BELLOC-FIRST AND LAST - The Victory
The study of history, like the exploration, the thorough exploration, of
any other field, leads one to perpetual novelties, miracles, and
unexpected things; and I, in the study of the revolutionary wars, came
across the story of a battle which completely possessed my spirit.
It would not be to my purpose here to give its name. It is not among the
most famous; it is not Waterloo, nor Leipsic, nor Austerlitz, nor even
Jemappes. The more I read into the night the more I perceived that upon
the issue of that struggle depended the fate of the modern world. So
completely did the notes of Carnot and a few private letters that had
been put before me absorb my attention that I will swear the bugle-calls
of those two days (for it was a two-days' struggle) sounded more clearly
in my ears than the rumble of the London streets, and, as this died out
with the advance of the night and the approach of morning, I was living
entirely upon that ridge in Flanders, watching, as a man watches an
arena, whether the new things or the old should be victorious. It was
the new that conquered.
From that evening I was determined to visit this place of which so far I
had but read, and to see how far it might agree with the vision I had
had of it, and to people actual fields with the ghosts of dead soldiers.
And for the better appreciation of the drama I chose the season and the
days on which the fight had been driven across that rolling land, and I
came there, as the Republicans had come, a little before the dawn.
The hillside was silent and deserted, more even than are commonly such
places, though silence and desertion seem the common atmosphere of all
the fields on which such fates have been decided. A man looking over
Carthage Bay, especially a man looking at those sodden pools that were
the sound harbours of Carthage, might be in an uninhabited world; and
the loop of the Trebbia is the same, and the edge of Fontenoy; and even
here in England that hillside looking south up which the Normans charged
at Battle is a quiet and a drowsy sort of place.... So it was here in
Flanders.
For two miles as I ascended by the little sunken lane which the extreme
right wing had followed in the last attack I saw neither man nor beast,
but only the same stubble of the same autumn fields, and the same colder
sun shining upon the empty uplands until I reached the crest where the
Hungarian and the Croat had met the charge, and had disputed the little
village for two hours--a dispute upon which hung your fate and mine and
that of Europe.
It was a tiny little village, seven or eight houses together and no
more, with a crazy little wooden steeple to its church all twisted awry,
large barns, and comfortable hedgerows of the Northern kind; and from it
one looked out westwards over an infinity of country, following low
crest after low crest, down on to the French plains. I went into the inn
of the place to drink, and found the cobbler there complaining that
wealth disturbed the natural equality of men. Then I wandered out,
pacing this point and that which I knew accurately from my maps, and
thinking of the noise of the war. Behind the little church, upon a
ramshackle green not large enough to pitch the stumps for single-wicket,
was the modest monument, a cock in bronze, crowing, and the word
"Victory" stamped into the granite of the pedestal; the whole thing, I
suppose, not ten feet high. The bronze was very well done; it savoured
strongly of Paris and looked odd in this abandoned little place. But
every time my eyes sank from the bronze, to look at some other point in
the landscape to identify the emplacement of such and such a battery or
the gully that had concealed the advance of such and such a troop, my
glance perpetually returned to that word "VICTORY," sculptured by itself
upon the stone. It was indeed a victory; it was a victory which, for its
huge unexpectedness, for the noise of it, for the length of time during
which it was in doubt, for its final success, there is no parallel, and
yet it is by no means among the famous battles of the world. And though
the French count it one among the thousand of their battles, I doubt
whether even in Paris most men would recognize it for the hammer-blow it
was. The men of the time hardly knew it, though Carnot guessed at it, and
now to-day in Sorbonne I think that regal fight is taking its true place.
So I went down the eight miles of front northward along the ridge; for
even that battle, a hundred and more years ago, had an extended front of
this kind. I recognized the tall majestic fringe of beeches from which
had issued the last of the Royalist regiments bearing for the last time
upon a European field the white flag of the Bourbon Monarchy; I came
beyond it to the combe fringed with its semicircle of underbrush in
which Coburg had massed his guns in the last effort to break the French
centre when his flank was turned. I came to the main highway, very
broad, straight, and paved, which cuts this battlefield in two, and then
beyond it to the central position whose capture had made the final
manoeuvre possible.
All Wednesday the Grenadiers, German, tall, padded, smart, and stout,
had held their ground. It was not until Thursday, and by noon, that they
were slowly driven up the hill by the ragged lads, the Gauls, shoeless,
some not in uniform at all, half-mutinous, drunk with pain and glory.
And I remembered, as the scene returned to me, that this battle, like so
many of the Revolution, had been a battle of men against boys; how grey
and veteran and trained in arms were the Austrians and the Prussians,
their allies, how strict in orders, how calm: and what children the
Terror had called up by force from the exhausted fields of remote French
provinces, to break them here against the frontier, like water against a
wall...!
There was a little chap, twelve years old, a drummer; he had crept and
crawled by hedgerows till he found himself behind the line of those
volleying Grenadiers. There, "before his side," and breaking all rules,
he had sounded the roll of the charge. They cut him down and killed him,
and the roll of his drum ceased hard. A generation or more later,
digging for foundations at this spot, the builders of the Peace came
upon his bones, the little bones of a child heaped pell-mell with
skeletons of the fallen giants round him.
I went back into the town in whose defence the battle had been waged,
and there I saw again in bronze this little lad, head high and mouth
open, a-beating of his drum, and again the word "VICTORY."
All that effort was undertaken, all those young men and children killed,
for something that was to happen for the salvation of the world; it has
not come. All that iron resistance of the German line had been forged
and organized till it almost conquered, till it almost thwarted, the
Republic, and it also had been organized for the defence, and, as some
thought, for the salvation, of the world. Some great good was to have
come by the storming of that hill, or some great good by the defeat of
the impetuous charge. Well, the hill was stormed, and (if you will) at
Leipsic the effort which had stormed it was rolled back. What has
happened to the High Goddess whom that youth followed, and worshipped as
they say, and what to the Gods whom their enemies defended? The ridge is
exactly the same.
A couple of generations ago there was a sort of man going mournfully
about who complained of the spread of education. He had an ill-ease in
his mind. He feared that book learning would bring us no good, and he
was called a fool for his pains. Not undeservedly--for his thoughts were
muddled, and if his heart was good it was far better than his head. He
argued badly or he merely affirmed, but he had strong allies (Ruskin was
one of them), and, like every man who is sincere, there was something in
what he said; like every type which is numerous, there was a human
feeling behind him: and he was very numerous.
Now that he is pretty well extinct we are beginning to understand what
he meant and what there was to be said for him. The greatest of the
French Revolutionists was right--"After bread, the most crying need of
the populace is knowledge." But what knowledge?
The truth is that secondary impressions, impressions gathered from books
and from maps, are valuable as adjuncts to primary impressions (that is,
impressions gathered through the channel of our senses), or, what is
always almost as good and sometimes better, the interpreting voice of
the living man. For you must allow me the paradox that in some
mysterious way the voice and gesture of a living witness always convey
something of the real impression he has had, and sometimes convey more
than we should have received ourselves from our own sight and hearing of
the thing related.
Well, I say, these secondary impressions are valuable as adjuncts to
primary impressions. But when they stand absolute and have hardly any
reference to primary impressions, then they may deceive. When they stand
not only absolute but clothed with authority, and when they pretend to
convince us even against our own experience, they are positively undoing
the work which education was meant to do. When we receive them merely as
an enlargement of what we know and make of the unseen things of which we
read, things in the image of the seen, then they quite distort our
appreciation of the world.
Consider so simple a thing as a river. A child learns its map and knows,
or thinks it knows, that such and such rivers characterize such and such
nations and their territories. Paris stands upon the River Seine, Rome
upon the River Tiber, New Orleans on the Mississippi, Toledo upon the
River Tagus, and so forth. That child will know one river, the river
near his home. And he will think of all those other rivers in its image.
He will think of the Tagus and the Tiber and the Seine and the
Mississippi--and they will all be the river near his home. Then let him
travel, and what will he come across? The Seine, if he is from these
islands, may not disappoint him or astonish him with a sense of novelty
and of ignorance. It will indeed look grander and more majestic, seen
from the enormous forest heights above its lower course, than what,
perhaps, he had thought possible in a river, but still it will be a
river of water out of which a man can drink, with clear-cut banks and
with bridges over it, and with boats that ply up and down. But let him
see the Tagus at Toledo, and what he finds is brown rolling mud, pouring
solid after the rains, or sluggish and hardly a river after long
drought. Let him go down the Tiber, down the Valley of the Tiber, on
foot, and he will retain until the last miles an impression of nothing
but a turbid mountain torrent, mixed with the friable soil in its bed.
Let him approach the Mississippi in the most part of its long course and
the novelty will be more striking still. It will not seem to him a river
at all (if he be from Northern Europe); it will seem a chance flood. He
will come to it through marshes and through swamps, crossing a deserted
backwater, finding firm land beyond, then coming to further shallow
patches of wet, out of which the tree-stumps stand, and beyond which
again mud-heaps and banks and groups of reeds leave undetermined, for
one hundred yards after another, the limits of the vast stream. At last,
if he has a boat with him, he may make some place where he has a clear
view right across to low trees, tiny from their distance, similarly half
swamped upon a further shore, and behind them a low escarpment of bare
earth. That is the Mississippi nine times out of ten, and to an
Englishman who had expected to find from his early reading or his maps a
larger Thames it seems for all the world like a stretch of East Anglian
flood, save that it is so much more desolate.
The maps are coloured to express the claims of Governments. What do they
tell you of the social truth? Go on foot or bicycling through the more
populated upland belt of Algiers and discover the curious mixture of
security and war which no map can tell you of and which none of the
geographies make you understand. The excellent roads, trodden by men
that cannot make a road; the walls as ready loopholed for fighting; the
Christian church and the mosque in one town; the necessity for and the
hatred of the European; the indescribable difference of the sun, which
here, even in winter, has something malignant about it, and strikes as
well as warms; the mountains odd, unlike our mountains; the forests,
which stand as it were by hardihood, and seem at war against the
influence of dryness and the desert winds, with their trees far apart,
and between them no grass, but bare earth alone.
So it is with the reality of arms and with the reality of the sea. Too
much reading of battles has ever unfitted men for war; too much talk of
the sea is a poison in these great town populations of ours which know
nothing of the sea. Who that knows anything of the sea will claim
certitude in connexion with it? And yet there is a school which has by
this time turned its mechanical system almost into a commonplace upon
our lips, and talks of that most perilous thing, the fortunes of a
fleet, as though it were a merely numerical and calculable thing! The
greatest of Armadas may set out and not return.
There is one experience of travel and of the physical realities of the
world which has been so widely repeated, and which men have so
constantly verified, that I could mention it as a last example of my
thesis without fear of misunderstanding. I mean the quality of a great
mountain.
To one that has never seen a mountain it may seem a full and a fine
piece of knowledge to be acquainted with its height in feet exactly, its
situation; nay, many would think themselves learned if they know no more
than its conventional name. But the thing itself! The curious sense of
its isolation from the common world, of its being the habitation of awe,
perhaps the brooding-place of a god!
I had seen many mountains, I had travelled in many places, and I had
read many particular details in the books--and so well noted them upon
the maps that I could have re-drawn the maps--concerning the Cerdagne.
None the less the sight of that wall of the Cerdagne, when first it
struck me, coming down the pass from Tourcarol, was as novel as though
all my life had been spent upon empty plains. By the map it was 9000
feet. It might have been 90,000! The wonderment as to what lay beyond,
the sense that it was a limit to known things, its savage intangibility,
its sheer silence! Nothing but the eye seeing could give one all those
things.
The old complain that the young will not take advice. But the wisest
will tell them that, save blindly and upon authority, the young cannot
take it. For most of human and social experience is words to the young,
and the reality can come only with years. The wise complain of the jingo
in every country; and properly, for he upsets the plans of statesmen,
miscalculates the value of national forces, and may, if he is powerful
enough, destroy the true spirit of armies. But the wise would be wiser
still if, while they blamed the extravagance of this sort of man, they
would recognize that it came from that half-knowledge of mere names and
lists which excludes reality. It is maps and newspapers that turn an
honest fool into a jingo.
It is so again with distance, and it is so with time. Men will not grasp
distance unless they have traversed it, or unless it be represented to
them vividly by the comparison of great landscapes. Men will not grasp
historical time unless the historian shall be at the pains to give them
what historians so rarely give, the measure of a period in terms of a
human life. It is from secondary impressions divorced from reality that
a contempt for the past arises, and that the fatal illusion of some
gradual process of betterment of "progress" vulgarizes the minds of men
and wastes their effort. It is from secondary impressions divorced from
reality that a society imagines itself diseased when it is healthy, or
healthy when it is diseased. And it is from secondary impressions
divorced from reality that springs the amazing power of the little
second-rate public man in those modern machines that think themselves
democracies. This last is a power which, luckily, cannot be greatly
abused, for the men upon whom it is thrust are not capable even of abuse
upon a great scale. It is none the less marvellous in its falsehood.
Now you will say at the end of this, Since you blame so much the power
for distortion and for ill residing in our great towns, in our system of
primary education and in our papers and in our books, what remedy can
you propose? Why, none, either immediate or mechanical. The best and the
greatest remedy is a true philosophy, which shall lead men always to ask
themselves what they really know and in what order of certitude they
know it; where authority actually resides and where it is usurped. But,
apart from the advent, or rather the recapture, of a true philosophy by
a European society, two forces are at work which will always bring
reality back, though less swiftly and less whole. The first is the poet,
and the second is Time.
Sooner or later Time brings the empty phrase and the false conclusion up
against what is; the empty imaginary looks reality in the face and the
truth at once conquers. In war a nation learns whether it is strong or
no, and how it is strong and how weak; it learns it as well in defeat as
in victory. In the long processes of human lives, in the succession of
generations, the real necessities and nature of a human society destroy
any false formula upon which it was attempted to conduct it. Time must
always ultimately teach.
The poet, in some way it is difficult to understand (unless we admit
that he is a seer), is also very powerful as the ally of such an
influence. He brings out the inner part of things and presents them to
men in such a way that they cannot refuse but must accept it. But how
the mere choice and rhythm of words should produce so magical an effect
no one has yet been able to comprehend, and least of all the poets
themselves.
It is an interesting speculation by what means the Book lost its old
position in this country. This is not only an interesting speculation,
but one which nearly concerns a vital matter. For if men fall into the
habit of neglecting true books in an old and traditional civilization,
the inaccuracy of their judgments and the illusions to which they will
be subject, must increase.
To take but one example: history. The less the true historical book is
read and the more men depend upon ephemeral statement, the more will
legend crystallize, the harder will it be to destroy in the general mind
some comforting lie, and the great object-lesson of politics (which is
an accurate knowledge of how men have acted in the past) will become at
last unknown.
There are many, especially among younger men, who would contest the
premiss upon which all this is founded. They may point out, for
instance, that the actual number of bound books bought in a given time
at present is much larger than ever it was before. They may point out
again, and with justice, that the proportion of the population which
reads books of any sort, though perhaps not larger than it was three
hundred years ago, is very much larger than it was one hundred years
ago. And it may further be affirmed with truth that the range of
subjects now covered by books produced and sold is much wider than ever
it was before.
All this is true; and yet it is also true that the Book as a factor in
our civilization has not only declined but has almost disappeared. Were
many more dogs to be possessed in England than are now possessed, but
were they to be all mongrels, among which none could be found capable of
retrieving, or of following a fox or a hare with any discipline, one
would have a right to say that the dog as a factor of our civilization
had declined. Were many more men in England able to ride horses more or
less, but were the number of those who rode constantly and for pleasure
enormously to diminish, and were the new millions who could just manage
to keep on horseback to prefer animals without spirit on which they
would feel safe, one would have a right to say that the horse was
declining as a factor in our civilization; and this is exactly what has
happened with the Book.
The excellence of a book and its value as a book depend upon two
factors, which are usually, though not always, united in varied
proportions: first, that it should put something of value to the reader,
whether of value as a discovery and an enlargement of wisdom or of value
as a new emphasis laid upon old and sound morals; secondly, that this
thing added or renewed in human life should be presented in such a
manner as to give permanent aesthetic pleasure.
That is not a first-rate book which, while it is admirably written,
teaches something false or something evil; nor is that a first-rate book
which, though it discover a completely new thing, or emphasize the most
valuable department of morals, is so constructed as to be unreadable.
Now it will not be denied that as far as these two factors are
concerned--and I repeat they are almost always found in combination--the
position of the Book has dwindled almost to nothingness. One could give
examples of almost every kind: one could show how poetry, no matter how
appreciated or praised, no longer sells. One could show--and this is one
of the worst signs of all--how men will buy by the hundred thousand
anything at all which has the hall mark of an established reputation,
quite careless as to their love of it or their appetite for it. One
could further show how more than one book of permanent value in English
life has been discovered in our generation outside England, and has been
as it were thrust upon the English public by foreign opinion.
But for my purpose it will be sufficient to take one very important
branch which I can claim to have watched with some care, and that is the
branch of History.
It may be said with truth that in our generation no single first-rate
piece of history has enjoyed an appreciable sale. That is not true of
France, it is not true of the United States, it is not even true of
Germany in her intellectual decline, but it is true of England.
History is an excellent test. No man will read history, at least history
of an instructive sort, unless he is a man who can read a book, and
desires to possess one. To read History involves not only some permanent
interest in things not immediately sensible, but also some permanent
brain-work in the reader; for as one reads history one cannot, if one is
an intelligent being, forbear perpetually to contrast the lessons it
teaches with the received opinions of our time. Again, History is
valuable as an example in the general thesis I am maintaining, because
no good history can be written without a great measure of hard work. To
make a history at once accurate, readable, useful, and new, is probably
the hardest of all literary efforts; a man writing such history is
driving more horses abreast in his team than a man writing any other
kind of literary matter. He must keep his imagination active; his style
must be not only lucid, but also must arrest the reader; he must
exercise perpetually a power of selection which plays over innumerable
details; he must, in the midst of such occupations, preserve unity of
design, as much as must the novelist or the playwright; and yet with all
this there is not a verb, an adjective or a substantive which, if it
does not repose upon established evidence, will not mar the particular
type of work on which he is engaged.
As an example of what I mean, consider two sentences: The first is taken
from the 432nd page of that exceedingly unequal publication, the
Cambridge History of the French Revolution; the second I have
made up on the spur of the moment; both deal with the Battle of
Wattignies. The "Cambridge History" version runs as follows:--
On October 15 the relieving force, 50,000 strong, attacked the Austrian
covering force at Wattignies; the battle raged all that day and was most
furious on the right, in front of the village of Wattignies, which was
taken and lost three times; on the 17th the French expected another
general engagement but the enemy had drawn off.
There are here five great positive errors in six lines. The French were
not 50,000 strong, the attack on the 15th was not on Wattignies, but on
Dourlers; Wattignies was not taken and lost three times; the fight of
the 15th was least pressed on the right (harder on the left and
hardest in the centre) and no one--not the least recruit--expected
Coburg to come back on the 17th. Why, he had crossed the Sambre
at every point the day before! As for negative errors, or errors of
omission, they are capital, and the chief is that the victory was won on
the second day, the 16th, of which no mention is made.
Now contrast such a sentence with the following:--
On October 15th the relieving force, 42,000 strong, attacked the
Austrian centre at Dourlers, and made demonstrations upon its wings; the
attack upon Dourlers (which village had been taken and lost three times)
having failed, upon the following day, October 16th, the extreme left of
the enemy's position at Wattignies was attacked and carried; the enemy
thus outflanked was compelled to retreat, and Maubeuge was relieved the
same evening.
In the first sentence (which bears the hall mark of the University)
every error that could possibly be made in so few lines has been made.
The numbers are wrong; the nature of the fighting is misstated; the
village in the centre is confused with that on the extreme right; the
critical second day is altogether omitted, and every portion of the
sentence, verb, adjective, and substantive, is either directly
inaccurate or indirectly conveys an inaccurate impression. The second
sentence, bald in style and uninteresting in presentation as the first,
has the merit of telling the truth. But--and here is the point--it would
be impossible to criticize the first sentence unless someone had read up
the battle, and to read up that battle one has to depend on five or six
documents, some unpublished (like much of Jourdan's Memoirs), some of
them involving a visit to Maubeuge itself, some, like Pierrat's book,
very difficult to obtain (for it is neither in the British Museum nor in
the Bodleian) some few the writings of contemporary eyewitnesses, and
yet themselves demonstrably inaccurate. All these must be read and
collated, and if possible the actual ground of the battle visited,
before the first simple inaccurate sentence can be properly criticized
or the second bald but accurate sentence framed. None of these
authorities can have been so much as heard of by the official historian
I have quoted.
It would be redundant to press the point. Most readers know well enough
what labour the just writing of history involves, and how excellent a
type it is of that "making of a book" which art is, as I have said,
imperilled by apathy at the present day.
Consider for a moment who were those that purchased historical works in
this country in the past. There were, first of all, the landed gentry.
In almost every great country-house you will find a good old library,
and that good old library you will discover to be, as a rule, most
valuable and most complete in what concerns the end of the eighteenth
and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. A very large proportion
of history, and history of the best sort, is to be found upon those
shelves. The standard dwindles, though it is fairly well maintained
during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. Then--as a
rule--it abruptly comes to an end. One may take as a sort of bourne, the
two great books Macaulay's History and Kinglake's, for an earlier
and a later limit. Most of these libraries contain Macaulay; some few
Kinglake; hardly one possesses later works of value.
It may be urged in defence of the buyer that no later works of value
exist. Put so broadly, the statement is erroneous; but the truth which
it contains is in itself dependent upon the lack of public support for
good historical work. When there is a fortune for the man who writes in
accordance with whatever form of self-appreciation happens for the
moment to be popular, while a steady view and an accurate presentation
of the past can find no sale, then that steady view and that accurate
presentation cannot be pursued save by men who are wealthy, or by men
who are endowed, but even wealthy men will hesitate to write what they
know will not be read, and for history no one is endowed.
Our Universities were framed for many purposes, of which the cultivation
of learning was but one; in that one field, however, a particular form
of learning was taken very seriously, and was pursued with admirable
industry; I mean an acquaintance with and an imitation of the Latin and
Greek Classics.
It was a particular character of this form of learning that proficiency
in it would lead to undisputed honours. The scholar recognized the
superior scholar; the field of inquiry was by convention highly limited;
it had been thoroughly explored; discussion upon such results as were
doubtful did not involve a difference in general philosophy.
With history it is otherwise. Whether such things have or have not
happened, and, above all, if they have happened, the way in which
they have happened, is to our general judgment of contemporary men what
evidence is to a criminal trial. Facts won't give way. If, therefore,
there are vested interests, moral or material, to be maintained, history
is, of all the sciences or arts, that one most likely to suffer at the
hands of those connected with such interests. Even where the truth will
be of advantage to those interests, they are afraid of it, because the
thorough discussion of it will involve the presentation of views
disadvantageous to privilege.
Where, as is much more commonly the case (for vested interests, moral or
material, are unreasoning and selfish things), the truth would certainly
offend them, they are the more determined to prevent its appearance.
But of all vested interests none deal with such assured incomes, none
are so immune by influence and tradition as the Universities.
Now, if the rich man has no temptation by way of popular fame, and the
poor man no opportunity for endowment, in any branch of letters, there
remains but a third form of support, and that is the support of the
buying public. And the public will not buy.
I will suppose the case of a popular novelist, who in a few months shall
write, not an historical novel, but a piece of so-called history. He
shall call it, for instance, "England's Heroes." Before you tell me his
name, or what he has written, I can tell you here and now what he will
write on any number of points. He will call Hastings Senlac. In the
Battle of Hastings he will make out Harold to be the head of a highly
patriotic nation called the "Anglo-Saxons"; they shall be desperately
defending themselves against certain French-speaking Scandinavians
called Normans. He will deplore the defeat, but will say it was all for
the best. Magna Charta he will have signed at Runnymede--probably he
will have it drawn up there as well. He will translate the most famous
clause by the modern words "Judgment of his peers" and "law of the
land." He will represent the Barons as having behind them the voice of
the whole nation--and so forth. When he comes to Crécy he will make
Edward III speak English. When he comes to Agincourt he will leave his
readers as ignorant as himself upon the boundaries, numbers and power of
the Burgundian faction. In the Civil War Oliver Cromwell will be an
honest and not very rich gentleman of the middle-classes. The
Parliamentary force will be that of the mass of the people against a few
gallant but wicked aristocrats who follow the perfidious Charles. He
will make no mention of the pay of the Ironsides. James II will be
driven out by a popular uprising, in which the great Churchill will play
an honourable and chivalric part. The loss of the American Colonies will
be deplored, and will be ascribed to the folly of attempting to tax men
of "Anglo-Saxon" blood, unless you grant them representation. The
Continental troops will be treated as the descendants of Englishmen! The
guns at Saratoga will be Colonial guns; the incapacity of the Fleet will
not be touched upon. Here again, as in the case of the Battle of
Hastings, all will be for the best, and there will be a few touching
words upon the passionate affection now felt for Great Britain by the
inhabitants of the United States. The defensive genius of Wellington
will be represented as that of a general particularly great in the
offensive. Talavera will be a victory. The Spanish Auxiliaries in the
Peninsula will be contemptible. No guns will be abandoned before Coruna,
but what are left at Coruna will be mentioned and re-embarked. The
character of Nelson will receive a curious sort of glutinous praise; Emma
Hamilton, not Naples, will be the stain upon his name; the Battle of
Trafalgar will prevent the invasion of England.
This is a lengthy but not unjust description of what this gentleman
would write; it is rubbish from beginning to end. It would sell, because
every word of it would foster in the reader the illusion that the
community of which he is a member is invincible under all circumstances,
that effort and self-denial and suffering are spared him alone out of
all mankind, and that a little pleasurable excitement, preferably that
to be obtained from his favourite game, is the chief factor in military
success.
I have omitted Alfred. Alfred in such a book will be the "teller of
truth"--but he will not go to Mass.
Given that the name is sufficiently well known, there is hardly any
limit to the sale of a book modelled upon these lines. Contrast with its
fate the fate of a book, written no matter how powerfully, that should
insist upon truths, no matter how valuable to the English people at the
present moment. These truths need by no means be unpleasant, though at
the present moment an unpleasant truth is undoubtedly more valuable than
a pleasant one. They could make as much or more for the glory of the
country; they could be at any rate of infinitely greater service, but
they would not be received, simply because they would compel close
attention and brain-work in the reader as well as in the writer of them.
An established groove would have to be abandoned; to use a strong
metaphor, the reader would have to get out of bed, and that is what the
modern reader will not do. Tell him that the men who fought on either
side at Hastings' plain cared nothing for national but everything for
feudal allegiance; that lex terrae means the local custom of
ordeal and not the "law of the land"; tell him that judicium
parium means the right of a noble to be judged by nobles, and has
nothing to do with the jury system; tell him that Magna Charta was
certainly drawn up before the meeting at Runnymede; that not until the
Lancastrians did English kings speak English; that Oliver Cromwell owed
his position to the enormous wealth of the Williamses, of whom had he
not been a cadet, he would never have been known; tell him that the
whole force of the Parliament resided in the squires and that the Civil
Wars turned England into an oligarchy; tell him the exact truth about
the infamy of Churchill; tell him what proportion of Englishmen during
the American War were taxed without being represented; tell him what
proportion of Washington's troops were of English blood; tell him any
one illuminating and true thing about the history of his country, and
the novelty will so offend him that a direct insult would have pleased
him better.
What is true of history is true of nearly all the rest, and the upshot
of the whole matter is that there is not, either in private patronage or
in popular demand, a chance for history in modern England.
You can have excellent literature in journalism, and it will be widely
read. I would say more--I would say that the better literature a
newspaper admits, the more widely will that paper be read, or at any
rate the greater will its influence be on modern Englishmen. But when it
comes to the kneaded and wrought matter of the true Book, neither the
public nor the centres of learning will have any of it, and the last
medium which might make it possible, patronage, has equally disappeared,
because the modern patron does not work in the daylight in the full view
of the nation and with its full approbation, and he is no longer a public
man (though he is richer than ever he was before). His patronage,
therefore, though it is still considerable, is expended in satisfying his
private demand. Private architects build him doubtful castles, private
collectors get him manuscripts and jewels, but Letters, which are a public
thing, he can no longer command.
It might be asked, by way of conclusion, whether there is any remedy for
this state of things. There is none. Its prime cause resides in a
certain attitude of the national mind, and this kind of broadly held
philosophy is not changed save by slow preaching or external shock. As
long as modern England remains what we know it, and follows the lines of
change which we see it following, the Book will necessarily decline more
and more, and we must make up our minds to it.
Of other evil tendencies of our time, one can say of some that they are
obviously mending, of others that such and such an applicable remedy
would mend them. Our public architecture is certainly getting better; so
is our painting. Our gross and increasing contempt of self-government
(to take quite another sphere) is curable by one or two simple reforms
in procedure, registration, the expenses of election, and voting at the
polls, which would restore the House of Commons to life, and give it
power to express English will. But a regard for, a cultivation of, above
all a sinking of wealth upon, English Letters is past praying for. We
must wait until the tide changes; we can do nothing, and the waiting
will be long.
BELLOC-FIRST AND LAST - The Victory