Part 11

Unless a man understands the Weald he cannot easily write about the beginnings of England, and yet historians have not understood it. Only the men mixed into it and married with it or born upon it have understood it, and these, I say, until lately were not permitted by constant travel that judgment by analogy and by contrast which teaches us the true meaning of things that we had hitherto only instinctively known. Now a Wealden man can say certain things about his countryside which are of real value to history and perhaps to politics as well; at any rate, to politics in that larger sense of patriotism intelligently appreciating the future of one’s own land. Thus the Wealden man, now that he knows so much else in England, can tell the historian that the Weald was never the impenetrable forest which historians would make of it. It lay in a barrier between the ports of the Channel and the Thames Valley. But the barrier was not uninhabited; it was not impassable. Its scattered brushwood was patchy, its soil never permanently marshy nor ever for long distances difficult for a mounted man or a man on foot. The Weald from the very beginning had homesteads in it, but it had not agglomerations of houses, nor had it parishes save in very few places. If you look at the map now you can see how the old parishes stretch northward and southward in long strips from the chalk and loam country up towards the forest ridge which is the centre of the Weald. Those long strips were the hunting rights of the village folk and their lords. Of some parishes carved out of the central Weald we can accurately tell the origin. We know that they were colonised as it were, cleared, and had their church built for them in the great spurt of civilisation which marked the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Men would understand the early history of the Weald better, and with it the early military history of South-Eastern England, if they would take one of the old forest paths--as that from Rusper, for instance, which works its way down, now as a metalled road, now as a green lane, now as a mere footpath with right of way, past the two old “broad” fords on the upper Arun and the marshy land east of Pulborough until it gets to Roundabout, and so to Storrington. All the history of communications in the Weald is exemplified in such a journey--and it is a journey which, though it is little more than twenty miles in length, takes quite a day. You have the modern high road, the green lane of the immediate past, and in places a mere track of remote antiquity. You see just how difficult it is to traverse the clay, how the occasional knobs of sand relieve your going; you can notice the character of the woodland where it is still untouched, and if you are wise you will notice one thing above all, and that is the character of the water. Now it is this which explains the Weald. Many bad bits of clay in Europe have formed highways for armies--for instance, all that rotten land in the great bend of the Loire which the Romans called the _Solitarium_, and which the French called the _Sologne_. But the Weald differs from most others in this, that good and plentiful water is hard to find. It is not the muddiness of the streams that is the chief defence of the place against human travel and habitation; it is the way in which, when rain has fallen and when water is plentiful, going is difficult, and the way in which, when a few days of dry weather come, the going becomes easy, but the water in the little streams disappears. There is evidence that the Romans, when they built their great military road--perhaps their only purely military road in Britain--across the Weald skipped one intervening station which should, upon the analogy of others, have been present upon it in the heart of the Weald, and pressed the march in this place to nearly double its usual length. The French armies do precisely the same thing in the bad lands of the Plain of Chalons to-day. Wherever there is ancient habitation in the Weald, or rather upon the fringes of the Weald, there is good, plentiful, and perennial water; elsewhere the Weald is still what it has been throughout history--a great rolling place, not deserted, not lonely, and yet not humanised. It is exactly the place for a seclusion from men, for you can see some men, but not too many of them; and I have always thought that King wise, who, when his enemies desired to kill him, wandered in the Andredsweald. The historians say that he took refuge in the impassable thickets of the forest. This is bosh. No man can sleep out in this climate for a season round, nor can any man live without cooked meat, nor do I see an Anglo-Saxon king living without wine and a good deal of pomp into the bargain. As to the wine, men might argue, but as to the pomp, they cannot. I will tell you what this King did without any doubt. He went from steading to steading and was royally entertained, and if you ask why it was a refuge for him the answer is that it was a refuge against the pursuit of many men.

The Weald is a refuge against the pursuit of many men. It was so then: it is so now.

And this leads me to my conclusion. The Weald will never be conquered. It will always be the Weald. To be conquered is to suffer the will of another: the Weald will suffer no will but its own. The men of the Weald drive out men odious to them in manner sometimes subtle, sometimes brutal, always in the long run successful. Economics break against the Weald as water breaks against stone. It is not a long walk from London. Your Londoner in summer comes and builds in it. So foreign birds their nests. But unlike the foreign birds, he does not return with each returning spring. For the Weald will welcome the bird for the pleasure the bird gives it, and drive it out when the pleasure is done. Now it welcomes the Londoner for his money, and this feature in the Londoner is not recurrent with the seasons.

Here is some Latin which I am assured is grammatical and correctly spelled as well:

Stat et stabit: manet et manebit, spectator orbis.

She stands and still shall stand; she remains and shall remain: a watcher of the generations.

On London and the Houses in it

The aspect of London, as the man who knows it grows older, begins to take on characters of permanence and characters of change, both of which are comparable to those of a human life. It is perceived that certain qualities in the great soul of the place are permanent, and that the memories of many common details merge after the passage of years into a general picture which is steadfast and gives unity to the whole.

This is especially true of the London skies, and more true, I think, of the London skies in autumn than at any other season of the year. Men go home from the City or from the Courts westward at an hour which is that of sunset, when the river catches more light than at any other time: the mixture of mist and smoke and of those shapes in our clouds, beyond the reek of the town, which are determined by the south-west wind blowing up the line of the valley, make together an impression which is the most lasting of the landscapes in which we live. These it was which inspired Turner when he drew them from the deserted room in the tower of Battersea Church, or from that corner house over the River, whence he could watch evening after evening the heavy but transparent colours which enter into the things he painted. Many foreigners, caught by the glamour of that artist, have missed the source whence his mellow and declining sunlight was inspired; its source was in these evening and autumn skies of London. There is a permanence also in the type of home which London built for more than two centuries, and which was laid down after the Great Fire, and there is a permanence in the older stonework. It is difficult or impossible to define what there is in common between the brown stock brick of London, which is the stuff of all its background whether of large houses or mean, and the black and white weathering of Portland stone. Perhaps the unity which seems to bind them is wholly in the mind, and depends merely upon association, but it is very strong upon anyone who has grown up from childhood into middle age surrounded by the vision of this town; and it would seem as though London was only London because of those rough surfaces of soft stonework, streaked with white wedges, scaling off the grime of St. Martin’s, or St. Clement Dane’s, or the fine front of the Admiralty, and standing out clear against the general brown mass of the streets. The quite new things have no character at all. One wonders what cosmopolitan need can have produced them. London never produced them, with their stone that so often is plaster, and their alien suggestion of whatever is least national in Paris or New York. London never produced them.

The noise of the streets in spite of every change remains the same, it is the same comforting and distant roar, like the roar of large waters among hills, which every visitor has noticed, with its sharp contrast to the rattle and cries of other great capitals. Why it should be so no one, I think, has discovered, though many have described it, but it remains an unmistakable thing, and if a London man, who had travelled and was far away, should be set down by a spirit in London, not knowing where he was, when he heard through a window high above the street this distant and continuous roar, he would know that he had come home. It should surely in theory have disappeared, this chief physical characteristic of the great place, yet neither the new electricity and the hissing of the wires, nor the new paving, nor even the new petrol seem to change it. It is still a confused and powerful and subdued voice, like a multitude undecided. The silence also does not change. The way in which in countless spots you pass through an unobserved low passage, or through an inconspicuous narrow turning, and find yourself in a deserted place, from which the whole life of London seems blanketed out, has been to every traveller and to every native part of the charm and surprise of London. Dickens knew it very well, and makes of it again and again a dramatic something in his work which stamps it everywhere with the soul of London. In every decade men growing older deplore the disappearance of this or that sanctuary of isolation and silence, but in the aggregate they never disappear; something in the very character of the people reproduces them continually, and if any man will borrow the leisure--even a man who knows his London well--to peer about and to explore for one Saturday afternoon in one square mile of older London, how many such unknown corners will he not find! The populace also upon whom all this is founded remain the same.

What changes in London are the things that also change in the life of a man, and nothing more than the relationship of particular spots and particular houses to our own lives. There is perhaps no city in the world where, under the permanence of the general type, there is so perpetual a flow and disturbance of association. It has even become normal to the life of the citizens, and the conception of a fixed home has left them. Here and there--but more and more rarely with every year--you may point out a great house which some wealthy family has chosen to inhabit for some few generations; but fixity of tenure, tradition, family tradition at least, and sacred hereditary things, either these were never proper to London or they have gone; it is this which overspreads a continued knowledge of London with an increasing loneliness and with memories that find no satisfaction or expression, but re-enter the heart of a man and do a hurt to him there.

There are so many strange doors that should be familiar doors. Turning sometimes into some street where one has turned for years to find at a very well-known number windows of a certain aspect and little details in the drab exterior of the house, every one of which was as familiar as a smile, one is (by the mere association of years and of a gesture repeated a thousand times) in the act of coming to the steps and of seeking an entry. The whole place is as much one’s friend and as much indicative of one’s friend as would be his clothes or his voice or any other external thing. He is not there, and the house is worse than empty. London grows full of such houses as a man grows older. Most of us have other losses sharper still, which men of other cities know less well, for most of us pass and repass the house where we were born, or where as children we gathered all the strongest impressions of life. It is impossible to believe that other souls are inheriting the effect of those familiar rooms. It is worse than a death; it is a kind of treason.

I know a house in Wimpole Street of which every part is as familiar quite as the torn leaves of the old books of childhood, but I have passed it and repassed it for how many years, forbidden an entrance, and finding that ancient and fixed friend in league, so to speak, with strangers. Or, in another manner, which of us does not know a house like any other house, amid the thousand unmarked houses in the better streets of the town, but to us quite individual because there met within it once so many who were for us the history of our time? It was in that room (where are the three windows) that she received her guests, retaining on into the last generations of a worse and degraded time the traditions of a better society. Here came men who could discuss and reveal things that are now distorted legends, and whose revelations were real because they came as witnesses: soldiers of the Crimea, of India, of Italy, and of Algiers, or men who remembered great actions within the State: actions that were significant through conviction, before we became what we are. Here was breeding; here were the just limits of tone and emphasis and change, and here was that type of intercourse which was surely as great and as good a thing as Europe or England has known. Who sees that room to-day? What taste has replaced her taste? What choice of stuff or colour mars the decoration on the walls? What trash or alien thing takes the place of that careful elaborate womanly work in which her travels throughout the world were recorded, and in which the excellent modesty of an art sufficient for her purpose reproduced in line and in colour the ironic nobility of her mind and the wide expanse of her learning? We do not know and we cannot know. The house is neither ours nor hers. To whomever it has passed it has turned traitor to us who knew.

It is better, I think, for those who have such memories when the material things that enshrine them wholly disappear, for then there is no jar, no agony of contrast between that society which once was and this which now is, with its quality of wealth and of the uses to which wealth is put to-day. If we must suffer the intolerable and clumsy presence of accidental power--power got suddenly, got anyhow, got by chance, untrained and unworthy--at least may we suffer such things in their own surroundings, in huge conservatories, with loud music, with an impression of partial drunkenness all around, and a certainty all around of intellectual incompetence and of sprawling bodies and souls. It is better to suffer these new things in such surroundings as may easily let one believe that one is not in London at all, but on the Riviera; and let the heat be excessive, and let there be a complete ignorance of all wine except champagne, and let it be a place where champagne is supposed to be one wine. Then the frame will suit the picture, and there will at least be no desecration of material things by human beings unworthy of the bricks and mortar. I say it is much better when the old houses disappear, at least the old houses in which we knew and loved the better people of a better time:--and yet the youth or childhood in which so many of us saw the last of it is not thirty years, is barely twenty years dead!

On Old Towns

Every man who has a civilised backing behind him, every man, that is, born to a citizenship which has history to nourish it, knows, loves, desires to inhabit, and returns to, the Old Towns; but the more one thinks of it the more difficult one finds it to determine in what this appetite consists.

The love of a village, of a manor, is one thing. You may stand in some place where you were born or brought up, especially if it be some place in which you passed those years in which the soul is formed to the body, between, say, seven years of age and seventeen, and you may look at the landscape of it from its height, but you will not be able to determine how much in your strong affection is of man and how much of God. True, nearly everything in a good European landscape has been moulded, touched, coloured, and in a sense made by Christian men. It is like a sort of tapestry which man has worked upon the stuff that God gave him; but, still, any such landscape from the height of one of our villages has surely more in it of God than of man. For one thing there is the sky; and then it must be admitted that the lines of the hills were there before man touched them, and though the definite outline of the woods, the careful thinning of them which allows great trees to grow, the noble choice and contrast of foliage, the sharp edge of cultivated against forest land, the careful planting of the tallest kinds of things, pine trees and elms, are all man’s work; and though the sights of water in between are usually man’s work also, yet in the air that clothes the scene and in all its major lines, man did not make it at all: he has but used it and improved it under the inspiration of That which made the whole.

But with the Old Towns it is not so. They please us in proportion to their apparent intensity of effort; the more man has worked the more can we embed ourselves within them. The more different is every stone from another, and the more that difference is due to the curious spirit of man the more are we pleased. We stand in little lanes where every single thing about us, except the strip of sky overhead, is man’s work, and the strip of sky overhead becomes what all skies are in all pictures--something subordinate to man, an ornament.

One could make a list of the Old Towns and go on for ever: the sea-light over the red brick of King’s Lynn from the east, and the other sea-light from the south over that other King’s town, Lyme Regis; the curious bunch of Rye; the hill of Poitiers all massed up with history, and in whose uneven alleys all the armies go by, from the armies of the Gauls to the army that makes a noise about them to-day: the hill of Lincoln, where one looks up from the Roman Gate to the towers completing the steep hill; the two hills of Cassel and of Montreuil, similarly packed with all that men are, have been, and remain; the quadrated towns, some surely Roman, some certainly so; Chichester, Winchester, Horsham, Oxford, Chester, and a hundred others--England is most fruitful in these; the towns that draw their life from rivers and have high steep walls of stone or brick going right down into the waters, Albi, Newcastle as it once was; in its own small way Arundel as it still is; the towns of the great flats, where men for some reason can best give rein to their fancy, Delft, Antwerp (that part of it which counts), Bruges, Louvain; Ypres also where the cooking is so vile.

One might continue for ever this futile list of towns--this is in common to them all, that wherever men come across them in travel they have a sense of home and the soul reposes.

Nowhere have I found this more than in the curious and to some the disappointing town of Arles. Arles has about it, more than any other town I know, the sentiment of protracted human experience. They dig and find stone tools and weapons. They dig again and find marks of log huts, bronze pins, and the arms of the Gauls. And then, apparent to the eye and still living as it were, and still breathing, as it were, the upper air which is also ours, not buried away like dead things, but surviving, is Greece, is Rome, is the Dark Ages, is the Middle Ages, is the Renaissance, is the religious quarrel, is the Eighteenth Century, is the Revolution, is to-day. I have sometimes thought that if a man should go to Arles with the desire deliberately to subject himself at once to the illusion and to the reality of the past, here he could do so. He could look curiously for a day at the map and see how the Rhone had swept the place for thousands upon thousands of years, making it a sort of corner at the head of its great estuary, and later of its delta; then he might spend the day wondering at the flints and the way they were chipped, and getting into the minds of the men that made them. Then he should spend a day with bronze, and then a day with the Gaulish iron. After that, for as many weeks as he chose, let him study the stones which Greece and which Rome have still left in the public places of the city; the half of the frontal of the great temple built into his hotel; the amphitheatre upon which he suddenly comes as he wanders up a narrow modern street; the Arenæ. The Dark Ages, which have left so little in Europe, have here left massive towers in which the echoes of the fighting linger, and huge rough stones which the Dark Ages did not quarry but which they moved from the palaces of the Romans to their own fortresses, and which by their very presence so removed bring back to one the long generations in which Europe slept healthily and survived.

St. Trophime is all the Middle Ages. You may walk quietly round its cloister and see those ten generations of men, from the hugeness of the Crusades to the last delicacies of the fifteenth century. The capitals of the columns go in order, the very earliest touch on that archaic grotesque which underlies every civilisation, the latest in their exact realism and their refinement, prove the decline of a whole period of the soul. Lest Arles should take up too much of this short space, I would remind the reader only of this ironical and striking thing: that on its gates as you go out of the city northward, you may see sculptured in marble what the Revolution but--a century ago--took to be a primal truth common to all mankind. It concerns the sanctity of property. Consider that doctrine to-day!

But not Arles, though it is so particular an example, not Delft, not the old English seaports which so perfectly enshrine our past, not Coutances which everyone should know, alone explain what the Old Towns are, but rather a knowledge of them all together explains it.

The Old Towns are ourselves; they are mankind. In their contortion, in their ruined regularity, in their familiar oddities, and in their awful corners of darkness, in their piled experience of the soul which has soaked right into their stone and their brick and their lime, they are the caskets of man. Note how the trees that grow by licence from the crevices of their battlements are a sort of sacramental saving things, exceptional to the fixed lines about them, and note how the grass which grows between the setts of their paving stones comes up ashamedly and yet universally, as good memories do in the oldness of the human mind, and as purity does through the complexity of living.

Which reminds me: Once there was a band of men, foolish men, Bohemian men, indebted men, who went down to paint in a silly manner, and chose a town of this sort which looked to them very old and wonderful; and there they squatted for a late summer month and talked the detestable jargon of their trade. They talked of tones and of values and of the Square Touch, and Heaven knows what nonsense, the meanwhile daubing daub upon daub on to the canvas; praising Velasquez (which after all was right) and ridiculing the Royal Academy. They ridiculed the Royal Academy.