I say it is something that can be found, though at first it seemed rather like something that could not be found. In truth, in that remarkable little fane of the flats, we might be said to have found everything but what we were looking for. There were indeed medieval paintings; and very fine ones, by no means hidden but splendidly displayed. Fronting us as we entered the church door, in a great row across the rood-screen, stood the Twelve Apostles, six on each side, with their rich colours somewhat darkened but their gold in full glow, and their emblems and tools of martyrdom unmistakable. Facing inwards, opposite each other, were two figures of St Michael and St George, treated somewhat in a heraldic manner. I mean the manner that looks arbitrary until we realise that it is decorative. The armament of St George seemed fantastic and top-heavy even for the tilting armour of the fourteenth century; the feathers of St Michael seemed to be sprouting from strange parts of him, as from the body of a monster. Only when we consider it as we do a coat of arms, as a pattern more than a picture, we suddenly realise that every line of it is in exactly the right place. High above all these there was a much more faded figure of St Etheldreda, the great Christian foundress and patron of those parts; looking down perhaps the more impressively for seeming more like a ghost or a great shadow on the wall.

  This was, in the strict sense of the word, all very fine; but it was not what we had come to see. The attitude of the Apostles however darkly traced, could not be mistaken for the postures of gentlemen when duck-shooting. St George was clearly occupied in killing a dragon and not a duck. St Michael’s wings might seem to be sticking out of him in an arbitrary and ornamental fashion; but they did not recall the wings of a duck, or even what the Psalmist coveted as the wings of a dove. Besides, St Michael is more associated with a goose. Nobody would venture to call St Etheldreda a duck. We concluded that the rumour about pictures of duck-hunting in the Fens must have been a rumour without foundation. In short, the duck was only a canard.

  Just as we were trailing out of the church in disappointment and even despair, so far as our duck-hunting expedition was concerned, my friend gave a cry; and I turned in the very porch to look back at him. He was bending over the figure representing St Paul, which wore a long inner garment elaborately embroidered with gold; we had both passed it over as a pattern merely adding richness to the general design. But on looking closer, I found that the Apostle of the Gentiles was all over ducks. He was, so to speak, crawling with ducks, with ducks and dogs pursuing them in one pantomimic dance all over the gilded pattern. It was here that the artist had crowded all his comic sketches of the sports of his native fens. It was a very good pattern, but it was made of quite grotesque pictures. It might have been the design for the fancy waistcoat of a fat gentleman in one of the Dickens novels. The first of all the Dickens novels, by the way, was originally written to illustrate some grotesque sketches of sport. It is not too much to say that, in the original scheme of the publishers, Mr Pickwick merely existed for the sake of Mr Winkle. Mr Winkle might very well have gone duck-shooting in the fens, as he went skating on the ice or riding on the famous horse that went sideways. The sporting artist employed on that occasion would doubtless have been ready to depict him surrounded by any number of ducks and dogs. But he would have been mildly surprised if he had been asked to depict them as part of the decoration of the parish church, to say nothing of the vestments of the parson. But the older artist saw nothing incongruous in depicting them thus in mazy detail between the massive book and the mighty sword, that stood for that terrible convert who was struck down upon the road to Damascus.

  Now that is the answer to the question I have already asked and that is why this pointless anecdote is also a parable. People were able to shut their eyes to the big church because it was only a church, however big; and they did not think of deducing anything from it about the number of houses or the nature of households. Because the framework of so much of medieval life was a religious framework, they never even looked at the picture in the frame. They passed it over exactly as anyone looking at the painted figures of the Twelve Apostles passed over all the lively little animals of which its ornament was made up. Thus, to take only one example, popular history seldom takes account of the large numbers of medieval people more or less loosely attached to the Church without being in the full sense either priests or monks: students, members of lay orders and men who were merely clerks in the sense of pleading benefit of clergy; that is, being under the milder law of the Church rather than the harsher law of the State. All this popular life, I suspect, moved normally within more or less clerical enclosures, as the details of the decoration seemed to dance within the enclosure of the main lines of the design. In the gradual revival of the study of such a period, we have had to investigate the religious life in order to discover the secular life. We have had to search the cathedrals to find the guilds; as my friend had to scrutinise the saint in order to find the hounds and the birds. There is no way to those things except through that Gothic porch; and this was realised even by the great men like Morris and Rossetti who might well have wished, for some other reason, to come in by some other way. But none ever came in by any other way except the thieves and the robbers.

  There are thousands of little things like that to be found in every corner of what is left of medieval craft and culture. I have taken this small instance because it is small, and because it is the last that has occurred to me. The study of these old things has to be intensive study; just as the cultivation of them anew would have to be an intensive cultivation.

  Travellers’ Joys

  Once when I was wandering about in the beautiful city of Bath, I fell into a vein of meditation not concerned with any of the antiquities of the place, as such things are counted in a guidebook. My reflections, though profound and philosophical, were not concerned with the Bath of Bath, which recalls the Roman foundation of Britain. They were not concerned with the Abbey of Bath, which recalls the Middle Ages; nor with the Pump Room or Assembly Room which recall the stately frivolity of the eighteenth century. I was not even thinking of that noble theme, the Wife of Bath, a medieval monument which seems even more gigantic than an abbey.

  If anyone really wants to know why some of us have a taste for what is called `medievalism’, he can find a great deal of it in that grand and grotesque personality. But the point is that the Wife of Bath was coming from Bath, and not going to Bath. When we consider what her errand was, and then what she was, we realise the wide reach and grasp of religion upon the motley mob of mankind. The Wife of Bath is a sort of caricature carved in brass; as brazen as Mrs Gamp and with as broad a grin. But who can imagine Dickens, who described so many wanderings in Kent, describing Mrs Gamp as going on a pilgrimage to the shrine of a saint? I suppose the whole stretch of history from the medieval to the modern world, might be summed up in the reversal of that journey. It is the change from the time when the Wife of Bath went to sprinkle herself with holy water at Canterbury, to the time when the Archbishop of Canterbury probably went to sprinkle himself with medicinal water at Bath. But it was not of such trifles as the towers of Canterbury or the Roman floors of Bath that I was musing mystically at the moment.

  My mind was uplifted and attuned to the subject of buns. I was reflecting upon the remarkable fact that, to a great extent, it is still necessary to go to Bath for Bath buns. I have, indeed, encountered in my travels in less civilised places something apparently intended for food, to which is attached the name of the Roman city of Somerset. But, after tasting it, I have come to the conclusion that the derivation is different. These other objects, I conceive, are very legitimately called Bath buns because they are made of soap and flannel. But to a great extent, in spite of the modern network of communications and dead level of standardisation, a Bath bun still means a bun of Bath. The same is true in its degree, I believe, in the case of Chelsey buns. It may be true, for all I know, of those unique cakes of Richmond, gloriously described as Maids of Honour. It may be that, before standardisation began, there were these local luxuries in nearly every locality. Perhaps there were Pimlico Pancakes which were the rich reward of crossing the meadows to the picturesque hamlet of Pimlico. Perhaps Clapham produced a sweetmeat as well as a sect; and Mayfair was famous for toffee before it was famous for toffs. But over all districts that have been surrounded and swallowed by the big industrial cities, there runs the rule of the great commercial combinations, and all such individual things have perished.

  I do not insist that nobody must be allowed to eat Brussels sprouts except in Brussels. I do not demand that everyone who likes Jerusalem artichokes should take staff and scrip and make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. I do not say that Turkish delight should delight none but Turks or travellers in Turkey. I do not even insist (though it would be a fine heroic idea, worthy of a romance of Scott or Stevenson) that no person should be permitted to taste Edinburgh Rock until he has earned it by scaling the steep and splendid facade of the Rock of Edinburgh. Some of these are merely names; and some of them do still carry with them something of the savour and the pride of nations. But in England, in those exquisitely English centres, the old provincial towns, we did manage to produce good things whose very glory was in being provincial.

  It was worth a man’s while to go from one town to another, and even from one county to another, to find things that he could not find at home. Thus there was a very real romance of travel, for romantic as well as for religious pilgrims. The traveller plodded along the Bath Road sustained from afar by the vista of the Bath Bun. He saw the cake peculiar to Richmond shining like a guiding star more brilliant than the Star and Garter. And though this may not seem the loftiest sort of star for a wise man to follow, yet these material luxuries had their moral significance, and stand in social criticism today as the symbols of something much deeper and wider than themselves. They illustrate something that is not only wanting in our latest social development, but something not immediately likely to be developed.

  Thus travel in the true sense has become impossible in the large urban or urbanised districts. There are twenty ways of going everywhere, and there is nowhere to go. There are a hundred improved means of communication and there is nothing to communicate. A traveller in simpler times travelled with two legitimate and even estimable objects; first to see strange things in the places he went to; and second, to boast about the country he came from. Both these admirable arts are bound to suffer neglect and negation under existing conditions, when the place he finds is exactly like the place he leaves. All such places are alike, plastered with the same advertisements, blocked up with the same big shops, selling the same newspapers, attending the same schools.

  There is therefore no real meaning in his travels, apart from the permanent personal interest of humanity. But the general spirit of travel, the desire to see new folk or new customs, all that has been ruined by the commercial concentration of modern times. I do not object to a reasonable number of things being scattered over the whole world, to remind the traveller of home and of the bond of mankind. I have seen The Illustrated London News for instance, in remote mud villages of Spain, or in caravanserais on the edge of the desert; and I am quite prepared to find it in the dark forests of Africa or the islands of the Southern Seas. But the Spanish villages and the Arab settlements were themselves quite different from London and the London News.

  If each of our separate towns and villages were cut off by some happy catastrophe such as being snowed up or turned into an island by a flood, that town or village might begin to produce its own magazines, It might produce its own style of architecture, its own school of poets. It might produce something of its own out of the soil, instead of passing on something from somewhere else to somewhere else; as if every human town were no more than a railway junction It might be encouraged to use all the talent within its reach; instead of having that talent swamped and swept away by mere floods of fashion and rumour, from the ends of the earth. Then the true type of the traveller and the pilgrim might reappear upon the earth. Then it would really be worth while to cross the hills from one valley to another; for, entering a new valley, he would enter a new world. There would be more fun to wander over a part of England than it is today to wander over all the earth. The old fairy-tales, that told of a man coming to one kingdom where the houses were built of gold, or another where the fountains ran with wine, were but the legitimate literary exaggeration of the experience of real travellers, who found one peasantry wearing gilded headdresses or another brewing golden ale. But in our present phase travel has destroyed the traveller; and there is nowhere for the pilgrim to go save on a spiritual journey — the only possible pilgrim’s progress.

  Understanding France

  It is curious, but very obvious, that internationalists are never interpreters between nations. It is what their name almost implies; it is what we should logically expect them to be, or at any rate try to be. And yet they do not do it, and I rather doubt whether they really try. What happens is that the internationalist, while he is often mildly but sincerely horrified at the nationalism of his own nation, is almost always even more horrified at the nationalism of some other nation. And it so happens, as the history of humanity has in fact developed, that very often the nationalism is the nation.

  Take the nearest and clearest case; the ancient but by no means primeval rivalry between England and France. In the early Middle Ages they were very nearly one nation. In the later Middle Ages, they were the first of the new and clearly distinguishable nations: on the one side by the splendid accident of Agincourt; on the other by something rather too splendid to be called an accident: St Joan. But ever since then, roughly speaking the two nations drifted further and further apart. And for anybody who is content with nations as nations, or with a very crude and clean-cut sort of nationalism, that might be natural enough. But what has the internationalist been doing? What about the man who talks with particular earnestness about the need for peace among the peoples, for mutual understanding among men of every race and realm, about friendliness to foreigners or humanity to natives? Has he, for instance, ever attempted to explain France to England? The extraordinary fact is that he has never done anything of the kind. He has always been the very last to do anything of the kind.

  Few ordinary Englishmen, whether Imperialist or Internationalist, have ever really grasped even what was meant by the greatness of France. But the Internationalist has grasped it much less than the Imperialist. There is much more sense of it in the poems of Mr Kipling than in the pamphlets of Mr Wells. But what is really needed is a widening of English culture, so as to understand what was really valued in French culture. Passing over all that earlier French history, in which the King of Paris had not yet fully become the King of France, we may note even in passing that the Crusades were a French affair; and we only fail to realise the fact because at that time our own monarchy and nobility were as French as the French. St Louis did not succeed in his Crusade; not even with the abortive success of Coeur de Lion. But St Louis does explain the Crusades, while Coeur de Lion rather confuses them. The main modern matter of which I speak, however, begins with the Renaissance and all that gigantic tradition that springs from Rabelais. Does it strike you that the worthy Nonconformist minister, who preaches against militarism and in favour of international pacifism, would be the very best man in the world to translate Rabelais?

  Then follows what the French call with a pride that is perfectly logical in a Frenchman but has been allowed to remain almost unintelligible to an Englishman, the Great Century. Nobody knows anything about France, or even about Europe, who does not know that the Great Century was great. Our historians have seen nothing but bombast in the instinct or imagination which compared Louis the Fourteenth to the Sun. But there is no historical truth without historical imagination. And it is much nearer the truth to compare him to a sun-god than to compare him to a pompous dancing-master, in the manner of the narrow national bigotry of Macaulay. Some English literary men have begun to do justice to the great age of Racine and Pascal and the fullness of the Golden Age of classicism. Mr Sacheverell Sitwell, in an excellent study of the Baroque, has a truly imaginative and therefore understanding description of one of those great pageants in which royalty was such a reality that it could carry any load of artifice; and in which it seemed something quite spiritual and spontaneous, like a song, that the King should not only go clad in gold, but clothed with the sun. Mr Maurice Baring has repeatedly insisted with great force and humour, that the notion that Racine is merely stilted and dull is worth as much as the impression of a Breton fisherman that Milton is only stilted and dull: it arises from the rather simple cause of incapacity to read a foreign language.

  There have been some good English translations of good French books on the tremendous and even tragic religious quarrel, the Jansenists and the Jesuits and the rest; a huge hinge or turning point in the whole history of Christianity. There have even been a few English critics capable of reading and reviewing the English translations. But the Rev. Timothy Tooting, who is a pacifist because he disapproves of all fights except bun-fights, who serves out cocoa but has never touched `alcohol’, and who holds meetings to promote the peace of the world — do you suppose that he has contributed very much to the understanding of the procession of the great Kings and the pride in the glory of Gaul? But until we understand that pride we shall never understand the point of view of a Frenchman. Again, the odd thing is that the Rev. Timothy Tooting was equally shocked at the great Kings and at the great rebellion against the great Kings. His remarks about the French Revolution and especially about Napoleon are just as silly and sniffy as his remarks about the French Monarchy, and especially about Louis the Fourteenth. And the remarks made about Napoleon by Mr Wells, who has some prejudices in common with Mr Tooting, are of the sort that might be excusable in a very stupid half-pay Tory captain who had served under Nelson, but are certainly not worthy either of Napoleon or of Mr Wells. Yet it is precisely men like Mr Wells who set out elaborately to reconcile the nations; to bring about what they call a better understanding between them. I suggest that he begin by reconciling England and France, and achieving a better understanding, or any sort of understanding, of France.