BELLOC-FIRST AND LAST - The Roman Roads in Picardy
If a man were asked where he would find upon the map the sharpest
impress of Rome and of the memories of Rome, and where he would most
easily discover in a few days on foot the foundations upon which our
civilization still rests, he might, in proportion to his knowledge of
history and of Europe, be puzzled to reply. He might say that a week
along the wall from Tyne to Solway would be the answer; or a week in the
great Roman cities of Provence with their triumphal arches and their
vast arenas and their Roman stone cropping out everywhere: in old quays,
in ruined bridges, in the very pavement of the streets they use to-day,
and in the columns of their living churches.
Now I was surprised to find myself after many years of dabbling in such
things, furnishing myself the answer in quite a different place. It was
in Picardy during the late manoeuvres of the French Army that, in the
intervals of watching those great buzzing flies, the aeroplanes, and in
the intervals of long tramps after the regiments or of watching the
massed guns, the necessity for perpetually consulting the map brought
home to me for the first time this truth--that Picardy is the
province--or to be more accurate, Picardy with its marches in the Ile de
France, the edge of Normandy and the edge of Flanders--which retains
to-day the most vivid impress of Rome. For though the great buildings
are lacking, and the Roman work, which must here have been mainly of
brick, has crumbled, and though I can remember nothing upstanding and
patently of the Empire between the gate of Rheims and the frontier of
Artois, yet one feature--the Roman road--is here so evident, so
multiple, and so enduring that it makes up for all the rest.
One discovers the old roads upon the map, one after the other, with a
sort of surprise. The scheme develops before one as one looks, and
always when one thinks one has completed the web another and yet another
straight arrow of a line reveals itself across the page.
The map is a sort of palimpsest. A mass of fine modern roads, a whole
red blur of lanes and local ways, the big, rare black lines of the
railway--these are the recent writing, as it were; but underneath the
whole, more and more apparent and in greater and greater numbers as one
learns to discover them, are the strict, taut lines which Rome stretched
over all those plains.
There is something most fascinating in noting them, and discovering them
one after the other.
For they need discovering. No one of them is still in complete use. The
greater part must be pieced together from lengths of lanes which turn
into broad roads, and then suddenly sink again into footpaths, rights of
way, or green forest rides.
Often, as with our rarer Roman roads in England, all trace of the thing
disappears under the plough or in the soft crossings of the river
valleys; one marks them by the straightness of their alignment, by the
place names which lie upon them (the repeated name Estree, for instance,
which is like the place name "street" upon the Roman roads of England);
by the recovery of them after a gap; by the discoveries which local
archaeology has made.
Different men have different pastimes, and I dare say that most of those
who read this will wonder that such a search should be a pastime for any
man, but I confess it is a pastime for me. To discover these things, to
recreate them, to dig out on foot the base upon which two thousand years
of history repose, is the most fascinating kind of travel.
And then, the number of them! You may take an oblong of country with
Maubeuge at one corner, Pontoise at another, Yvetot and some frontier
town such as Fumes for the other two corners, and in that stretch of
country a hundred and fifty miles by perhaps two hundred, you can build
up a scheme of Roman ways almost as complete as the scheme of the great
roads to-day.
That one which most immediately strikes the eye is the great line which
darts upon Rouen from Paris.
Twice broken at the crossing of the river valleys, and lost altogether
in the last twelve miles before the capital of Normandy, it still stands
on the modern map a great modern road with every aspect of purpose and
of intention in its going.
From Amiens again they radiate out, these roads, some, like the way to
Cambray, in use every mile; some, like the old marching road to the sea,
to the Portus Itius, to Boulogne, a mere lane often wholly lost and
never used as a great modern road. This was the way along which the
French feudal cavalry trailed to the disaster of Crécy, and just beyond
Crécy it goes and loses itself in that exasperating but fascinating
manner which is the whole charm of Roman roads wherever the hunter finds
them. You may lay a ruler along this old forgotten track, all the way
past Domqueur, Novelle (which is called Novelle-en-Chaussée, that is
Novelle on the paved road), on past Estrée (where from the height you
overlook the battlefield of Crécy), and that ruler so lying on your map
points right at Boulogne Harbour, thirty odd miles away--and in all
those thirty odd remaining miles I could not find another yard of it.
But what an interest! What a hobby to develop! There is nothing like it
in all the kinds of hunting that have ever been invented for filling up
the whole of the mind. True, you will get no sauce of danger, but, on
the other hand, you will hunt for weeks and weeks, and you will come
back year after year and go on with your hunting, and sometimes you
actually find--which is more than can be said for hunting some animals
in the Weald.
How was it lost, this great main road of Europe, this marching road of
the legions, linking up Gaul and Britain, the way that Hadrian went, and
the way down which the usurper Constantine III must have come during
that short adventure of his which lends such a romance to the end of the
Empire? One cannot conceive why it should have disappeared. It is a
sunken way down the hillside across the light railway which serves
Crécy, it gets vaguer and vaguer, for all the world like those ridges
upon the chalk that mark the Roman roads in England, and then it is
gone. It leaves you pointing, I say, at that distant harbour, thirty odd
miles off, but over all those miles it has vanished. The ghost of the
legends cannot march along it any more. In one place you find a few
yards of it about three miles south and east of Montreuil. It may be
that the little lane leading into Estrée shows where it crossed the
valley of the Cauche, but it is all guesswork, and therefore very proper
to the huntsman.
Then there is that unbroken line by which St. Martin came, I think, when
he rode into Amiens, and at the gate of the town cut his cloak in two to
cover the beggar. It drives across country for Roye and on to Noyon, the
old centre of the Kings. It is a great modern road all the way, and it
stretches before you mile after mile after mile, until suddenly, without
explanation and for no reason, it ends sharply, like the life of a man.
It ends on the slopes of the hill called Choisy, at the edge of the wood
which is there. And seek as you will, you will never find it again.
From that road also, near Amiens, branches out another, whose object was
St. Quentin, first as a great high road, lost in the valley of the
Somme, a lesser road again, still in one strict alignment, it reaches on
to within a mile of Vermand, and there it stops dead. I do not think
that between Vermand and St. Quentin you will find it. Go out
north-westward from Vermand and walk perhaps five miles, or seven: there
is no trace of a road, only the rare country lanes winding in and out,
and the open plough of the rolling land. But continue by your compass so
and you will come (suddenly again and with no apparent reason for its
abrupt origin) upon the dead straight line that ran from the capital of
the Nervii, three days' march and more, and pointing all the time
straight at Vermand.
And so it is throughout the province and its neighbourhood. Here and
there, as at Bavai, a great capital has decayed. Here and there (but
more rarely), a town wholly new has sprung up since the Romans, but the
plan of the country is the same as that which they laid down, and the
roads as you discover them, mark it out and establish it. The armies
that you see marching to-day in their manoeuvres follow for half a
morning the line which was taken by the Legions.
It has often been remarked that while all countries in the world possess
some sort of literature, as Iceland her Sagas, England her daily papers,
France her prose writers and dramatists, and even Prussia her railway
guides, one nation and one alone, the Empire of Monomotopa, is utterly
innocent of this embellishment or frill.
No traveller records the existence of any Monomotopan quill-driver; no
modern visitor to that delightful island has come across a
littérateur whether in the worse or in the best hotels; and such
reading as the inhabitants enjoy is entirely confined to works imported
by large steamers from the neighbouring Antarctic Continent.
The causes of this singular and happy state of affairs were unknown
(since the common histories did not mention them) until the recent
discovery by Mr. Paley, the chief authority upon Monomotopan hieratic
script, of a very ancient inscription which clearly sets forth the whole
business.
It seems that an Emperor of Monomotopa, whose date can be accurately
fixed by internal evidence to lie after the universal deluge and before
the building of the Pyramid of Cheops, was, upon his accession to the
throne, particularly concerned with the just repartition of taxes among
his beloved subjects.
It would seem (if we are to trust the inscription) that in a past still
more remote the taxes were so light that even the richest men would meet
them promptly and without complaining, but this was at a period when the
enemies of Monomotopa were at once distant and actively engaged in
quarrelling among themselves. With sickening treachery these distant
rival nations had determined to produce wealth and to live in amity, so
that it was incumbent upon the Monomotopans not only to build ships, but
actually to provide an army, and at last (what broke the camel's back)
to establish fortifications of a very useless but expensive sort upon a
dozen points of their Imperial coast.
Under the increasing strain the old fiscal system broke down. The poor
were clearly embarrassed, as might be seen in their emaciated visages
and from the terrible condition of their boots. The rich had reached the
point after which it was inconvenient to them to pay any more. The
middle classes were spending the greater part of their time in devising
methods by which the exorbitant and intempestive demands of the
collectors could be either evaded or, more rarely, complied with. In a
word, a new and juster system of taxation was an imperative need, and
the Emperor, who had just ascended the throne at the age of eighteen,
and whom a sort of greenness had preserved from the iniquities of this
world, was determined to effect the great reform.
With the advice of his Ministers (all of whom had had considerable
experience in the handling of money), the Emperor at last determined
that each man and woman should pay to the State one-tenth and no more of
the wealth which he or she produced; those who produced nothing it was
but common justice and reason to exempt, and the effect of this tardy
act of justice upon the very rich was observed in the sudden increase of
the death-rate from all those diseases that are the peculiar product of
luxury and evil living. Paupers also, the unemployed, cripples,
imbeciles, deaf mutes, and the clergy escaped under this beneficent and
equable statute, and we may sum up the whole policy by saying that never
was a law acclaimed with so much happy bewilderment nor subject to less
expressed criticism than this.
It was, moreover, easy to estimate in this new fashion the total revenue
of the State, since its produce had been accurately set down by
statisticians of the utmost eminence, and one of these diverse documents
had been taken for the basis of the new fiscal regime.
In practice also the collection was easy. Overseers would attend the
harvest with large carts, prong the tenth turnip, hoick up the tenth
sheaf of wheat, bucket out the tenth gallon of ale, and so forth. In the
markets every tenth animal was removed by Imperial officers, every tenth
newspaper was impounded as it left the press, and every tenth drink
about to be consumed in the hostelries of the Empire was, after a
simulacrum of proffering it, suddenly removed by the waiter and poured
into a receptacle, the keys of which were very jealously guarded.
It was the same with the liberal professions: of the fee received by a
barrister in the Criminal Courts a tenth was regularly demanded at the
door when the verdict had been given and the prisoner whom he had
defended passed out to execution. The tenth knock-out in the prize ring
received by the professional pugilist was followed by the immediate
sequestration of his fee for that particular encounter, and the tenth
aria vibrating from the lips of a prima donna was either compounded for
at a certain rate or taken in kind by the official who attended at every
performance of grand opera.
One form of wealth alone puzzled the beneficent monarch and his
Napoleonic advisers, and this was the production (for it then existed)
of literary matter.
At first this seemed as simple to tax as any one of the other numerous
activities upon which the Emperor's loyal and loving subjects were
engaged. A brief examination of the customs of the trade, conducted by
an army of officials who penetrated into the very dens and attics in
which Letters are evolved, reported that the method of payment was by
the measurement of a number of words.
"It is, your Majesty," wrote the permanent official of the department in
his minute, "the practice of those who charitably employ this sort of
person to pay them in classes by the thousand words; thus one man gets
one sequin a thousand, another two byzants, a third as much as a ducat,
while some who have singularly attracted the notice of the public can
command ten, twenty, nay forty scutcheons, and in some very exceptional
cases a thousand words command one of those beautiful pieces of stiff
paper which your Majesty in his bountiful provision tenders to his
dutiful subjects for acceptance as metal under diverse penalties. The
just taxation of these fellows can therefore be easily achieved if your
Majesty, in the exercise of his almost superhuman wisdom, will but add a
schedule to the Finance Act in which there shall be set down fifteen or
twenty classes of writers, with their price per thousand words, and a
compulsory registration of each class, enforced by the rude hand of the
police."
The Emperor of Monomotopa immediately nominated a Royal Commission
(unpaid), among whose sons, nephews, and private friends the salaried
posts connected with the work were distributed. This Commission reported
by a majority of one ere two years had elapsed. The schedule was
designed, and such littérateurs as had not in the interval fled
the country were registered, while a further enactment strictly
forbidding their employers to make payment upon any other system
completed the scheme.
But, alas! so full of low cunning and dirty dodges is this kind of man
(I mean what we call authors) that very soon after the promulgation of
the new law a marked deterioration in the quality of Monomotopan letters
was apparent upon every side!
The citizen opening his morning paper would be astonished to find the
leading article consist of nothing more original than a portion of the
sacred Scriptures. A novel bought to ease the tedium of a journey would
consist of long catalogues for the most part, and when it came to
descriptions of scenery would fall into the most minute and detailed
category of every conceivable feature of the landscape. Some even took
advantage of the new regulation so far as to repeat one single word an
interminable number of times, while it was remarked with shame by the
Ministers of Religion that the morals of their literary friends
permitted them only to use words of one syllable, and those of the
shortest kind. And this they said was the only true and original
Monomotopan dialect.
Such was the public inconvenience that next year a sharper and much more
drastic law was passed, by which it was laid down that every literary
composition should make sense within the meaning of the Act, and should
be original so far as the reading of the judge appointed for the trial
of the case extended. But though after the first few executions this law
was generally observed, the nasty fellows affected by it managed to
evade it in spirit, for by the use of obscure terms, of words drawn from
dead languages, and of bold metaphor transferred from one art to
another, they would deliberately invite prosecution, and then in the
witness-box make fools of those plain men, the judge and jury, by
showing that this apparently meaningless claptrap could, with sufficient
ingenuity, be made to yield some sort of sense, and during this period
no art critic was put to death.
Driven to desperation, the Emperor changed the whole basis of the
Remuneration of Literary Labour, and ordered that it should be by the
length of the prose or poetry measured in inches.
This reform, however, did but add to the confusion, for while the men of
the pen wrote their works entirely in short dialogue, asterisks, and
blanks, the publishers, who were now thoroughly organized, printed the
same in smaller and smaller type, in order to avoid the consequences of
the law.
At this last piece of insolence the Emperor's mind was quickly decided.
Arresting one night not only all those who had ever written, but all
those who had even boasted of letters, or who were so much as suspected
by their relatives of secretly indulging in them, he turned the whole
two million into a large but enclosed area, and (desiring to kill two
birds with one stone) offered the ensuing spectacle as an amusement to
the more sober and respectable sections of the community.
It is well known that the profession of letters breeds in its followers
an undying hatred of each against his fellows. The public were therefore
entertained for a whole day with the pleasing sight of a violent but
quite disordered battle, in which each of the wretched prisoners seemed
animated by no desire but the destruction of as many as possible of his
hated rivals, until at last every soul of these detestable creatures had
left its puny body and the State was rid of all.
A law which carried to the universities the rule of the primary
schools--to wit, that men should be taught to read but not to
write--completed the good work. And there was peace.
Without any doubt whatsoever, the one characteristic of the towns is
the lack of reality in the impressions of the many: now we live in
towns: and posterity will be astounded at us! It isn't only that we get
our impressions for the most part as imaginary pictures called up by
printer's ink--that would be bad enough; but by some curious perversion
of the modern mind, printer's ink ends by actually preventing one from
seeing things that are there; and sometimes, when one says to another
who has not travelled, "Travel!" one wonders whether, after all, if he
does travel, he will see the things before his eyes? If he does, he will
find a new world; and there is more to be discovered in this fashion
to-day than ever there was.
I have sometimes wished that every Anglo-Saxon who from these shores has
sailed and seen for the first time the other Anglo-Saxons in New York or
Melbourne, would write in quite a short letter what he really felt.
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred men only write what they have read
before they started, just as Rousseau in an eighteenth-century village
believed that every English yokel could vote and that his vote conveyed
a high initiative, making and unmaking the policy of the State; or just
as people, hearing that the birth-rate of France is low, travel in that
country and say they can see no children--though they would hardly say
it about Sussex or Cumberland where the birth-rate is lower still.
What travel does in the way of pleasure (the providing of new and fresh
sensations, and the expansion of experience), that it ought to do in the
way of knowledge. It ought to and it does, with the wise, provide a
complete course of unlearning the wretched tags with which the sham
culture of our great towns has filled us. For instance, of Barbary--the
lions do not live in deserts; they live in woods. The peasants of
Barbary are not Semitic in appearance or in character; Barbary is full
to the eye, not of Arab and Oriental buildings--they are not
striking--but of great Roman monuments: they are altogether the most
important things in the place. Barbary is not hot, as a whole: most of
Barbary is extremely cold between November and March. The inhabitants of
Barbary do not like a wild life, they are extremely fond of what
civilization can give them, such as crème de menthe, rifles, good
waterworks, maps, and railways: only they would like to have these
things without the bother of strict laws and of the police, and so
forth. Travel in Barbary with seeing eyes and you find out all this new
truth.
Now it took the French forty years and more before each of these plain
facts (and I have only cited half a dozen out of as many hundred) got
into their letters and their print: they have not yet got into the
letters and the print of other nations. But an honest man travelling in
Barbary on his own account would pick up every one of these truths in
two or three days, except the one about the lions; to pick up that truth
you must go to the very edge of the country, for the lion is a shy beast
and withdraws from men.
The wise man who really wants to see things as they are and to
understand them, does not say: "Here I am on the burning soil of
Africa." He says: "Here I am stuck in a snowdrift and the train twelve
hours late"--as it was (with me in it) near Sétif in January, 1905. He
does not say as he looks on the peasant at his plough outside Batna:
"Observe yon Semite!" He says: "That man's face is exactly like the face
of a dark Sussex peasant, only a little leaner." He does not say: "See
those wild sons of the desert! How they must hate the new artificial
world around them!" Contrariwise, he says: "See those four Mohammedans
playing cards with a French pack of cards and drinking liqueurs in the
café! See, they have ordered more liqueurs!" He does not say: "How
strange and terrible a thing the railway must be to them!" He says: "I
wish I was rich enough to travel first, for the natives pouring in and
out of this third-class carriage, jabbering like monkeys, and treading
on my feet, disturb my tranquillity. Some hundreds must have got in and
out during the last fifty miles!"
In other words, the wise man has permitted eye-openers to rain upon him
their full, beneficent, and sacramental influence. And if a man in
travelling will always maintain his mind ready for what he really sees
and hears, he will become a whole nest of Columbuses discovering a
perfectly interminable series of new worlds.
A man can only talk of what he himself knows. Let me give further
examples. I had always heard until I visited the Pyrenees how French
civilization (especially in the matter of roads, motors, and things like
that) went up to the "Spanish" frontier and then stopped dead. It
doesn't. The change is at the Aragonese frontier. On the Basque third of
the frontier the people are just as active and fond of wealth, and of
scraping of stone and of cleanliness, and of drawing straight lines, to
the north as to the south of it. They are all one people, as
industrious, as thrifty, and as prosperous as the Scots. So are the
Catalans one people, and you get much the same sort of advantages and
disadvantages (apart from the effect of government) with the Catalans to
the north as with the Catalans to the south of the border.
So with religion. I had thought to find the Spanish churches crowded. I
found just the contrary. It was the French churches that were crowded,
not the Spanish; and the difference between the truth--what one really
sees and hears--and the printed legend happens to be very subtly
illustrated in this case of religion. The French have inherited (and are
by this time used to, and have, perhaps grown fond of) a big religious
debate. Those who side with the national religion and tradition
emphasize their opinion in every possible way--so do their opponents.
You pick up two newspapers from Toulouse, for instance, and it is quite
on the cards that the leading article of each will be a disquisition
upon the philosophy of religion, the one, the "Depêche" of Toulouse,
militantly, and often solently atheist; the other as militantly
Catholic.
You don't get that in Pamplona, and you don't get it in Saragossa. What
you get there is a profound dislike of being interfered with, ancient
and lazy customs, wealth retained by the chapters, the monasteries, and
the colleges, and with all this a curious, all-pervading indifference.
One might end this little train of thought by considering a converse
test of what the eye-opener is in travel; and that test is to talk to
foreigners when they first come to England and see how they tend to
discover in England what they have read of at home instead of what they
really see. There have been very few fogs in London of late, but your
foreigner nearly always finds London foggy. Kent does not show along its
main railway line the evidence of agricultural depression: it is like a
garden. Yet, in a very careful and thorough French book just published
by a French traveller, his bird's-eye view of the country as he went
through Kent just after landing would make you think the place a desert;
he seems to have thought the hedges a sign of agricultural decay. The
same foreigner will discover a plebeian character in the Commons and an
aristocratic one in the House of Lords, though he shall have heard but
four speeches in each, and though every one of the eight speeches shall
have been delivered by members of one family group closely intermarried,
wealthy, titled, and perhaps (who knows?) of some lineage as well.
The moral is that one should tell the truth to oneself, and look out for
it outside one. It is quite as novel and as entertaining as the
discovery of the North Pole--or, in case that has come off (as some
believe), the discovery of the South Pole.
I notice a very curious thing in the actions particularly of business
men to-day, and of other men also, which is the projection outward from
their own inward minds of something which is called "The Public"--and
which is not there.
I do not mean that a business man is wrong when he says that "the public
will demand" such and such an article, and on producing the article
finds it sells widely; he is obviously and demonstrably right in his use
of the word "public" in such a connexion. Nor is a man wrong or subject
to illusion when he says, "The public have taken to cinematograph
shows," or "The public were greatly moved when the Hull fishermen were
shot at by the Russian fleet in the North Sea." What I mean is "The
Public" as an excuse or scapegoat; the Public as a menace; the Public as
a butt. That Public simply does not exist.
For instance, the publisher will say, as though he were talking of some
monster, "The Public will not buy Jinks's work. It is first-class work,
so it is too good for the Public." He is quite right in his statement of
fact. Of the very small proportion of our people who read only a
fraction buy books, and of the fraction that buy books very few indeed
buy Jinks's. Jinks has a very pleasant up-and-down style. He loves to
use funny words dragged from the tomb, and he has delicate little
emotions. Yet hardly anybody will buy him--so the publisher is quite
right in one sense when he says, "The Public" won't buy Jinks. But where
he is quite wrong and suffering from a gross illusion is in the motive
and the manner of his saying it. He talks of "The Public" as something
gravely to blame and yet irredeemably stupid. He talks of it as
something quite external to himself, almost as something which he has
never personally come across. He talks of it as though it were a Mammoth
or an Eskimo. Now, if that publisher would wander for a moment into the
world of realities he would perceive his illusion. Modern men do not
like realities, and do not usually know the way to come in contact with
them. I will tell the publisher how to do so in this case.
Let him consider what books he buys himself, what books his wife buys;
what books his eldest son, his grandmother, his Aunt Jane, his old
father, his butler (if he runs to one), his most intimate friend, and
his curate buy. He will find that not one of these people buys Jinks.
Most of them will talk Jinks, and if Jinks writes a play, however dull,
they will probably go and see it once; but they draw the line at buying
Jinks's books--and I don't blame them.
The moral is very simple. You yourselves are "The Public," and if you
will watch your own habits you will find that the economic explanation
of a hundred things becomes quite clear.
I have seen the same thing in the offices of a newspaper. Some simple
truth of commanding interest to this country, involving no attack upon
any rich man, and therefore not dangerous under our laws, comes up for
printing. It is discussed in the editor's room. The editor says, "Yes,
of course, we know it is true, and of course it is important, but the
Public would not stand it."
I remember one newspaper office of my youth in which the Public was
visualized as a long file of people streaming into a Wesleyan chapel,
and another in which the Public was supposed to be made up without
exception of retired officers and maiden ladies, every one of whom was a
communicant of the English Established Church, every one of good birth,
and yet every one devoid of culture.
Without the least doubt each of these absurd symbols haunted the brain
of each of the editors in question. The editor of the first paper would
print at wearisome length accounts of obscure Catholic clerical scandals
on the Continent, and would sweat with alarm if his sub-editors had
admitted a telegram concerning the trial of some fraudulent Protestant
missionary or other in China.
Meanwhile his rather dull paper was being bought by you and me, and bank
clerks and foreign tourists, and doctors, and publicans, and brokers,
Catholics, Protestants, atheists, "peculiar people," and every kind of
man for many reasons--because it had the best social statistics, because
it had a very good dramatic critic, because they had got into the habit
and couldn't stop, because it came nearest to hand on the bookstall. Of
a hundred readers, ninety-nine skipped the clerical scandal and either
chuckled over the fraudulent missionary or were bored by him and went on
to the gambling news from the Stock Exchange. But the type for whom all
that paper was produced, the menacing god or demon who was supposed to
forbid publication of certain news in it, did not exist.
So it was with the second paper, but with this difference, that the
editor was right about the social position of those who read his sheet,
but quite wrong about the opinions and emotions of people in that social
position.
It was all the more astonishing from the fact that the editor was born
in that very class himself and perpetually mixed with it. No one perhaps
read "The Stodge" (for under this device would I veil the true name of
the organ) more carefully than those retired officers of either service
who are to be found in what are called our "residential" towns. The
editor was himself the son of a colonel of guns who had settled down in
a Midland watering-place. He ought to have known that world, and he did
know that world, but he kept his illusion of his Public quite apart from
his experience of realities.
Your retired officer (to take his particular section of this particular
paper's audience) is nearly always a man with a hobby, and usually a
good scientific or literary hobby at that. He writes many of our best
books demanding research. He takes an active part in public work which
requires statistical study. He is always a travelled man, and nearly
always a well-read man. The broadest and the most complete questioning
and turning and returning of the most fundamental subjects--religion,
foreign policy, and domestic economics--are quite familiar to him. But
the editor was not selecting news for that real man; he was selecting
news for an imaginary retired officer of inconceivable stupidity and
ignorance, redeemed by a childlike simplicity. If a book came in, for
instance, on biology, and there was a chance of having it reviewed by
one of the first biologists of the day, he would say: "Oh, our Public
won't stand evolution," and he would trot out his imaginary retired
officer as though he were a mule.
Artists, by which I mean painters, and more especially art critics, sin
in this respect. They say: "The public wants a picture to tell a story,"
and they say it with a sneer. Well, the public does want a picture to
tell a story, because you and I want a picture to tell a story. Sorry.
But so it is. The art critic himself wants it to tell a story, and so
does the artist. Each would rather die than admit it, but if you set
either walking, with no one to watch him, down a row of pictures you
would see him looking at one picture after another with that expression
of interest which only comes on a human face when it is following a
human relation. A mere splash of colour would bore him; still more a
mere medley of black and white. The story may have a very simple plot;
it may be no more than an old woman sitting on a chair, or a landscape,
but a picture, if a man can look at it all, tells a story right enough.
It must interest men, and the less of a story it tells the less it will
interest men. A good landscape tells so vivid a story that children (who
are unspoilt) actually transfer themselves into such a landscape, walk
about in it, and have adventures in it.
They make another complaint against the public, that it desires painting
to be lifelike. Of course it does! The statement is accurate, but the
complaint is based on an illusion. It is you and I and all the world
that want painting to imitate its object. There is a wonderful picture
in the Glasgow Art Gallery, painted by someone a long time ago, in which
a man is represented in a steel cuirass with a fur tippet over it, and
the whole point of that picture is that the fur looks like fur and the
steel looks like steel. I never met a critic yet who was so bold as to
say that picture was a bad picture. It is one of the best pictures in
the world; but its whole point is the liveliness of the steel and of the
fur.
Finally, there is one proper test to prove that all this jargon about
"The Public" is nonsense, which is that it is altogether modern. Who
quarrelled with the Public in the old days when men lived a healthy
corporate life, and painted, wrote, or sang for the applause of their
fellows?
If you still suffer from the illusion after reading these magisterial
lines of mine, why, there is a drastic way to cure yourself, which is to
go for a soldier; take the shilling and live in a barracks for a year;
then buy yourself out. You will never despise the public again. And
perhaps a better way still is to go round the Horn before the mast. But
take care that your friends shall send you enough money to Valparaiso
for your return journey to be made in some comfort; I would not wish my
worst enemy to go back the way he came.
BELLOC-FIRST AND LAST - The Roman Roads in Picardy