunsets, I think, when behind the mass of the distant mountains an angry sky lights up its unfruitful aspect of desolation, and, though lending it a colour it can never possess in commoner hours and seasons, in no way creates an illusion of fertility or ofromance, of yield or of adventure, in that doomed silence.
The vision of which I speak does not, I know, convey this peculiar impression even to all of the few who may have seen it thus—and they are rare. They are rare because men do not now approach the old places of Europe in the old way. They come into a Spanish town of the north by those insufficient railways of our time. They return back home with no possession of great sights, no more memorable experience than of urban things done less natively, more awkwardly, more slowly than in England. Yet even those few, I say, who enter Spain from the north, as Spain should be entered—over the mountain roads—have not all of them received the impression of which I speak.
I have so received it, I know; I could wish that to the Northerner it were the impression most commonly conveyed: a marvel that men should live in such a place: a wonder when the ear catches the sound of a distant bell, thatritual and a creed should have survived there—so absolute is its message of desolation.
With a more familiar acquaintance this impression does not diminish, but increases. Especially to one who shall make his way painfully on foot for three long days from the mountains to the mountains again, who shall toil over the great bare plain, who shall cross by some bridge over Ebro and look down, it may be, at a trickle of water hardly moving in the midst of a broad, stony bed, or it may be at a turbid spate roaring a furlong broad after the rains—in either case unusable and utterly unfriendly to man; who shall hobble from little village to little village, despairing at the silence of men in that silent land and at their lack of smiles and at the something fixed which watches one from every wall; who shall push on over the slight wheel-tracks which pass for roads—they are not roads—across the infinite, unmarked, undifferenced field; to one who has done all these things, I say, getting the land into his senses hourly, there comes an appreciation ofits wilful silence and of its unaccomplished soul. That knowledge fascinates, and bids him return. It is like watching with the sick who were thought dead, who are, in your night of watching, upon the turn of their evil. It is like those hours of the night in which the mind of some troubled sleeper wakened can find neither repose nor variety, but only a perpetual return upon itself—but waits for dawn. Behind all this lies, as behind a veil of dryness stretched from the hills to the hills, for those who will discover it, the intense, the rich, the unconquerable spirit of Spain.
Men forget too easily how much the things they see around them in the landscapes of Britain are the work of men. Most of our trees were planted and carefully nurtured by man's hand. Our ploughs for countless centuries have made even the soil of the plains the lines of a great view; its groups of hedge and of building, of ridge and of road are very largely the creation of that curious and active breed which was set upon this dull round of the earth to enliven it—which, alone of creatures, speaks and has foreknowledge of death and wonders concerning its origin and its end. It is man that has transformed the surface and the outline of the old countries, and even the rivers carry his handiwork.
There is a little river on my land which very singularly shows the historical truth of whatI am here saying. As God made it, it was but a drain rambling through the marshy clay of tangled underwood, sluggishly feeling its way through the hollows in general weathers, scouring in a shapeless flood after the winter rains, dried up and stagnant in isolated pools in our hot summers. Then, no one will ever know how many centuries ago, man came, busy and curious, and doing with his hands. He took my little river; he began to use it, to make it, and to transform it, and to erect of it a human thing. He gave to it its ancient name, which is the ancient name for water, and which you will find scattered upon streams large and small from the Pyrenees up to the Northern Sea and from the West of Germany to the Atlantic. He called it the Adur; therefore pedants pretend that the name is new and not old, for pedants hate the fruitful humour of antiquity.
Well, not only did man give my little river (an inconceivable number of generations ago) the name which it still bears, but he bridged it and he banked it, he scoured it and he dammedit, until he made of it a thing to his own purpose and a companion of the countryside.
With the fortunes of man in our Western and Northern land the fortunes of my little river rose and fell. What the Romans may have done with it we do not know, for a clay soil preserves but little—coins sink in it and the foundations of buildings are lost.
In the breakdown which we call the Dark Ages, and especially perhaps after the worst business of the Danish Invasion, it must have broken back very nearly to the useless and unprofitable thing it had been before man came. The undergrowth, the little oaks and the maples, the coarse grass, the thistle patches, and the briars encroached upon tilled land; the banks washed down, floods carried away the rotting dams, the waterwheels were forgotten and perished. There seem to have been no mills. There is no good drinking water in that land, save here and there at a rare spring, unless you dig a well, and the people of the Dark Ages inBritain, broken by the invasion, dug no wells in the desolation of my valley.
Then came the Norman: the short man with the broad shoulders and the driving energy, and that regal sense of order which left its stamp wherever he marched, from the Grampians to the Euphrates. He tamed that land again, he ploughed the clay, he cut the undergrowth, and he built a great house of monks and a fine church of stone where for so long there had been nothing but flying robbers, outlaws, and the wolves of the weald.
To my little river the Norman was particularly kind. He dug it out and deepened it, he bridged it again and he sluiced it; it brimmed to its banks, it was once more the companion of men, and, what is more, he dug it out so thoroughly all the twenty miles to the sea that he could even use it for barges and for light boats, so that this head of the stream came to be called Shipley, for goods of ships could be floated, when all this was done, right up to the wharfwhich the Knight Templars had built above the church to meet the waters of the stream.
All the Middle Ages that fruitfulness and that use continued. But with the troubles in which the Middle Ages closed and in which so much of our civilisation was lost, the little river was once more half abandoned. The church still stood, but stone by stone the great building of the Templars disappeared. The river was no longer scoured; its course was checked by dense bush and reed, the wild beasts came back, the lands of the King were lost. One use remained to the water—the Norman's old canalisation was forgotten and the wharf had slipped into a bank of clay, and was now no more than a tumbled field with no deep water standing by. This use was the use of the Hammer Ponds. Here and there the stream was banked up, and the little fall thus afforded was used to work the heavy hammers of the smithies in which the iron of the countryside was worked. For in this clay of ours there was ironstone everywhere, and the many oaks of the wealdfurnished the charcoal for its smelting. The metal work of the great ships that fought the French, many of their guns also, and bells and railings for London, were smithied or cast at the issue of these Hammer Ponds. But coal came and the new smelting; our iron was no longer worked, and the last usefulness of the little river seemed lost.
Then for two generations all that land lay apart, the stream quite choked or furiously flooding, the paths unworkable in winter: no roads, but only green lanes, and London, forty miles away, unknown.
The last resurrection of the little river has begun to-day. The railway was the first bringer of good news (if you will allow me to be such an apologist for civilisation); then came good hard roads in numbers, and quite lately the bicycle, and, last of all, the car. The energy of men reached Adur once again, and once again began the scouring and making of the banks and the harnessing of the water for man; so that, though we have not tackled the canal as weshould (that will come), yet with every year the Adur grows more and more of a companion again. It has furnished two fine great lakes for two of my neighbours, and in one place after another they have bridged it as they should, and though clay is a doubtful thing to deal with they have banked it as well.
The other day as I began a new and great and good dam with sluices and with puddled clay behind oak boards and with huge oak uprights and oaken spurs to stand the rush of the winter floods, I thought to myself, working in that shimmering and heated air, how what I was doing was one more of the innumerable things that men had done through time incalculable to make the river their own, and the thought gave me great pleasure, for one becomes larger by mixing with any company of men, whether of our brothers now living or of our fathers who are dead.
This little river—the river Adur before I have done with it—will be as charming and well-bred a thing as the Norman or the Romanknew. It shall bring up properly to well-cut banks. These shall be boarded. It shall have clear depths of water in spite of the clay, and reeds and water lilies shall grow only where I choose. In every way it shall be what the things of this world were made to be—the servant and the instrument of Man.