Part 3
We had been for two hours upon our horses, we who had started long after sunrise after our horses had been groomed and fed and watered, and treated like Christian men--for it was a saying of ours that the Republic was kinder to a horse than to a man, because a horse cost money. We had gone, I said, two hours also along the road, trotting and walking alternately, with the interminable clatter-clank-clank of the limber and the pieces behind us, and with the occasional oath of the sergeant or the corporal when a trace went loose or when a bit of bad riding on the part of some leader checked the column of guns; we had so pounded along into the heat of the day; the sun was beginning to offend us--we were more in a sweat than our horses--when we heard a long way off upon the road before us the faint noise of a song, and soon we saw from one of those recurring summits of the arrow-like French road, the jolly fellows of the Line. They were not more than a thousand yards before us; they made a little dust as they went, and as they went their rifles swinging on the shoulder gave them a false appearance of unity--for unity they were not caring at all. Somewhat before we reached them we saw their cohesion break, they became a doubled mob upon either side of the road, and we knew that they were making the regulation halt of five minutes, which is ordered at the end of every hour; but probably their commanding officer had somewhat advanced or retarded this in order to make a coincidence with the going by of the guns.
We saw them as we approached lying in all attitudes upon either side of the road, some few munching bread from the haversack, and some few drinking from their gourds. As we came up they were compelled to rise to salute another arm upon its passage, and their faces, all their double hedge of faces, were full of insolence and of merriment, for they had recently sung and eaten, and the march had done them good--they had covered about eighteen miles.
So we went by, and when we had left them some few hundred yards we again heard faintly behind us the beginning of a new song, the tune of which was known among us as “The Washerwoman.” It is a good marching song. But shortly after this we heard no more, for first the noise of the horse hoofs extinguished the singing, and later distance swallowed it up altogether.
* * * * *
We had come into quarters early in the afternoon, we had groomed our horses and fed them, and watered them at the chalkiest stream, we had brought them back to their stables, and the stable guard was set; those who were not on duty went off about the village, and several, of whom I was one, gathered in the house of a man whose relative in the regiment had led us thither.
He received us well, for he was a farmer in a large way; he gave us wine, bread, and eggs, and a little bacon. He said he hoped that no more troops would come into the little village that day. We told him that the Line would come, so far as we knew, but he answered that he had heard from his brother, who was mayor of the adjoining commune, that the Line were to be quartered in that neighbouring parish, that they would march through the village in which we were, and sleep in the houses about a mile ahead of us upon the road to Rheims.
While he was speaking thus we heard again, but much louder than before (for it came upon us round the corner of the village street), the noise of a marching song. They were singing at the top of their voices--they were in a sort of fury of singing.
They passed along making more dust than ever before, and anyone who had not known them would have said they were out of hand. Several were limping as they went, one or two, recognising the gunners and the drivers, waved their hands. The rest still sang. No one had fallen out. Their arms they carried anyhow, and more than one man was carrying two rifles (probably for money), and more than one man was carrying none, and some had their rifles slung across their backs, and some tucked under their arms. So they went forward, and again we heard their singing dwindle, but this time it continued much longer than before, and I think we heard it up to the halt, when their task was accomplished and the march was done.
They are an incredible people!
On Saturnalia
One of the bothers of writing is that words carry about upon their backs nowadays a great pack of past meanings and derivations, and that--particularly to-day--no word is standing still as it were and meaning something once and for all which a plain man can say without being laughed at for ignorance or for affectation. For instance, Saturnalia. To one man it means a certain bundle of ritual many centuries dead, common to a particular district of Italy and practised in midwinter. To another man it means a lot of poor people having an exaggerated beanfeast and thereby annoying the rich people. But it does not mean either of these things to the plain man. It means to the plain man occasion and specific occasion for turning things upside down and getting breathing space for a while from the crushing order of this world. That is what “Saturnalia” means to the ordinary user of the word, and note, he has no other word by which to express the idea--so thoroughly has the thing died out since modern English was formed. I suppose the nearest word for it in English--when such feasts were still known in England--was the vague word “Misrule.” Anyhow, it is Saturnalia now, and Saturnalia it shall be here.
If a man were to come back from the past and watch the modern world into which he had tumbled he would note any number of things that would, I am certain, intoxicate him with wonder and delight. Just as one is intoxicated with wonder and delight on landing in youth upon the quays of a foreign port for the first time--that is, if the foreign port is well governed, for there is no wonder or delight either in barbarism or in decay. Such a man would be perpetually running to telephones, those curious toys, and marvelling at cinematographs and rejoicing in express trains and clear print and big guns and phonographs; he couldn’t help it. Motor-cars moving by themselves would fill him with magic--but he would bitterly mislike certain absences, and he would complain that half a dozen things were very wrong with the world. So many men free and yet owning nothing--so much the greater part of men free and yet owning nothing--would seem to him a monstrous and perilous thing. The exact and mechanical accuracy that clocks and railways have made would offend him; he would see it as a disease wearing out men’s nerves. The modern arguments all in a circle round and round the old insoluble problems would bore him dreadfully, and still more perhaps the fresh discoveries every week of principles and plain truths as old as the Mediterranean--but nothing surely would astonish him or grieve him or frighten him more than the absence of topsy-turvydom without some recurrent breath of which the soul of man perishes.
And why? There is a question you may ask some time before it will be answered. One thing is sure, though the sureness of it reposes on some base we cannot see: in the proportion that men are secure of their philosophy and social scheme, in that proportion they must in some fixed manner turn it upside down from time to time for their delight and show it on a stage or enact it in a religious ritual with all its rules reversed and the whole thing wrong way about. They have always done this in healthy States, and if ever our State gets healthy they will begin to do it again. It is a human craving, an intense craving--but why, it would be a business to say.
It must not be imagined that the craving or the expression of it has passed from us to-day. They have no more passed from us than the desire for property or for the tilling of the land. But their corporate character is broken up, they appear sporadically in individuals only, and are therefore often evil. They appear in the irony which is an increasing feature of our letters, in mad freaks and outbreaks for which men strained beyond bearing are punished, and they appear in fantastic prophecies of a changed world.
One sees that craving for a burst of misrule in quite unexpected enthusiasms for things remote from our lives, in great senseless mobs furious about minor things--the minor actions of a campaign or the minor details of law-making--in the public clamour about the misfortunes of some foreign prisoner or the politics of some alien State. One sees it in the men who suddenly start rules of life based on some careful negation of what all around them do, in the leaders and teachers who first note exactly what nearly all their fellow-beings eat or drink or wear, and then most loudly proclaim salvation to lie in _not_ eating, drinking, or wearing these obviously necessary things. The neighbours stare! And no wonder--for private Saturnalia are dangerously near to vice in the sane, in the weak to insanity.
But true Saturnalia, public Saturnalia, were healthy because they were corporate. Custom and religion had dug a sort of channel into which all that emotion could commonly run, and in midwinter, when it had long been very dark, the mischiefs, the comic spirits came out of the woods and for some days possessed the souls of men, and these, by that possession, were purged and freed. So it was for hundreds upon hundreds of years--until quite the modern time. Why have we lost it, and how long must we wait for it to return?
When the relations of slave and master seemed as obvious and necessary as seem to us (let us say) the reading of a daily paper or the taking of a train, yet the obvious and necessary routine was broken in midwinter, the slave was the master for a moment and the master a slave.
When the ritual of the Church was as much a commonplace as the ritual of social life is to us to-day, there was a season (it was this season between Christmas and the Epiphany) when the dead weight of order was lifted and a boy was dressed as a bishop or a donkey was put to chaunt the office, and the people sang:--
Plebs autem respondet: Hé sire Ane, ho! Chantez! Vous aurez du foin assez Et de l’avoine à manger!
When the awful authority of civil and hereditary powers was unquestioned they yet set up in English halls Lords of Misrule who governed that season. The Inns of Court, I believe, delighted in them, and certainly till quite late in the seventeenth century the peasantry of the villages.
It has gone. It will return. During its absence (and may that absence not be much prolonged) perhaps one can see its nature the more clearly because one sees it from the outside and as a distant though a desired thing. Perhaps we, living in a very unreasonable age, when realities are forgotten and imaginaries preferred, when we solemnly reiterate impossibilities, affirm our faith in scientific guesswork and our doubts upon the plain rules of arithmetic, can understand why our much more reasonable fathers thirsted for and obtained these feasts of unreason. It seems to have been a little like the natural craving for temporary oblivion (sleep--a chaos) once in every day; a sort of bath in that muddle or nothingness out of which the world was made. Equality, which lies at the base of society, was brought to surface by a paradox and shown at large. Intensity of conviction and of organisation took refuge in the relief of a momentary--and not meant--denial of that conviction and organisation, and the whole of society collectively expanded its soul by one collective foolery at high pressure, as does the healthy individual by one good farce or peal of laughter when occasion serves.
How the Saturnalia will return (as return they will) no one can say. The seeds of reaction from the tangle of the modern world lie all around in the customs and the demands of the populace: but seeds are never known or perceived till they have sprouted. Sometimes one catches the echo of the return in a chance jest; especially if it be a cabman’s. Sometimes in a solemn hoax largely indulged in by many poor men against one richer than themselves. Sometimes in the voluntary humour and cynical goodness of heart of a powerful or wealthy man exposing the illusions of his kind.
Anyhow, one way or another, sooner or later, the Saturnalia will return; may it be sooner rather than later, and at the latest not later than 1938, when so many of us will be so very old.
For my part I shall look for the first signs in the provinces of rich and riotous blood as on the Border (and especially just north of it) or in Flanders, or, better still, in Burgundy from Nuits and Beaune northward and eastward. I have especially great hopes of the town of Dijon.
A Little Conversation in Herefordshire
There is a country house (as the English phrase goes) in the County of Hereford, at a little distance from the River Wye; the people who live in this house are very rich. They are not rich precariously, nor with doubts here and there, nor for the time, but in a solid manner; that is, they believe their riches to be eternal. Their income springs from very many places, of which they have not an idea; it is spent in a straightforward manner, which they fully comprehend. It is spent in relieving the incompetence--the economic incompetence--of all those about them; in causing wine to come into England from Ay, Vosne, Barsac, and (though they do not know it) from the rougher soil of Algiers. It also causes (does the way in which they exercise what only pedants call their Potential Demand) tea to be grown in Ceylon for their servants and in China for themselves, horses to be bred in Ireland, and wheat to be sown and most laboriously garnered in Western Canada, Ohio, India, South Russia, the Argentine, and other places. Also, were you to seek out every economic cause and effect, you would find missionaries living where no man can live, save by artifice, and living upon artificial supply in a strange climate by the strength of this Potential Demand rooted in the meadows of the Welsh March.
Then, also, if you were to follow the places whence their wealth is derived, it would interest you very much. You would see one man earning so much in the docks and handing on a Saturday evening so much of his wages into their fund. You would see another clipping off cloth in Manchester and offering it to them, and another plucking cotton in Egypt and exchanging it, at their order, against something which they, not he, needed. Altogether you would see the whole world paying tithe, and a stream flowing into Hereford as into a reservoir, and a stream flowing out again by many channels.
These good people were at dinner; upon the 5th of October, to be accurate. Parliament had not yet met, but football had begun, and there was shooting, also a little riding upon horses, though this is not to-day a popular amusement, and few will practise it. As for the women, one wrote and the other read--which was a fair division of labour; but the woman who wrote was not read by the woman who read, for the woman who wrote (and she was the daughter) preferred to write upon problems. But her mother, who did the reading, preferred what is called fiction, and Mr. Meredith was a favourite author of hers; but, indeed, she would read all fiction so only that it was in her native tongue.
Now the men of the family were very different from this, and the things they liked were hunting of a particular kind (which I shall not here describe), shooting of a similar kind, their country, and politics, which last interest it would have been abominable to deny them, for the two men, both father and son, were actively engaged in the making of laws, each in a different place; the laws they made (it is true in the company of, and with the advice of, others) are to be found in what is called the Statute Book, which neither you nor I have ever seen.
All these four, the father, the son, the mother, and the daughter, in different ways intelligent, but all four very kind and good, were at dinner upon this day of which I speak, the 5th of October, but they were not alone. They had to meet them several people who were staying in the house. The one was a satirist who had been born in Lithuania. He was poor and proud and had learnt the English tongue, and he wrote books upon the pride of race and upon battling with the sea. He was an envious sort of man, but as he never had nor ever would have any home or lineage, England was much the same to him as any other place. He hated all our nations with an equal hatred.
Another guest was a little man called Copp. He was a lord; his title was not Copp. Only his name was Copp, and even this name he hid, for old father Copp, who had married a Miss Billings in the eighteenth century, had had a son John Billings, since the Billings were richer than the Copps. And John Billings had married Mary Steyning, who was the Squire’s daughter, and they had had a son John Steyning, since John was by this time the hereditary name. Now John Steyning was in the Parliament that worked for the Regent, and a short one it was, and he became plain Lord Steyning, and then he and his son and his grandson married in all sorts of ways, and the title now was Bramber, but the family name was Steyning, and the real name was Copp. So much for Copp. He was as lively as a grig, he had travelled everywhere, and he knew about ten languages. He was peculiarly brave, and as a boy he had stoutly refused to go to the University.
Then also there was the Doctor, who was absurdly nervous and could ill afford to dine out, and there was a young man who was in Parliament with the son of the family; this young man had been to Oxford with him also, not at Cambridge; he was a lawyer, and he was making three thousand pounds a year, but he said he was making six when he talked to his wife and mother, and most serious men believed that he was making ten. The women of these were also present with them, saving always that Copp, who was called Steyning, and whose title was Bramber, was not married.
These then, sitting round the table, came to talk of something after all not remote from the interest of their lives. They talked of Socialists, and it all began by Copp (who called himself Steyning, while his title was Bramber) saying that his uncle Gwilliam had just missed being a Socialist because he was too stupid.
The Head of the Family, who had most imperfectly caught the pronouncement of Copp as to his relative, said, “Yes, Bramber; got to be pretty stupid to be that!” By which the Head of the House meant that one had to be pretty stupid to be a Socialist, whereas what Copp had said was that his uncle had been too stupid to be a Socialist. But it was all one.
The Son of the House said that there were lots of Socialists going about, and the young lawyer friend said there were a lot of people who said they were Socialists but who were not Socialists.
The Daughter of the House said that it was very interesting the way in which Socialism went up and down. She said: “Look at the Fabians!” The Mother of the House looked all round, smiling genially, for she thought that her daughter was speaking of the name of a book.
The Doctor said: “It’s all a pose, those sort of people.” But which sort he did not say, so the Daughter of the House said sharply: “Which sort of people?” For she loved to cross-examine struggling professional men, and the Doctor got quite red, and said; “Oh, all that sort of people!”
The young lawyer, who was quick to see a difficulty, helped him out by saying, “He means people like Bensington!”
The Doctor, who had never heard of Bensington, nodded eagerly, and the Head of the House, frowning a healthy frown, said, “What, not John Bensington, old William Bensington’s son?”
“Yes,” said the young lawyer. “That’s the kind of man he means,” and the Doctor nodded again.
His enemy was dropping farther and farther behind him with every stride, but she made a brilliant rally. “Do you mean John Bensington?” she said. The Doctor, in some alarm, and with his mouth full, nodded vigorously for the third time. The Head of the House, still frowning, broke into all this with a solid roar: “I don’t believe a word of it.” He sat leaning back again, not relaxing his frown and trying to connect the son of his old friend with a gang of treasonable robbers. He remembered Jock’s marriage--for it was a bad one--and a silly book of verses he had written, and how keen he had been against his father’s selling the bit of land along the coast, because it was bound to go up. He could fit Jock in with many unpleasant things, but he couldn’t fit him in with the very definite picture that rose in his mind whenever he heard the word “Socialist.” There was something adventurous and violent and lean about the word--something like a wolf. There was nothing of all that in Jock. So much thought matured at last into living words, and the Head of the House said, “Why, he’s on the County Council.”
The Daughter of the House turned to the lawyer and said, “How would you define a Socialist, Mr. Layton?”
Mr. Layton defined a Socialist, and his silent wife, who was sitting opposite, looked at him happily on account of the power of his mind. The Lithuanian, who had said nothing all this while, but had been glancing with eyes as bright as a bird’s, now at one speaker, now at another, nerved himself to intervene. Then there passed over his little soul the vivid pictures of things he had seen and known: the dens in Riga, the pain, the flight upon a Danish ship, the assumption first of German, then of English nationality, the easy gullibility of the large-hearted wealthy people of this land. He remembered his own confidence, his own unwavering talent, and his contempt of, and hatred for, other men. He could have trusted himself to speak, for he was in full command of his little soul, and there was not a trace of anything in his accent definitely foreign. But the virtue and the folly of these happy luxurious people about him pleased him too much and pleased him wickedly.
He went on tasting them in silence, until the Daughter of the House, who felt awe for him alone of all those present--much more awe than she did for her strong and good father--said to him, almost with reverence, that he should take to writing now of the meadows of England, since he had so wonderfully described her battles at sea. And the Lithuanian was ready to turn the talk upon letters, his bright eyes darting all the while. The old man, the Head of the House, sighed and muttered: “Jock was no Socialist.” That was the one thing that he retained; ... and meanwhile wealth continued to pour in from all corners of the world into his house, and to pour out again over the four seas, doing his will, and no one in the world, not even the chief victims of that wealth, hated it as the little Lithuanian did, and no one in the world--not even of them who had seen most of that wealth--hungered bestially for it as did he.
On the Rights of Property
There is in the dark heart of Soho, not far from a large stable where Zebras, Elephants, and trained Ponies await their turn for the footlights and the inebriation of public applause, a little tavern, divided, as are even the meanest of our taverns, into numerous compartments, each corresponding to some grade in the hierarchy of our ancient and orderly society.