CHESTERTON-ALARM AND SIDISCUTIO - Ethandune
Perhaps you do not know where Ethandune is. Nor do I; nor does anybody.
That is where the somewhat sombre fun begins. I cannot even tell you
for certain whether it is the name of a forest or a town or a hill.
I can only say that in any case it is of the kind that floats
and is unfixed. If it is a forest, it is one of those forests
that march with a million legs, like the walking trees that were
the doom of Macbeth. If it is a town, it is one of those towns
that vanish, like a city of tents. If it is a hill, it is
a flying hill, like the mountain to which faith lends wings.
Over a vast dim region of England this dark name of Ethandune floats
like an eagle doubtful where to swoop and strike, and, indeed,
there were birds of prey enough over Ethandune, wherever it was.
But now Ethandune itself has grown as dark and drifting as the black
drifts of the birds.
And yet without this word that you cannot fit with a meaning
and hardly with a memory, you would be sitting in a very different
chair at this moment and looking at a very different tablecloth.
As a practical modern phrase I do not commend it; if my private
critics and correspondents in whom I delight should happen to
address me "G. K. Chesterton, Poste Restante, Ethandune," I fear
their letters would not come to hand. If two hurried commercial
travellers should agree to discuss a business matter at Ethandune
from 5 to 5.15, I am afraid they would grow old in the district
as white-haired wanderers. To put it plainly, Ethandune is anywhere
and nowhere in the western hills; it is an English mirage.
And yet but for this doubtful thing you would have probably
no Daily News on Saturday and certainly no church on Sunday.
I do not say that either of these two things is a benefit;
but I do say that they are customs, and that you would not possess
them except through this mystery. You would not have Christmas
puddings, nor (probably) any puddings; you would not have Easter eggs,
probably not poached eggs, I strongly suspect not scrambled eggs,
and the best historians are decidedly doubtful about curried eggs.
To cut a long story short (the longest of all stories), you would
not have any civilization, far less any Christian civilization.
And if in some moment of gentle curiosity you wish to know why you
are the polished sparkling, rounded, and wholly satisfactory citizen
which you obviously are, then I can give you no more definite answer
geographical or historical; but only toll in your ears the tone
of the uncaptured name--Ethandune.
I will try to state quite sensibly why it is as important as it is.
And yet even that is not easy. If I were to state the mere fact
from the history books, numbers of people would think it equally
trivial and remote, like some war of the Picts and Scots.
The points perhaps might be put in this way. There is a
certain spirit in the world which breaks everything off short.
There may be magnificence in the smashing; but the thing is
smashed. There may be a certain splendour; but the splendour
is sterile: it abolishes all future splendours. I mean (to take a
working example), York Minster covered with flames might happen
to be quite as beautiful as York Minster covered with carvings.
But the carvings produce more carvings. The flames produce nothing
but a little black heap. When any act has this cul-de-sac quality it
matters little whether it is done by a book or a sword, by a clumsy
battle-axe or a chemical bomb. The case is the same with ideas.
The pessimist may be a proud figure when he curses all the stars;
the optimist may be an even prouder figure when he blesses them all.
But the real test is not in the energy, but in the effect.
When the optimist has said, "All things are interesting," we are
left free; we can be interested as much or as little as we please.
But when the pessimist says, "No things are interesting,"
it may be a very witty remark: but it is the last witty remark
that can be made on the subject. He has burnt his cathedral;
he has had his blaze and the rest is ashes. The sceptics, like bees,
give their one sting and die. The pessimist must be wrong,
because he says the last word.
Now, this spirit that denies and that destroys had at one
period of history a dreadful epoch of military superiority.
They did burn York Minster, or at least, places of the same kind.
Roughly speaking, from the seventh century to the tenth, a dense tide
of darkness, of chaos and brainless cruelty, poured on these islands
and on the western coasts of the Continent, which well-nigh cut them
off from all the white man's culture for ever. And this is the final
human test; that the varied chiefs of that vague age were remembered
or forgotten according to how they had resisted this almost cosmic raid.
Nobody thought of the modern nonsense about races; everybody thought
of the human race and its highest achievements. Arthur was a Celt,
and may have been a fabulous Celt; but he was a fable on the right side.
Charlemagne may have been a Gaul or a Goth, but he was not a barbarian;
he fought for the tradition against the barbarians, the nihilists.
And for this reason also, for this reason, in the last resort, only,
we call the saddest and in some ways the least successful of the Wessex
kings by the title of Alfred the Great. Alfred was defeated
by the barbarians again and again, he defeated the barbarians again
and again; but his victories were almost as vain as his defeats.
Fortunately he did not believe in the Time Spirit or the Trend of
Things or any such modern rubbish, and therefore kept pegging away.
But while his failures and his fruitless successes have names still in use
(such as Wilton, Basing, and Ashdown), that last epic battle which really
broke the barbarian has remained without a modern place or name.
Except that it was near Chippenham, where the Danes gave up their
swords and were baptized, no one can pick out certainly the place
where you and I were saved from being savages for ever.
But the other day under a wild sunset and moonrise I passed the place
which is best reputed as Ethandune, a high, grim upland, partly bare
and partly shaggy; like that savage and sacred spot in those great
imaginative lines about the demon lover and the waning moon.
The darkness, the red wreck of sunset, the yellow and lurid moon,
the long fantastic shadows, actually created that sense of
monstrous incident which is the dramatic side of landscape.
The bare grey slopes seemed to rush downhill like routed hosts;
the dark clouds drove across like riven banners; and the moon was
like a golden dragon, like the Golden Dragon of Wessex.
As we crossed a tilt of the torn heath I saw suddenly between
myself and the moon a black shapeless pile higher than a house.
The atmosphere was so intense that I really thought of a pile
of dead Danes, with some phantom conqueror on the top of it.
Fortunately I was crossing these wastes with a friend who knew
more history than I; and he told me that this was a barrow older
than Alfred, older than the Romans, older perhaps than the Britons;
and no man knew whether it was a wall or a trophy or a tomb.
Ethandune is still a drifting name; but it gave me a queer emotion
to think that, sword in hand, as the Danes poured with the torrents
of their blood down to Chippenham, the great king may have lifted up
his head and looked at that oppressive shape, suggestive of something
and yet suggestive of nothing; may have looked at it as we did,
and understood it as little as we.
Some time ago a Sub-Tropical Dinner was given by some
South African millionaire. I forget his name; and so, very likely,
does he. The humour of this was so subtle and haunting that it has
been imitated by another millionaire, who has given a North Pole Dinner
in a grand hotel, on which he managed to spend gigantic sums of money.
I do not know how he did it; perhaps they had silver for snow
and great sapphires for lumps of ice. Anyhow, it seems to have
cost rather more to bring the Pole to London than to take Peary
to the Pole. All this, one would say, does not concern us.
We do not want to go to the Pole--or to the hotel. I, for one,
cannot imagine which would be the more dreary and disgusting--
the real North Pole or the sham one. But as a mere matter of psychology
(that merry pastime) there is a question that is not unentertaining.
Why is it that all this scheme of ice and snow leaves us cold?
Why is it that you and I feel that we would (on the whole)
rather spend the evening with two or three stable boys in a pot-house
than take part in that pallid and Arctic joke? Why does the modern
millionaire's jest--bore a man to death with the mere thought of it?
That it does bore a man to death I take for granted, and shall do
so until somebody writes to me in cold ink and tells me that he really
thinks it funny.
Now, it is not a sufficient explanation to say that the joke
is silly. All jokes are silly; that is what they are for.
If you ask some sincere and elemental person, a woman, for instance,
what she thinks of a good sentence from Dickens, she will say
that it is "too silly." When Mr. Weller, senior, assured
Mr. Weller, junior, that "circumvented" was "a more tenderer word"
than "circumscribed," the remark was at least as silly as it
was sublime. It is vain, then, to object to "senseless jokes."
The very definition of a joke is that it need have no sense; except that
one wild and supernatural sense which we call the sense of humour.
Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is,
to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.
It is meant to remind us human beings that we have things about us
as ungainly and ludicrous as the nose of the elephant or the neck
of the giraffe. If laughter does not touch a sort of fundamental folly,
it does not do its duty in bringing us back to an enormous
and original simplicity. Nothing has been worse than the modern
notion that a clever man can make a joke without taking part in it;
without sharing in the general absurdity that such a situation creates.
It is unpardonable conceit not to laugh at your own jokes.
Joking is undignified; that is why it is so good for one's soul.
Do not fancy you can be a detached wit and avoid being a buffoon;
you cannot. If you are the Court Jester you must be the Court Fool.
Whatever it is, therefore, that wearies us in these wealthy jokes
(like the North Pole Dinner) it is not merely that men make fools
of themselves. When Dickens described Mr. Chuckster, Dickens was,
strictly speaking, making a fool of himself; for he was making
a fool out of himself. And every kind of real lark, from acting
a charade to making a pun, does consist in restraining one's nine
hundred and ninety-nine serious selves and letting the fool loose.
The dullness of the millionaire joke is much deeper. It is not
silly at all; it is solely stupid. It does not consist of
ingenuity limited, but merely of inanity expanded. There is
considerable difference between a wit making a fool of himself
and a fool making a wit of himself.
The true explanation, I fancy, may be stated thus. We can all remember it
in the case of the really inspiriting parties and fooleries of our youth.
The only real fun is to have limited materials and a good idea.
This explains the perennial popularity of impromptu private theatricals.
These fascinate because they give such a scope for invention
and variety with the most domestic restriction of machinery.
A tea-cosy may have to do for an Admiral's cocked hat; it all
depends on whether the amateur actor can swear like an Admiral.
A hearth-rug may have to do for a bear's fur; it all depends on
whether the wearer is a polished and versatile man of the world
and can grunt like a bear. A clergyman's hat (to my own private
and certain knowledge) can be punched and thumped into the exact
shape of a policeman's helmet; it all depends on the clergyman.
I mean it depends on his permission; his imprimatur; his nihil obstat.
Clergymen can be policemen; rugs can rage like wild animals;
tea-cosies can smell of the sea; if only there is at the back
of them all one bright and amusing idea. What is really funny
about Christmas charades in any average home is that there is
a contrast between commonplace resources and one comic idea.
What is deadly dull about the millionaire-banquets is that there
is a contrast between colossal resources and no idea.
That is the abyss of inanity in such feasts--it may be literally
called a yawning abyss. The abyss is the vast chasm between
the money power employed and the thing it is employed on.
To make a big joke out of a broomstick, a barrow and an old hat--
that is great. But to make a small joke out of mountains
of emeralds and tons of gold--surely that is humiliating!
The North Pole is not a very good joke to start with. An icicle
hanging on one's nose is a simple sort of humour in any case.
If a set of spontaneous mummers got the effect cleverly with cut
crystals from the early Victorian chandelier there might really be
something suddenly funny in it. But what should we say of hanging
diamonds on a hundred human noses merely to make that precious
joke about icicles?
What can be more abject than the union of elaborate and recherche
arrangements with an old and obvious point? The clown with the red-hot
poker and the string of sausages is all very well in his way.
But think of a string of pate de foie gras sausages at a guinea
a piece! Think of a red-hot poker cut out of a single ruby!
Imagine such fantasticalities of expense with such a tameness
and staleness of design.
We may even admit the practical joke if it is domestic and simple.
We may concede that apple-pie beds and butter-slides are sometimes
useful things for the education of pompous persons living
the Higher Life. But imagine a man making a butter-slide and
telling everybody it was made with the most expensive butter.
Picture an apple-pie bed of purple and cloth of gold. It is
not hard to see that such schemes would lead simultaneously
to a double boredom; weariness of the costly and complex method
and of the meagre and trivial thought. This is the true analysis,
I think of that chill of tedium that strikes to the soul of any
intelligent man when he hears of such elephantine pranks.
That is why we feel that Freak Dinners would not even be freakish.
That is why we feel that expensive Arctic feasts would probably
be a frost.
If it be said that such things do no harm, I hasten, in one sense,
at least, to agree. Far from it; they do good. They do good
in the most vital matter of modern times; for they prove and print
in huge letters the truth which our society must learn or perish.
They prove that wealth in society as now constituted does
not tend to get into the hands of the thrifty or the capable,
but actually tends to get into the hands of wastrels and imbeciles.
And it proves that the wealthy class of to-day is quite as ignorant
about how to enjoy itself as about how to rule other people.
That it cannot make its government govern or its education educate we
may take as a trifling weakness of oligarchy; but pleasure we do look
to see in such a class; and it has surely come to its decrepitude
when it cannot make its pleasures please.
One sometimes hears from persons of the chillier type of culture
the remark that plain country people do not appreciate the beauty
of the country. This is an error rooted in the intellectual pride
of mediocrity; and is one of the many examples of a truth in the idea
that extremes meet. Thus, to appreciate the virtues of the mob
one must either be on a level with it (as I am) or be really
high up, like the saints. It is roughly the same with aesthetics;
slang and rude dialect can be relished by a really literary taste,
but not by a merely bookish taste. And when these cultivated cranks
say that rustics do not talk of Nature in an appreciative way,
they really mean that they do not talk in a bookish way.
They do not talk bookishly about clouds or stones, or pigs or slugs,
or horses or anything you please. They talk piggishly about pigs;
and sluggishly, I suppose, about slugs; and are refreshingly horsy
about horses. They speak in a stony way of stones; they speak
in a cloudy way of clouds; and this is surely the right way.
And if by any chance a simple intelligent person from the country
comes in contact with any aspect of Nature unfamiliar and arresting,
such a person's comment is always worth remark. It is sometimes
an epigram, and at worst it is never a quotation.
Consider, for instance, what wastes of wordy imitation and ambiguity
the ordinary educated person in the big towns could pour out on the
subject of the sea. A country girl I know in the county of Buckingham
had never seen the sea in her life until the other day. When she
was asked what she thought of it she said it was like cauliflowers.
Now that is a piece of pure literature--vivid, entirely independent
and original, and perfectly true. I had always been haunted with
an analogous kinship which I could never locate; cabbages always
remind me of the sea and the sea always reminds me of cabbages.
It is partly, perhaps, the veined mingling of violet and green,
as in the sea a purple that is almost dark red may mix with a green
that is almost yellow, and still be the blue sea as a whole.
But it is more the grand curves of the cabbage that curl over
cavernously like waves, and it is partly again that dreamy repetition,
as of a pattern, that made two great poets, Eschylus and Shakespeare,
use a word like "multitudinous" of the ocean. But just where my
fancy halted the Buckinghamshire young woman rushed (so to speak)
to my imaginative rescue. Cauliflowers are twenty times better
than cabbages, for they show the wave breaking as well as curling,
and the efflorescence of the branching foam, blind bubbling,
and opaque. Moreover, the strong lines of life are suggested;
the arches of the rushing waves have all the rigid energy of green stalks,
as if the whole sea were one great green plant with one immense
white flower rooted in the abyss.
Now, a large number of delicate and superior persons would refuse
to see the force in that kitchen garden comparison, because it is not
connected with any of the ordinary maritime sentiments as stated in books
and songs. The aesthetic amateur would say that he knew what large
and philosophical thoughts he ought to have by the boundless deep.
He would say that he was not a greengrocer who would think first
of greens. To which I should reply, like Hamlet, apropos of
a parallel profession, "I would you were so honest a man."
The mention of "Hamlet" reminds me, by the way, that besides
the girl who had never seen the sea, I knew a girl who had never
seen a stage-play. She was taken to "Hamlet," and she said it
was very sad. There is another case of going to the primordial
point which is overlaid by learning and secondary impressions.
We are so used to thinking of "Hamlet" as a problem that we
sometimes quite forget that it is a tragedy, just as we are so used
to thinking of the sea as vast and vague, that we scarcely notice
when it is white and green.
But there is another quarrel involved in which the young gentleman
of culture comes into violent collision with the young lady of
the cauliflowers. The first essential of the merely bookish view
of the sea is that it is boundless, and gives a sentiment of infinity.
Now it is quite certain, I think, that the cauliflower simile
was partly created by exactly the opposite impression, the
impression of boundary and of barrier. The girl thought of
it as a field of vegetables, even as a yard of vegetables.
The girl was right. The ocean only suggests infinity when you
cannot see it; a sea mist may seem endless, but not a sea.
So far from being vague and vanishing, the sea is the one
hard straight line in Nature. It is the one plain limit;
the only thing that God has made that really looks like a wall.
Compared to the sea, not only sun and cloud are chaotic and doubtful,
but solid mountains and standing forests may be said to melt
and fade and flee in the presence of that lonely iron line.
The old naval phrase, that the seas are England's bulwarks,
is not a frigid and artificial metaphor; it came into the head
of some genuine sea-dog, when he was genuinely looking at
the sea. For the edge of the sea is like the edge of a sword;
it is sharp, military, and decisive; it really looks like a bolt
or bar, and not like a mere expansion. It hangs in heaven, grey,
or green, or blue, changing in colour, but changeless in form,
behind all the slippery contours of the land and all the savage
softness of the forests, like the scales of God held even.
It hangs, a perpetual reminder of that divine reason and justice
which abides behind all compromises and all legitimate variety;
the one straight line; the limit of the intellect; the dark and
ultimate dogma of the world.
"Sentimentalism is the most broken reed on which righteousness can lean";
these were, I think, the exact words of a distinguished American visitor
at the Guildhall, and may Heaven forgive me if I do him a wrong.
It was spoken in illustration of the folly of supporting Egyptian
and other Oriental nationalism, and it has tempted me to some
reflections on the first word of the sentence.
The Sentimentalist, roughly speaking, is the man who wants to eat
his cake and have it. He has no sense of honour about ideas;
he will not see that one must pay for an idea as for anything else.
He will not see that any worthy idea, like any honest woman, can only
be won on its own terms, and with its logical chain of loyalty.
One idea attracts him; another idea really inspires him;
a third idea flatters him; a fourth idea pays him. He will
have them all at once in one wild intellectual harem, no
matter how much they quarrel and contradict each other. The
Sentimentalist is a philosophic profligate, who tries to capture
every mental beauty without reference to its rival beauties;
who will not even be off with the old love before he is on with the new.
Thus if a man were to say, "I love this woman, but I may some day
find my affinity in some other woman," he would be a Sentimentalist.
He would be saying, "I will eat my wedding-cake and keep it."
Or if a man should say, "I am a Republican, believing in
the equality of citizens; but when the Government has given
me my peerage I can do infinite good as a kind landlord and a
wise legislator"; then that man would be a Sentimentalist.
He would be trying to keep at the same time the classic austerity
of equality and also the vulgar excitement of an aristocrat.
Or if a man should say, "I am in favour of religious equality;
but I must preserve the Protestant Succession," he would be a
Sentimentalist of a grosser and more improbable kind.
This is the essence of the Sentimentalist: that he seeks to enjoy every
idea without its sequence, and every pleasure without its consequence.
Now it would really be hard to find a worse case of this inconsequent
sentimentalism than the theory of the British Empire advanced
by Mr. Roosevelt himself in his attack on Sentimentalists.
For the Imperial theory, the Roosevelt and Kipling theory, of our
relation to Eastern races is simply one of eating the Oriental cake
(I suppose a Sultana Cake) and at the same time leaving it alone.
Now there are two sane attitudes of a European statesman towards
Eastern peoples, and there are only two.
First, he may simply say that the less we have to do with them
the better; that whether they are lower than us or higher they
are so catastrophically different that the more we go our way
and they go theirs the better for all parties concerned.
I will confess to some tenderness for this view. There is much
to be said for letting that calm immemorial life of slave
and sultan, temple and palm tree flow on as it has always flowed.
The best reason of all, the reason that affects me most finally,
is that if we left the rest of the world alone we might have
some time for attending to our own affairs, which are urgent
to the point of excruciation. All history points to this;
that intensive cultivation in the long run triumphs over the widest
extensive cultivation; or, in other words, that making one's own
field superior is far more effective than reducing other people's
fields to inferiority. If you cultivate your own garden and grow
a specially large cabbage, people will probably come to see it.
Whereas the life of one selling small cabbages round the whole
district is often forlorn,
Now, the Imperial Pioneer is essentially a commercial traveller;
and a commercial traveller is essentially a person who goes to see
people because they don't want to see him. As long as empires go
about urging their ideas on others, I always have a notion that the
ideas are no good. If they were really so splendid, they would make
the country preaching them a wonder of the world. That is the
true ideal; a great nation ought not to be a hammer, but a magnet.
Men went to the mediaeval Sorbonne because it was worth going to.
Men went to old Japan because only there could they find the unique
and exquisite old Japanese art. Nobody will ever go to modern Japan
(nobody worth bothering about, I mean), because modern Japan
has made the huge mistake of going to the other people:
becoming a common empire. The mountain has condescended to Mahomet;
and henceforth Mahomet will whistle for it when he wants it.
That is my political theory: that we should make England worth
copying instead of telling everybody to copy her.
But it is not the only possible theory. There is another view of our
relations to such places as Egypt and India which is entirely tenable.
It may be said, "We Europeans are the heirs of the Roman Empire;
when all is said we have the largest freedom, the most exact science,
the most solid romance. We have a deep though undefined obligation
to give as we have received from God; because the tribes of men are
truly thirsting for these things as for water. All men really want
clear laws: we can give clear laws. All men really want hygiene:
we can give hygiene. We are not merely imposing Western ideas.
We are simply fulfilling human ideas--for the first time."
On this line, I think, it is possible to justify the forts of Africa
and the railroads of Asia; but on this line we must go much further.
If it is our duty to give our best, there can be no doubt about what is
our best. The greatest thing our Europe has made is the Citizen:
the idea of the average man, free and full of honour, voluntarily
invoking on his own sin the just vengeance of his city. All
else we have done is mere machinery for that: railways exist
only to carry the Citizen; forts only to defend him; electricity
only to light him, medicine only to heal him. Popularism, the
idea of the people alive and patiently feeding history, that
we cannot give; for it exists everywhere, East and West. But
democracy, the idea of the people fighting and governing--that
is the only thing we have to give.
Those are the two roads. But between them weakly wavers the
Sentimentalist--that is, the Imperialist of the Roosevelt school.
He wants to have it both ways, to have the splendours of success without
the perils. Europe may enslave Asia, because it is flattering:
but Europe must not free Asia, because that is responsible.
It tickles his Imperial taste that Hindoos should have European hats:
it is too dangerous if they have European heads. He cannot leave
Asia Asiatic: yet he dare not contemplate Asia as European.
Therefore he proposes to have in Egypt railway signals, but not flags;
despatch boxes, but not ballot boxes.
In short, the Sentimentalist decides to spread the body of Europe
without the soul.
It is within my experience, which is very brief and occasional
in this matter, that it is not really at all easy to talk
in a motor-car. This is fortunate; first, because, as a whole,
it prevents me from motoring; and second because, at any given moment,
it prevents me from talking. The difficulty is not wholly due to
the physical conditions, though these are distinctly unconversational.
FitzGerald's Omar, being a pessimist, was probably rich,
and being a lazy fellow, was almost certainly a motorist.
If any doubt could exist on the point, it is enough to say that,
in speaking of the foolish profits, Omar has defined the difficulties
of colloquial motoring with a precision which cannot be accidental.
"Their words to wind are scattered; and their mouths are stopped
with dust." From this follows not (as many of the cut-and-dried
philosophers would say) a savage silence and mutual hostility,
but rather one of those rich silences that make the mass and bulk
of all friendship; the silence of men rowing the same boat or fighting
in the same battle-line.
It happened that the other day I hired a motor-car, because I wanted
to visit in very rapid succession the battle-places and hiding-places
of Alfred the Great; and for a thing of this sort a motor is
really appropriate. It is not by any means the best way of seeing
the beauty of the country; you see beauty better by walking, and best
of all by sitting still. But it is a good method in any enterprise
that involves a parody of the military or governmental quality--
anything which needs to know quickly the whole contour of a county
or the rough, relative position of men and towns. On such a journey,
like jagged lightning, I sat from morning till night by the side
of the chauffeur; and we scarcely exchanged a word to the hour.
But by the time the yellow stars came out in the villages and
the white stars in the skies, I think I understood his character;
and I fear he understood mine.
He was a Cheshire man with a sour, patient, and humorous face;
he was modest, though a north countryman, and genial, though an expert.
He spoke (when he spoke at all) with a strong northland accent;
and he evidently was new to the beautiful south country,
as was clear both from his approval and his complaints.
But though he came from the north he was agricultural and not
commercial in origin; he looked at the land rather than the towns,
even if he looked at it with a somewhat more sharp and utilitarian eye.
His first remark for some hours was uttered when we were crossing
the more coarse and desolate heights of Salisbury Plain.
He remarked that he had always thought that Salisbury Plain was a plain.
This alone showed that he was new to the vicinity. But he also said,
with a critical frown, "A lot of this land ought to be good land enough.
Why don't they use it?" He was then silent for some more hours.
At an abrupt angle of the slopes that lead down from what is called
(with no little humour) Salisbury Plain, I saw suddenly, as by accident,
something I was looking for--that is, something I did not expect to see.
We are all supposed to be trying to walk into heaven; but we
should be uncommonly astonished if we suddenly walked into it.
As I was leaving Salisbury Plain (to put it roughly) I lifted up
my eyes and saw the White Horse of Britain.
One or two truly fine poets of the Tory and Protestant type,
such as Swinburne and Mr. Rudyard Kipling, have eulogized
England under the image of white horses, meaning the white-maned
breakers of the Channel. This is right and natural enough.
The true philosophical Tory goes back to ancient things because
he thinks they will be anarchic things. It would startle him very
much to be told that there are white horses of artifice in England
that may be older than those wild white horses of the elements.
Yet it is truly so. Nobody knows how old are those strange green
and white hieroglyphics, those straggling quadrupeds of chalk,
that stand out on the sides of so many of the Southern Downs.
They are possibly older than Saxon and older than Roman times.
They may well be older than British, older than any recorded times.
They may go back, for all we know, to the first faint seeds
of human life on this planet. Men may have picked a horse
out of the grass long before they scratched a horse on a vase
or pot, or messed and massed any horse out of clay. This may
be the oldest human art--before building or graving. And if
so, it may have first happened in another geological age, before
the sea burst through the narrow Straits of Dover. The White
Horse may have begun in Berkshire when there were no white
horses at Folkestone or Newhaven. That rude but evident white
outline that I saw across the valley may have been begun when Britain
was not an island. We forget that there are many places where art
is older than nature.
We took a long detour through somewhat easier roads, till we came
to a breach or chasm in the valley, from which we saw our friend
the White Horse once more. At least, we thought it was our friend
the White Horse; but after a little inquiry we discovered to our
astonishment that it was another friend and another horse.
Along the leaning flanks of the same fair valley there was (it seemed)
another white horse; as rude and as clean, as ancient and as modern,
as the first. This, at least, I thought must be the aboriginal
White Horse of Alfred, which I had always heard associated with his name.
And yet before we had driven into Wantage and seen King Alfred's
quaint grey statue in the sun, we had seen yet a third white horse.
And the third white horse was so hopelessly unlike a horse that we were
sure that it was genuine. The final and original white horse, the white
horse of the White Horse Vale, has that big, babyish quality that truly
belongs to our remotest ancestors. It really has the prehistoric,
preposterous quality of Zulu or New Zealand native drawings.
This at least was surely made by our fathers when they were barely men;
long before they were civilized men.
But why was it made? Why did barbarians take so much trouble
to make a horse nearly as big as a hamlet; a horse who could
bear no hunter, who could drag no load? What was this titanic,
sub-conscious instinct for spoiling a beautiful green slope
with a very ugly white quadruped? What (for the matter of that)
is this whole hazardous fancy of humanity ruling the earth,
which may have begun with white horses, which may by no means end
with twenty horse-power cars? As I rolled away out of that country,
I was still cloudily considering how ordinary men ever came
to want to make such strange chalk horses, when my chauffeur
startled me by speaking for the first time for nearly two hours.
He suddenly let go one of the handles and pointed at a gross
green bulk of down that happened to swell above us. "That would
be a good place," he said.
Naturally I referred to his last speech of some hours before;
and supposed he meant that it would be promising for agriculture.
As a fact, it was quite unpromising; and this made me suddenly understand
the quiet ardour in his eye. All of a sudden I saw what he really meant.
He really meant that this would be a splendid place to pick out another
white horse. He knew no more than I did why it was done; but he was
in some unthinkable prehistoric tradition, because he wanted to do it.
He became so acute in sensibility that he could not bear to pass
any broad breezy hill of grass on which there was not a white horse.
He could hardly keep his hands off the hills. He could hardly
leave any of the living grass alone.
Then I left off wondering why the primitive man made so many
white horses. I left off troubling in what sense the ordinary
eternal man had sought to scar or deface the hills. I was content
to know that he did want it; for I had seen him wanting it.
CHESTERTON-ALARM AND SIDISCUTIO - Ethandune