First and Last

H >> H. Belloc >> First and Last

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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.

On the Sources of Rivers

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.

On Error

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.

The Great Sight

All night we had slept on straw in a high barn. The wood of its beams
was very old, and the tiles upon the roof were green with age; but there
hung from beam to beam, fantastically, a wire caught by nails, and here
and there from this wire hung an electric-light bulb. It was a symbol of
the time, and the place, and the people. There was no local by-law to
forbid such a thing, or if there was, no one dreamt of obeying it.

Just in the first dawn of that September day we went out, my companion
and I, at guesswork to hunt in the most amusing kind of hunting, which
is the hunting of an army. The lane led through one of those lovely
ravines of Picardy which travellers never know (for they only see the
plains), and in a little while we thought it wise to strike up the steep
bank from the valley on to the bare plateau above, but it was all at
random and all guesswork, only we wisely thought that we were nearing
the beginning of things, and that on the bare fields of the high flat we
should have a greater horizon and a better chance of catching any
indications of men or arms.

When we had reached the height the sun had long risen, but it as yet
gave no shining and there were no shadows, for a delicate mist hung all
about the landscape, though immediately above us the sky was faintly
blue.

It was the weirdest of sensations to go for mile after mile over that
vast plain, to know that it was cut in regular series by parallel
ravines which in all that extended view we could not guess at; to see up
to the limits of the plateau the spires of villages and the groups of
trees about them, and to know that somewhere in all this there lay
concealed a _corps d'armee_--and not to see or hear a soul. The
only human being that we saw was a man driving a heavy farm cart very
slowly up a side-way just as we came into the great road which has shot
dead across this country in one line ever since the Romans built it. As
we went along that road, leaving the fields, we passed by many men
indeed, and many houses, all in movement with the early morning; and the
chalked numbers on the doors, and here and there an empty tin of
polishing-paste or an order scrawled on paper and tacked to a wall
betrayed the passage of soldiers. But of the army there was nothing at
all. Scouting on foot (for that was what it was) is a desperate
business, and that especially if you have nothing to tell you whether
you will get in touch in five, or ten, or twenty miles.

It was nine o'clock before a clatter of horse-hoofs came up the road
behind us. At first my companion and I wondered whether it were the
first riders of the Dragoons or Cuirassiers. In that case the advance
was from behind us. But very soon, as the sound grew clearer, we heard
how few they were, and then there came into view, trotting rapidly, a
small escort and two officers with the umpires' badges, so there was
nothing doing; but when, half a mile ahead of us on the road, they
turned off to the left over plough, we knew that that was the way we
must follow too. Before we came to the turning-place, before we left the
road to take the fields on the left, there came from far off and on our
right the sound of a gun.

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