PART FOUR: AT HOME AND ABROAD

  ON HOLIDAYS

  THERE ARE epochs of history which their enemies call rude and which their friends call simple. My difficulty is that they seem to me not simple, but subtle. They understood much better than we do the idea of variety and reaction. For them emancipation was a recoil and not merely a release. The world must be turned upside down at absolute intervals, as a bucket must be turned upside down in order to empty it. It is the essence of a holiday that it must be a revolution, and it is the essence of a revolution that it must revolve. A revolution far more frightful and overwhelming than any of the revolutions of history happens every twelve hours. We do, quite seriously, die daily. We trust ourselves in utter dark and dissolution; in such black sleep as has killed many men by a drug or by the drifting snow. Each of us has every night an enormous negative holiday. But most will agree, I think, that the essence of that holiday is its irresponsibility. The legal authorities would be kept busy if we could be indicted for the crimes we have committed in dreams. Now the whole point of a holiday was to be, within certain rational restraints, irresponsible. Interfering with a holiday was almost like interfering with a dream. And the whole project of using holidays as anything else but holidays was really absent from the mind. The notion of `combining amusement with instruction’ would have seemed like the notion of combining sleep with insomnia. Great spiritual authorities have told us to watch and pray. Great spiritual influences, I think, also tell us to believe and sleep. But neither god nor priest nor devil ever had the impudence to tell us to watch and sleep.

  And that is the contradiction made by the modern cranks about holidays. It would be a typical and triumphant work of modern science to take charge of a child day and night; to give him the drugs that would keep him half asleep all day, and the dreams that would keep him half awake all night.

  In this connection I think the educational arrangement about holidays has long been a ludicrous mistake. Holiday tasks are a mistake. Home-work is a mistake. Give the boy or girl less holidays if you think they need less. But be sufficiently businesslike to get the best out of the boy or girl for whatever concession you make to them. If you can excuse anyone from work, you can excuse him from worry. Leisure is a food, like sleep; liberty is a food, like sleep. Leisure is a matter of quality rather than quantity. Five minutes lasts longer when one cannot be disturbed than five hours when one may be disturbed. Restrict the liberty in point of time; restrict it in point of space; but do not restrict it in point of quality. If you give somebody only three seconds’ holiday - then, by all the remains of your ruined sense of honour, leave him alone for three seconds.

  Let me take an example which involves a particular sort of holiday that is fairly popular and national. During the summer, the big railway stations will be found thronged with the bags and babies of innumerable families going to seaside resorts. Each traveller is (I need hardly say) murmuring to himself the lines of Swinburne:

  “I will go down to the great white mother ...

  Mother and maker of men, the sea;

  I will go down to her, I and none other . . .”

  A friend of mine regards these lines as unreasonable, declaring that Swinburne, however much he liked sea-bathing, should not insist on all the seas of the world being locked up like his private bathroom. But certainly the request, whether reasonable or not, would be very difficult to enforce, say, at Margate or Broadstairs. But even if it be true, as I were loth to believe, that some holiday-makers do not murmur Swinburne’s lines as they start, I am still firmly convinced that most holiday-makers like the sea because it is some kind of outlook upon some kind of loneliness and liberty. It is the only kind of loneliness and liberty. It is the only plain, straight line in Nature. It is the only empty place on earth. It is the one open window; to Jones, as it was to Keats.

  I think it was Richard Jefferies who said that all men ought to be idle; and that we should get all the work we wanted done by harnessing to our machinery the tremendous tides of the sea. Something analogous was suggested by Mr. Wells; but I disagree with it. I think it would destroy the holiday. We should have removed all the use of the seaside by removing the uselessness of the sea. Men jaded or dazed with duties wish to look out across that fruitless field, in which God has sown we know not what seed and shall raise we know not what harvest. They wish to behold how enormous is their irresponsibility. The sea blows upon the cashier at Margate the great good news that he is not God. But this holiday sentiment will continue to weaken so long as men try to make all our holidays duties, or all our days holidays; and cannot understand that when anything is being woven the shuttle flies back and forth.

  THE PEASANT

  THE GENIUS who shall write a real philosophical pantomime (a thing untried, I think, since Aristophanes) should find many handy symbols in the harlequinades of our youth. The donkey who comes in two suggests infinite speculations about organic unity and by divergent evolution. The policeman made into sausages would be excellent machinery either for a Socialistic satire or for a satire on Socialism. And the red-hot poker quite exactly expresses that most terrible and profound thing in human affairs - a fierce domesticity.

  But there is another trick of the old pantomimes which happens to offer the only parallel I can think of to the strange state of our society today. We all remember that beginning of the Transformation Scene when the front scene is still there, but the back scene begins to glow through it. The heroine is still in the dungeon; but the walls grow more and more transparent; and something else (probably the Garden of the Fairy Volatile) is apparent at the same time.

  I have exactly the same sensations about our old Victorian political methods and the social realities that are now behind them. I do not ignore the old front scene of Privy Council or Parliament; I can still see it there; it is the England of my boyhood, and I rather like it. But simultaneously with these symbolic figures, these representatives and estates of the realm, I can see the Things that are behind. Another England is shining through political England; whether it will be very like the Garden of the Fairy Volatile remains to be seen. This fact, that the Government and the Commonwealth are often on two different planes of reality, has one peculiar result, too little noticed, on our attitude towards foreigners. There are the same names all over Europe - Parliament, Army, Church, Land, and so on. But these words often stand for astonishingly different things; for widely varying degrees of realism or ritual or memory or conspiracy or indifference. When a man has even one concrete experience of some foreign thing, he will generally find it to be in quite another world from that foreign country as it appears in the newspapers. A man reading the best English journals would have the general impression that the chief event in France is the sudden fall of the Ministry which came as abruptly as that tragic blow out of the air which a few weeks before had struck one of its members dead where he stood.

  Now I happened to be in France when the news of this tragedy was scattered abroad, and I want to try and convey an atmosphere which I felt, and which I felt to be France itself. To us in England France seemed to be full of all this crisis and disaster. This was something like what one felt upon the actual scene of it.

  I was away in those eastern highlands, where France (so to speak) clings to the rising mountains, till they break away and shoot up into the sky as Switzerland. More to the north was that gap that is the great gate into Germany and is guarded by the Lion of Belfort. Among these hills I met a peasant who was like thousands of the peasants all round: a Jack-of-all-trades. Among other things he owned a ramshackle carriage with an excellent horse, with which he could drive me anywhere; and he was, as far as appearance goes, rather like a very rude beggar. His clothes were coarse and threadbare, his face was rugged, but sharp; he was always in a sweat from drudgeries. A man who looked like that would be `moved on’ in London if he tried to open the door of a cab. Well, I got him to drive me away over the hills, and, finding that the mountains grew taller, grander, and (one might say) more incredible at every turn of the road, I persuaded him to make a day’s journey of it, and to rest the horse in a high village where (as everywhere in that country) one could get good wine and bread and an omelette at least.

  Now, when I stopped before the cottage that could thus become an impromptu inn, I did exactly what every Englishman of my unfortunate class would have done in my place. I addressed the driver with nervous cordiality and extreme vagueness and said that I supposed he would like to have some lunch too, offering him a few francs for the purpose. He did not understand what it meant. He said I had better pay for the carriage at the end. I said it again, and still it was a puzzle to him. I said it again, in French which, however bad, was at least unmistakable; and this time I made myself clear. Whereupon this amazing scarecrow burst into an ungovernable fit of laughter, and slapped his trouser pocket about six times with his squat spread hand, exclaiming, “Money! I have much! I have mountains! I am rich! I am very rich!” And after the conversation I had with him on the road home, I think it perfectly possible that he was considerably richer than I am.

  He talked about his dog, which was the best dog in the world; his son, who was the most promising cook in the world; his horse, which was the most astonishing horse in the world; he seemed to find inexhaustible glories in his patch of property. At the end of the journey, warned by that prodigy of the noon, I offered him no extra tip, but only two good cigars that somebody had given me. He at once replied by giving me a bottle of the wine he manufactured himself. It was, he assured me, the best wine in the world.

  That is all that happened; only as we drove into the town the papers were flaring with the dreadful death of the French Minister of War and the narrow escape of the French Premier. My friend had never heard of either of them; he took no interest in politics. I think he thought politics a sort of mutiny among slaves. He was a free man. I think my sociological friends really ought to remember that there are many millions of him in Europe.

  THE LOST RAILWAY STATION

  I AM writing this as best I may in a Scottish railway station; and my thoughts go back, with all the pathos of the patriot, to an English railway station. Trucks and rails may seem to lack the fine shades of variety to be felt in the trees and hills of home; but my fancy really flies to an English railway station where I once dreamed a dream.

  There is in the north of London an important station, which is by comparison as quiet and comfortable as the courtyard of an old inn. I do not know why this repose rests upon it, for a considerable train service is connected with it. It has the usual bookstall, at which I have bought all the bloodiest detective stories I could find; various refreshment bars at which I have bought various other things; and all the usual fittings of such a place. But in the centre there stands a fountain, and not far from it a large model of an ocean liner. Something about the look of the fountain and the surrounding hostelries, jutting out on opposite sides, reminds me absurdly of the market-place of a village; though perhaps something of a pantomime village. I can imagine the village maiden leaning gracefully on the fountain with a jar or jug or bucket; though I hasten to admit that I have never seen her do so. I can even conceive that the little boy who ran away to sea (that picturesque figure, whose presence, or rather absence, is so essential to the health of the happy village) drank in all his desire of seafaring adventure at the ends of the earth by looking at the toy liner. His white-haired mother would still be waiting for him - presumably in the waiting room. In short, I have always felt that I could fill this place with all the recognized romantic figures of rural life, in fiction if not in fact.

  I wonder what would really happen if in some special convulsion that station were really cut off and left to live its own simple life, like a farm surrounded by floods, or a hamlet snowed up in the mountains. It pleases me to fancy that a railway strike might go on so long that people forgot the very purpose of a railway station. Railway porters would not even know that they were railway porters; and even the stationmaster would be ignorant of the mysterious secret of his mastery. Most of us have had a fancy that all society is like that strange railway station; that its social actions have some hieratic significance lost before the beginning of history; that it was made it knows not why; and is waiting for it knows not what. For the end of such a play or parable would be something truly terrific, like the Day of Judgment. When the signals changed colours at last, it would truly be like the moon turning to blood in the Apocalypse. Something utterly unthinkable, like the thunder and the seals and trumpets of the Last Day, would transform my quiet railway-station. A train would come in at last.

  But my fancy chiefly rests on the remote generations of the future in this simple community, descended from the original primitive marriages between a few railway porters and a few barmaids. By that time the little commonwealth ought to have a whole tangle of traditions ultimately to be traced back to the lost idea of a train. Perhaps people would still go religiously to the ticket-office at intervals, as to a kind of confessional box; and there recite the names of far-off and by this time fabulous places; the word `Harrow’ sounding like the word `Heaven’ or the word `Ealing’ like the word `Eden’. For this society would of course, like every other, produce sceptics; that is men who had lost their social memory. All sorts of quaint ceremonials would survive, and would be scoffed at as irrational, because their rational origin had been obscured. At a date centuries hence, the clock in the refreshment room would still be kept a little fast, as compared with the clock in the station. There would be most complicated controversies about this custom; turning on things behind the times and things in advance of the age. The bookstall would have come to be something like the Bodleian or the great lost library of Alexandria; a storehouse of ancestral documents of primitive antiquity and profound obscurity; and learned men would be found spelling their way through a paragraph in one of our daily papers, deluded with the ever-vanishing hope of finding a sort of human meaning in it. The fountain seems to be the only possible religious centre of the village; though I think the mysterious image of the great ship should be the type of some faint adventurous memory and adventurous hope; a vague hint of things beyond; perhaps a great legend like that of the Argo. But a fountain is clearly the more human and historic site for a shrine. It would be dedicated, I hope, to a saint; as are so many springs and wells all over Christendom. And now I come to think of it, the very name of this railway station, like so much also that sounds cockney and commonplace, has an origin presumably religious. There could hardly be a more beautiful combination of words and ideas than that which I imagine to lie behind the prosaic name of Marylebone.

  I had intended to draw a moral, or many morals from this vision. I had intended to point out how much our own society suffers from a similar paradox; not that its institutions are meaningless; but on the contrary, that they have a meaning, which would be found again if the society woke up and went to work again. It is only because they are asleep that they seem to be senseless. If the trains were running, if the traditions were working, the traditions would be instantly recognized as reasonable. Thus the modern world does not really suffer from scurry, but rather from slumber. I had in mind especially what I may call the Allegory of the Lost Luggage, or of the Cloak Room, which is concerned with the philosophy of property. Property is still being defended by a dim sense of duty; though it is really held up in transit and accumulated in the wrong place. But I cannot pursue my guess; for something has happened in the Scotch railway station which dissipates all my dreams of the happier English railway station. My train has come in.

  BETHLEHEM AND THE GREAT CITIES

  I WAS once at the same dinner-table with a newspaper proprietor who regarded himself, and was regarded, as the dictator of Europe and who really was by far too great an extent the dictator of England. He also was interested in Palestine, and in the course of conversation I learned that he had never even heard of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. I suppose he had seen Crusaders in pictures or at fancy-dress balls; but he had no notion of what they did, and certainly no notion that what they did was to conquer and make Palestine a part of Europe for a hundred years, filling it with abbeys like those of Glastonbury or St. Andrew’s and castles like those of Conway and Caernarvon. Now that is a point that interests me a great deal because the traces of it are very obvious to any traveller who happens to have been there. The first fact that strikes him about Jerusalem is that it is a medieval town; long before it strikes him specially as an oriental town. It has that curious combination of cosiness and defiance that belongs to the walled cities and painted pales and fences of the life of the Middle Ages. The latest walls were built by the successors of the Saracens but they are not in our sense Saracenic. Most of the windows and gates are in their whole spirit Gothic. The Franciscan going by with his beard and brown habit under those grey Gothic walls seems to be entirely in the picture, and even in the conventional picture. It is rather the Arab coming in with his coloured turban or burnous who seems for the moment, if only by a sort of optical illusion, to be a stranger and one straying from a far-off eastern land.

  I had a rather parallel experience when I first saw Rome. In the case of Rome, as in the case of Jerusalem, people seem to have lost their own first impressions in the disproportionate emphasis of detail among guides and guide-books. The general impression of Rome is not the Forum or even the Coliseum. We might almost say that they are to St. Peter’s what Stonehenge is to Salisbury Cathedral. The overwhelming impression is not that of Pagan but of Papal Rome; but especially Rome of the Renaissance Popes. I say it is the overwhelming impression; it could not be to everybody a pleasing impression. It might annoy a man, not only if he were narrowly Puritan, but also if he were too narrowly medieval. It did annoy Ruskin and might well have annoyed William Morris. Nor is their criticism a thing merely to be criticized; there is in that classical exuberance much that is really florid and false. But that is the impression; and it is quite certainly the stamp and imprint of the great Popes of the Renaissance. Renaissance Rome is not merely heathen, any more than Jerusalem is merely Jewish or merely Moslem. In those huge fountains where the Tritons look like Titans in the twilight, they have none the less been really baptized by these waters. The cross on top of the primeval obelisks is not a contradiction but a culmination. The culmination culminates on that high column where Our Lady stands at once vanquishing and exalting the symbol of Diana, with her foot upon the horns of the moon.