BELLOC-FIRST AND LAST - On Entries
I am always planning in my mind new kinds of guide books. Or, rather,
new features in guide books.
One such new feature which I am sure would be very useful would be an
indication to the traveller of how he should approach a place.
I would first presuppose him quite free and able to come by rail or by
water or by road or on foot across the fields, and then I would describe
how the many places I have seen stand quite differently in the mind
according to the way in which one approaches them.
The value of travel, to the eye at least, lies in its presentation of
clear and permanent impressions, and these I think (though some would
quarrel with me for saying it) are usually instantaneous. It is the
first sharp vision of an unknown town, the first immediate vision of a
range of hills, that remains for ever and is fruitful of joy within the
mind, or, at least, that is one and perhaps the chief of the fruits of
travel.
I remember once, for instance, waking from a dead sleep in a train (for
I was very tired) and finding it to be evening. What woke me was the
sudden stopping of the train. It was in Italy. A man in the carriage
said to me that there was some sort of accident and that we should be
waiting a while. The people got out and walked about by the side of the
track. I also got out of the carriage and took the air, and when I so
stepped out into the cool of that summer evening I was amazed at the
loneliness and tragedy of the place.
There were no houses about me that I could see save one little place
built for the railway men. There was no cultivation either.
Close before me began a sort of swamp with reeds which hardly moved to
the air, and this gradually merged into a sheet of water above and
beyond which were hills, barren and not very high, which took the last
of the daylight, for they looked both southward and to the west. The
more I watched the extraordinary and absolute scene the less I heard of
the low voices about me, and indeed a sort of positive silence seemed to
clothe the darkening landscape. It was full of something quite gone
down, and one had the impression that it would never be disturbed.
As the light lessened, the hills darkened, the sky took on one broad and
tender colour, the sheet of water gleamed quite white, and the reeds
stood up like solid shadows against it. I wish I could express in words
the impression of recollection and of savage mourning which all that
landscape imposed, but from that impression I was recalled and startled
by the guard, who came along telling us that things were righted and
that the train would start again; soon we were in our places and the
rapid movement isolated for me the memory of a singularly vivid scene. I
thought the place must have a name, and I asked a neighbour in the
carriage what it was called; he told me it was called Lake Trasimene.
Now I do not say that this tragic site is to be visited thus. It was but
an accident, though an accident for which I am most grateful to my fate.
But what I have said here illustrates my meaning that the manner of
one's approach to any place in travel makes all the difference.
Thus one may note how very different is Europe seen from the water than
seen from any other opportunity for travel. So many of the great
cathedrals were built to dominate men who should watch them from the
wharves of the mediaeval towns, but I think it is almost a rule if you
have leisure and can take your choice to choose this kind of entry to
them. Amiens is quite a different thing seen from the river below it to
the north and east from what it is seen by a gradual approach along the
street of a modern town. The roofs climb up at it, and it stands
enthroned. So Chartres seen from the little Eure; but the Eure is so
small a river that he would be a bold man who would travel up it all
this way. Nevertheless it is a good piece of travel, and anyone who will
undertake it will see Louviers and will pass Anet, where the greatest
work of the Renaissance once stood, and will go through lonely but rich
pastures until at last he gets to Chartres by the right gate. Thence he
will see something astonishing for so flat a region as the Beauce. The
great church seems mountainous upon a mountain. Its apse completes the
unclimbable steepness of the hill and its buttresses follow the lines of
the fall of it. But if you do not come in by the river, at least come in
by the Orleans road. I suppose that nine people out of ten, even to-day
when the roads are in proper use again, come into Chartres by that
northern railway entry, which is for all the world like coming into a
great house by a big, neglected backyard.
Then if ever you have business that takes you to Bayonne, come in by
river and from the sea, and how well you will understand the little town
and its lovely northern Gothic!
Some of the great churches all the world knows must be seen from the
water, and most of the world so sees them. Ely is one, Cologne is
another, but how many people have looked right up at Durham as at a
cliff from that gorge below, or how many have seen the height of Albi
from the Tarn?
As for famous cities with their walls, there is no doubt that a man
should approach them by the chief high road, which once linked them with
their capital, or with their nearest port, or with Rome--and that
although this kind of entry is nowadays often marred by ugly suburbs.
You will get much your finest sight of Segovia as you come in by the
road from the Guadarama and from Madrid. It is from that point that you
were meant to see the town, and you will get much your best grip on
Carcassonne, old Carcassonne, if you come in by the road from Toulouse
at morning as you were meant to come, and so Coucy should be approached
by that royal road from Soissons and from the south, while as for Laon
(the most famous of the hill towns), come to it from the east, for it
looks eastward, and its lords were Eastern lords.
Ranges of hills, I think, are never best first seen from railways.
Indeed, I can remember no great sight of hills so seen, not even the
Alps. A railway must of necessity follow the floor of the valley and
tunnel and creep round the shoulders of the bulwarks. There is perhaps
one exception to this rule, which is the sight of the Pyrenees from the
train as one comes into Tarbes. It is a wise thing if you are visiting
those hills to come into Tarbes by night and sleep there, and then next
morning the train upon its way to Pau unfolds you all the wall of the
mountains. But this is an accident. It is because the railway runs upon
a sort of high platform that you see the mountains so. With all other
hills that I remember it is best to have them burst suddenly upon you
from the top of some pass lifted high above the level and coming, let us
say, to a height half their own. Certainly the Bernese Oberland is more
wonderful caught in one moment from the Jura than introduced in any
other way, and the snows on Atlas over the desert seem like part of the
sky when they come upon one after climbing the red rocks of the high
plateaux and you see them shining over the salt marshes. The Vosges you
cannot thus see from a half-height; there is no platform, and that is
perhaps why the Vosges have not impressed travellers as they should. But
you can so watch the grand chain of old volcanoes which are the rampart
of Auvergne. You can stand upon the high wooden ridge of Foreze and see
them take the morning across the mists and the flat of the Limagne,
where the Gauls fought Caesar. Further south from the high table of the
Velay you can see the steep backward escarpment of the Cevennes, inky
blue, desperately blue, blue like nothing else on earth except the
mountains in those painters of North Italy, of the parts north and east
of Venice, the name of whose school escapes me--or, rather, I never knew
it.
Now, as for towns that live in a hollow, it is great fun to come upon
them from above. They are not used to being thus taken at a disadvantage
and they are both surprised and surprising. There are many towns in
holes and trenches of Europe which you can thus play "peep-bo" with if
you will come at them walking. By train they will mean nothing to you.
You will probably come upon them out of a long, shrieking tunnel, and by
the high road they mean little more, for the high road will follow the
vale. But if you come upon them from over their guardian cliffs and
scars you catch them unawares, and this is a good way of approaching
them, for you master them, as it were, and spy them out before you enter
in. You can act thus with Grenoble and with many a town on the Meuse,
and particularly with Aubusson, which lies in the depths of so dreadful
a trench that I could wonder how man ever dreamt of living and building
there.
The most difficult of all places on which to advise, I think, would be
the very great cities, the capitals. They seem to have to-day no noble
entries and no proper approach. Perhaps we shall only deal with them
justly when we can circle down to them through the air and see their
vast activity splashed over the plain. Anyhow, there is no proper way of
entering them now that I know of. Berlin is not worth entering at all.
Rome (a man told me once) could be entered by some particular road over
the Janiculum, I think--which also, if I remember right, was the way
that Shelley came--but I despair of Paris, and certainly of London. I
cannot even recall an entry for Brussels, though Brussels is a
monumental city with great rewards for those who love the combination of
building and hills.
Perhaps, after all, the happiest entries of all and the most easy are
those of our many market towns, small and not swollen in Britain and in
Northern Gaul and in the Netherlands and in the Valley of the Rhine.
These hardly ever fail us, and we come upon them in our travels as they
desire that we should come, and we know them properly as things should
properly be known--that is, from the beginning.
I write of travelling companions in general, and not in particular,
making of them a composite photograph, as it were, and finding what they
have in common and what is their type; and in the first place I find
them to be chance men. For there are some people who cannot travel
without a set companion who goes with them from Charing Cross all over
the world and back to Charing Cross again. And there is a pathos in
this: as Balzac said of marriage, "What a commentary on human life, that
human beings must associate to endure it." So it is with many who cannot
endure to travel alone: and some will positively advertise for another
to go with them.
In a glade of the Sierra Nevada, which, for awful and, as it were,
permanent beauty seemed not to be of this world, I came upon a man
slowly driving along the trail a ramshackle cart, in which were a few
chairs and tables and bedding. He had a long grey beard and wild eyes;
he was old, and very small like a gnome, but he had not the gnome's
good-humour. I asked him where he was going, and I slowed down, so as to
keep pace with his ridiculous horse. For some time he would not answer
me, and then he said, "Out of this." He added, "I am tired of it." And
when I asked him, "Of what?" his only answer was an old-fashioned oath.
But from further complaints which he made I gathered that what he was
tired of was clearing forests, digging ground, paying debts, and in
general living upon this unhappy earth. He did not like me very much,
and though I would willingly have learned more, he would tell me nothing
further, so when we got to a place where there was a little stream I
went on and left him.
I have never forgotten the sadness of this man. Where he was going, and
what he expected to do, or what opportunities he had, I have never
understood. Though some years after, in quite another place--namely,
Steyning, in Sussex--I came upon just such another, whose quarrel was
with the English climate, the rich and the poor, and the whole
constitution of God's earth. These are the advantages of travel, that
one meets so many men whom one would otherwise never meet, and that one
feeds as it were upon the complexity of mankind.
Thus in a village called Encamps, in the depths of Andorra, where no man
has ever killed another, I found a man with a blue face, who was a
fossil, the kind of man you would never find in the swelling life of
Western Europe. He was emancipated, he had studied in Perpignan, over
and beyond the great hills. He could not see why he should pay taxes to
support a priest. "The priests" he assured me, "say the most ridiculous
things. They narrate the most impossible fables. They affirm what cannot
possibly be true. All that they say is in opposition to science. If I am
ill, can a priest cure me? No. Can a priest tell me how to build, or how
to light my house? He is unable to do so. He is a useless and a lying
mouth, why should I feed him?"
I questioned this man very closely, and discovered that in his view the
world slowly changed from worse to better, and to accelerate this
process enlightenment alone was needed. "But what do these brutes," he
said, alluding to his fellow-countrymen, "know of enlightenment? They do
not even make roads, because the priests forbid them."
I could write at length upon this man. He was not a Sceptic as you may
imagine, nor had he adopted the Lucretian form of Epicureanism. Not a
bit of it. He was a hearty Atheist, with Positivist leanings. I further
found that he had married a woman older, wealthier, and if possible
uglier than himself. She kept the inn, and was very kind to him. His
life would have been quite happy had he not been tortured by the
monstrous superstitions of others.
Then, again, in the town of Marseilles, only two years ago, I met a man
who looked well fed, and had a stalwart, square French face, and whose
politico-economic ideal, though it was not mine, greatly moved me. It
was just past midnight, and I was throwing little stones into the old
Greek harbour, the stench and the glory of which are nearly three
thousand years old; I was to be off at dawn upon a tramp steamer, and I
had so determined to pass the few hours of darkness.
I was throwing pebbles into the water, I say, and thinking about
Ulysses, when this man came slouching up, with his hands in the pockets
of his enormous corduroy trousers, and, looking at me with some contempt
from above (for he was standing, I was sitting), he began to converse
with me. We talked first of ships, then of heat and cold, and so on to
wealth and poverty; and thus it was I came upon his views, which were
that there should be a sort of break up, and houses ought to be burned,
and things smashed, and people killed; and over and above this, it
should be made plain that no one had a right to govern: not the people,
because they were always being bamboozled; obviously not the rich; least
of all, the politicians, to whom he justly applied the most derogatory
epithets. He waved his arm out in the darkness at the Phoceans, at the
half-million of Marseilles, and said, "All that should disappear." The
constructive side of his politico-economic scheme was negative. He was a
practical man. None of your fine theories for him. One step at a time.
Let there be a Chambardement--that is, a noisy collapse, and he would
think about what to do afterwards.
His was not the narrow, deductive mind. He was objective and concrete.
Believe me or not, he was paid an excellent wage by the municipality to
prevent people like me, who sit up at night, from doing mischief in the
harbour. When I had come to an end of his politico-economic scheme--the
main lines of which were so clear and simple that a child could
understand them--we fell to talking of the tides, and I told him that in
my country the sea went up and down. He was no rustic, and would have no
such commonplace truths. He was well acquainted with the Phenomenon of
the Tides; it was due to the combined attraction of the sun and of the
moon. But when I told him I knew places where the tides fell thirty or
forty feet, we would have had a violent quarrel had I not prudently
admitted that that was romantic exaggeration, and that five or six was
the most that one ever saw it move. I avoided the quarrel, but the
little incident broke up our friendship, and he shuffled away. He did
not like having his leg pulled.
There are many others I remember. Those I have written about elsewhere I
am ashamed to recall, as the man at Jedburgh, who first expounded to me
how one knew all about the fate of the individual soul, and then
objected to personal questions about his own; the German officer man at
Aix-la-Chapelle, who had hair the colour of tow, and gave me minute
details of the method by which England was to be destroyed; a man I met
upon the Appian Way, who told the most abominable lies; and another man
who met me outside Oxford station during the Vac. and offered to show me
the sights of the town for a consideration, which he did, but I would
not pay him because he was inaccurate, as I easily proved by a few
searching questions upon the exact site of Bocardo (of which he had
never heard), and the negative evidence against a Roman origin for the
site of the city. Moreover, he said that Trinity was St. John's, which
was rubbish.
Then there was another man who travelled with me from Birmingham,
pressed certain tracts upon me, and wanted to charge me sixpence each at
Paddington. But if I were to speak of even these few I should exceed.
There are certain customs in man the permanence of which gives infinite
pleasure. When the mood of the schools is against them these customs lie
in wait beneath the floors of society, but they never die, and when a
decay in pedantry or in despotism or in any other evil and inhuman
influence permits them to reappear they reappear.
One of these customs is the religious attachment of man to isolated high
places, peaks, and single striking hills. On these he must build
shrines, and though he is a little furtive about it nowadays, yet the
instinct is there, strong as ever. I have not often come to the top of a
high hill with another man but I have seen him put a few stones together
when he got there, or, if he had not the moral courage so to satisfy his
soul, he would never fail on such an occasion to say something ritual and
quasi-religious, even if it were only about the view; and another instinct
of the same sort is the worship of the sources of rivers.
The Iconoclast and the people whose pride it is that their senses are
dead will see in a river nothing more than so much moisture gathered in
a narrow place and falling as the mystery of gravitation inclines it.
Their mood is the mood of that gentleman who despaired and wrote:
A cloud's a lot of vapour,
The sky's a lot of air,
And the sea's a lot of water
That happens to be there.
You cannot get further down than that. When you have got as far down as
that all is over. Luckily God still keeps his mysteries going for you,
and you can't get rid, even in that mood, of the certitude that you
yourself exist and that things outside of you are outside of you. But
when you get into that modern mood you do lose the personality of
everything else, and you forget the sanctity of river heads.
You have lost a great deal when you have forgotten that, and it behoves
you to recover what you have lost as quickly as possible, which is to be
done in this way: Visit the source of some famous stream and think about
it. There was a Scotchman once who discovered the sources of the Nile,
to the lasting advantage of mankind and the permanent glory of his
native land. He thought the source of the Nile looked rather like the
sources of the Till or the Tweed or some such river of Thule. He has
been ridiculed for saying this, but he was mystically very right. The
source of the greatest of rivers, since it was sacred to him, reminded
him of the sacred things of his home.
When I consider the sources of rivers which I have seen, there is not
one, I think, which I do not remember to have had about it an influence
of awe. Not only because one could in imaginings see the kingdoms of the
cities which it was to visit and the way in which it would bind them all
together in one province and one story, but also simply because it was
an origin.
The sources of the Rhone are famous: the Rhone comes out of a glacier
through a sort of ice cave, and if it were not for an enormous hotel
quite four-square it would be as lonely a place as there is in Europe,
and as remarkable a beginning for a great river as could anywhere be
found. Nor, when you come to think of it, does any European river have
such varied fortunes as the Rhone. It feeds such different religions and
looks on such diverse landscapes. It makes Geneva and it makes Avignon;
it changes in colour and in the nature of its going as it goes. It sees
new products appearing continually on its journey until it comes to
olives, and it flows past the beginning of human cities, when it
reflects the huddle of old Arles.
The sources of the Garonne are well known. The Garonne rises by itself
in a valley from which there is no issue, like the fabled valleys shut
in by hills on every side. And if it were anything but the Garonne it
would not be able to escape: it would lie imprisoned there for ever.
Being the Garonne it tunnels a way for itself right under the High
Pyrenees and comes out again on the French side. There are some that
doubt this, but then there are people who would doubt anything.
The sources of the River Arun are not so famous as these two last, and
it is a good thing, for they are to be found in one of the loneliest
places within an hour of London that any man can imagine, and if you
were put down there upon a windy day you would think yourself upon the
moors. There is nothing whatsoever near you at the beginnings of the
little sacred stream.
Thames had a source once which was very famous. The water came out
plainly at a fountain under a bleak wood just west of the Fosse Way,
under which it ran by a culvert, a culvert at least as old as the
Romans. But when about a hundred years ago people began to improve the
world in those parts, they put up a pumping station and they pumped
Thames dry--since which time its gods have deserted the river.
The sources of the Ribble are in a lonely place up in a corner of the
hills where everything has strange shapes and where the rocks make one
think of trolls. The great frozen Whernside stands up above it, and
Ingleborough Hill, which is like no other hill in England, but like the
flat-topped Mesas which you have in America, or (as those who have
visited it tell me) like the flat hills of South Africa; and a little
way off on the other side is Pen-y-ghent, or words to that effect. The
little River Ribble rises under such enormous guardianship. It rises
quite clean and single in the shape of a little spring upon the
hillside, and too few people know it. The other river that flows east
while the Ribble flows west is the River Ayr. It rises in a curious way,
for it imitates the Garonne, and finding itself blocked by limestone
burrows underneath at a place called Malham Tarn, after which it has no
more trouble.
The River Severn, the River Wye, and a third unimportant river, or at
least important only for its beauty (and who would insist on that?) rise
all close together on the skirts of Plinlimmon, and the smallest of them
has the most wonderful rising, for it falls through the gorge of Llygnant,
which looks like, and perhaps is, the deepest cleft in this island, or, at
any rate, the most unexpected. And a fourth source on the mountain, a tarn
below its summit, is the source of Rheidol, which has a short but
adventurous life like Achilles.
There is one source in Europe that is properly dealt with, and where the
religion due to the sources of rivers has free play, and this is the
source of the Seine. It comes out upon the northern side of the hills
which the French call the Hills of Gold, in a country of pasturage and
forest, very high up above the world and thinly peopled. The River Seine
appears there in a sort of miraculous manner, pouring out of a grotto,
and over this grotto the Parisians have built a votive statue; and there
is yet another of the hundred thousand things that nobody knows.
There is an elusive idea that has floated through the minds of most of
us as we grew older and learnt more and more things. It is an idea
extremely difficult to get into set terms. It is an idea very difficult
to put so that we shall not seem nonsensical; and yet it is a very
useful idea, and if it could be realized its realization would be of
very practical value. It is the idea of a Dictionary of Ignorance and
Error.
On the face of it a definition of the work is impossible. Strictly
speaking it would be infinite, for human knowledge, however far
extended, must always be infinitely small compared with all possible
knowledge, just as any given finite space is infinitely small compared
with all space.
But that is not the idea which we entertain when we consider this
possible Dictionary of Ignorance and Error. What we really mean is a
Dictionary of the sort of Ignorance and the sort of Error which we know
ourselves to have been guilty of, which we have escaped by special
experience or learning as time went on, and against which we would warn
our fellows.
Flaubert, I think, first put it down in words, and said that such an
encyclopaedia was very urgently needed.
It will never exist, but we all know that it ought to exist. Bits of it
appear from time to time piecemeal and here and there, as for instance
in the annotations which modern scholarship attaches to the great text,
in the printed criticisms to which sundry accepted doctrines are
subjected by the younger men to-day, in the detailed restatement of
historical events which we get from modern research as our fathers could
never have them--but the work itself, the complete Encyclopaedia or
Dictionary of Ignorance and Error, will never be printed. It is a great
pity.
Incidentally one may remark that the process by which a particular error
is propagated is as interesting to watch as the way in which a plant
grows.
The first step seems to be the establishing of an authority and the
giving of that authority a name which comes to connote doctrinal
infallibility. A very good example of this is the title "Science." Mere
physical research, its achievements, its certitudes, even its
conflicting and self-contradictory hypotheses, having got lumped
together in many minds under this one title Science, the title is now
sacred. It is used as a priestly title, as an immediate estopper to
doubt or criticism.
The next step is a very interesting one for the student of psychical
pathology to note. It seems to be a disease as native and universal to
the human mind as is the decay of the teeth to the human body. It seems
as though we all must suffer somewhat from it, and most of us suffer a
great deal from it, though in a cool aspect we easily perceive it to be
a lesion of thought. And this second step is as follows:
The whole lump having been given its sacred title and erected into an
infallible authority, which you are to accept as directly superior to
yourself and all personal sources of information, there is attributed to
this idol a number of attributes. We give it a soul, and a habit and
manners which do not attach to its stuff at all. The projection of this
imagined living character in our authority is comparable to what we also
do with mountains, statues, towns, and so forth. Our living
individuality lends individuality to them. I might here digress to
discuss whether this habit of the mind were not a distorted reflection
of some truth, and whether, indeed, there be not such beings as demons
or the souls of things. But, to leave that, we take our authority--this
thing "Science," for instance--we clothe it with a creed and appetites
and a will, and all the other human attributes.
This done, we set out in the third step in our progress towards fixed
error. We make the idol speak. Of course, being only an idol, it talks
nonsense. But by the previous steps just referred to we must believe
that nonsense, and believe it we do. Thus it is, I think, that fixed
error is most generally established.
I have already given one example in the hierarchic title "Science."
It was but the other day that I picked up a weekly paper in which a
gentleman was discussing ghosts--that is, the supposed apparition of the
living and the dead: of the dead though dead, and of the living though
absent.
Nothing has been more keenly discussed since the beginning of human
discussions. Are these phenomena (which undoubtedly happen) what modern
people call subjective, or are they what modern people call objective?
In old-fashioned English, Are the ghosts really there or are they not?
The most elementary use of the human reason persuades us that the matter
is not susceptible of positive proof. The criterion of certitude in any
matter of perception is an inner sense in the perceiver that the thing
he perceives is external to himself. He is the only witness; no one can
corroborate or dispute him. The seer may be right or he may be wrong,
but we have no proof--and only according to our temperament, our fancy,
our experience, our mood, do we decide with one or the other of the two
great schools.
Well, the gentleman of whom I am speaking wrote and had printed in plain
English this phrase (read it carefully):--"Science teaches us that these
phenomena are purely subjective."
Now I am quite sure that of the thousands who read that phrase all but a
handful read it in the spirit in which one hears the oracle of a god.
Some read it with regret, some with pleasure, but all with acquiescence.
That physical science was not competent in the matter one way or the
other each of those readers would probably have discovered, if even so
simple a corrective as the use of the term "physical research" instead
of the sacred term "science" had been applied; the hierarchic title
"Science" did the trick.
I might take another example out of many hundreds to show what I mean.
You have an authority which is called, where documents are concerned,
"The Best Modern Criticism." "The Best Modern Criticism" decides that
"Tam o' Shanter" was written by a committee of permanent officials of
the Board of Trade, or that Napoleon Bonaparte never existed. As a
matter of fact, the tomfoolery does not usually venture upon ground so
near home, but it talks rubbish just as monstrous about a poem a few
hundred or a few thousand years old, or a great personality a few
hundred or a few thousand years old.
Now if you will look at that phrase "The Best Modern Criticism" you will
see at once that it simply teems with assumption and tautology. But it
does more and worse: it presupposes that an infallible authority must of
its own nature be perpetually wrong.
Even supposing that I have the most "modern" (that is, merely the
latest) criticism to hand, and even supposing that by some omniscience
of mine I can tell which is "the best" (that is, which part of it has
really proved most ample, most painstaking, most general, and most
sincere), even then the phrase fatally condemns me. It is to say that
Wednesday is always infallible as compared with Tuesday, and Thursday as
compared with Wednesday, which is absurd.
The B.M.C. tells me in 1875 that the Song of Roland could have no
origins anterior to the year 1030. But the B.M.C. of 1885 (being a
B.M.C. and nothing more valuable) has a changed opinion. It must change
its opinion, that is the law of its being, since an integral factor in
its value is its modernity. In 1885 B.M.C. tells me that the Song of
Roland can be traced to origins far earlier, let us say to 912.
In 1895 B.M.C. has come to other conclusions--the Song of Roland is
certainly as late as 1115 ... and so forth.
Now you would say that an idol of that absurdity could have no effect
upon sane men. Change the terms and give it another name, and you would
laugh at the idea of its having an effect upon any men. But we know as a
matter of fact that it commands the thoughts of nearly all men to-day
and makes cowards of the most learned.
Perhaps you will ask me at the end of so long a criticism in what way
error may be corrected, since there is this sort of tendency in us to
accept it, to which I answer that things correct it, or as the
philosophers call things, "Reality." Error does not wash.
To go back to that example of ghosts. If ever you see a ghost (my poor
reader), I shall ask you afterwards whether he seemed subjective or no.
I think you will find the word "subjective" an astonishingly thin
one--if, at least, I catch you early after the experience.
BELLOC-FIRST AND LAST - On Entries