First and Last Part 11

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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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.

The Eye-Openers

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 sh.o.r.es 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 Suss.e.x or c.u.mberland 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 _creme 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 Setif 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 Suss.e.x 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 cafe! 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-cla.s.s 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 sc.r.a.ping 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 "Depeche" 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, t.i.tled, 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.

The Public

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 b.u.t.t. 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-cla.s.s 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 G.o.d 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 cla.s.s 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 cuira.s.s 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.

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.