First and Last

H >> H. Belloc >> First and Last

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What has happened? These two men with their keen, feminine faces, these
two great heroes of a great time in the great story of a great people of
this world, are not there. They are nowhere. But the site remains.

Philosophers can put in formulae the crowd of suggestions that rush into
the mind when one's soul contemplates the perpetual march and passage of
mortality. But they can do no more than give us formularies: they cannot
give us replies. What are we? What is all this business? Why does the
mere space remain and all the rest dissolve?

There is a lonely place in the woods of Chilham, in the County of Kent,
above the River Stour, where a man comes upon an irregular earthwork
still plainly marked upon the brow of the bluff. Nobody comes near this
place. A vague country lane, or rather track; goes past the wet soil of
it, plunges into the valley beyond, and after serving a windmill joins
the high road to Canterbury. Well, that vague track is the ancient
British road, as old as anything in this Island, that took men from
Winchester to the Straits of Dover. That earthwork is the earthwork (I
could prove it, but this is not the place) where the British stood
against the charge of the Tenth Legion, and first heard, sounding on
their bronze, the arms of Caesar. Here the river was forded; here the
little men of the South went up in formation; here the Barbarian broke
and took his way, as the opposing General has recorded, through devious
woodland paths, scattering in the pursuit; here began the great history
of England.

Is it not an enormous business merely to stand in such a place? I think
so.

I know a field to the left of the Chalons Road, some few miles before
you get to Ste. Menehould. There used to be an inn by the roadside
called "The Sign of the Moon." It has disappeared. There used to be a
ramshackle windmill beyond the field, a mile or so from the road, on an
upland swell of land, but that also has gone, and had been gone for some
time before I knew the field of which I write. It is a bare fold of land
with one or two little scrubby spinneys alongside the plough. And for
the rest, just the brown earth and the sky. There are days on which you
will see a man at work somewhere within that mile, others on which it is
completely deserted. Here it is that the French Revolution was
preserved. Here was the Prussian charge. On the deserted, ugly lump of
empty earth beyond you were the three batteries that checked the
invaders. It was all alive and crowded for one intense moment with the
fate of Christendom. Here, on the place in which you are standing and
gazing, young Goethe stood and gazed. That meaningless stretch of coarse
grass supported Brunswick and the King of Prussia, and the brothers of
the King of France, as they stood windswept in the rain, watching the
failure of the charge. It is the field of Valmy. Turn on that height and
look back westward and you see the plains rolling out infinitely; they
are the plains upon which Attila was crushed; but there is no one there.

All men have remarked that night and silence are august, and I think
that if this quality in night and silence be closely examined it will be
found to consist, in part at least, in this: that either of them
symbolizes Absence. By a paradox which I will not attempt to explain,
but which all have felt, it is in silence and in darkness that the Past
most vividly returns, and that this absence of what once was possesses,
nay, obtrudes itself upon the mind: it becomes almost a sensible thing.
There is much to be said for those who pretend, imagine, or perhaps have
experienced under such conditions the return of the dead. The mood of
darkness and of silence is a mood crammed with something that does not
remain, as space remains, that is limited by time, and is a creature of
time, and yet something that has an immortal right to remain.

Now, I suppose that in that sentence where I say things mortal have
immortal rights to permanence, the core of the whole business is touched
upon. And I suppose that the great men who could really think and did
not merely fire off fireworks to dazzle their contemporaries--I suppose
that Descartes, for instance, if he were here sitting at my table--could
help me to solve that contradiction; but I sit and think and cannot
solve it.

"What," says the man upon his own land, inherited perhaps and certainly
intended for his posterity--"what! Can you separate me from this? Are
not this and I bound up inextricably?" The answer is "No; you are not so
far as any observer of this world can discover. Space is in no way
possessed by man, and he who may render a site immortal in one of our
various ways, the captain who there conquered, the poet who there
established his sequence of words, cannot himself put forward a claim to
permanence within it at all."

There was a woman of charming vivacity, whose eyes were ever ready for
laughter, and whose tone of address of itself provoked the noblest of
replies. Many loved her; all admired. She passed (I will suppose) by
this street or by that; she sat at table in such and such a house;
Gainsborough painted her; and all that time ago there were men who had
the luck to meet her and to answer her laughter with their own. And the
house where she moved is there and the street in which she walked, and
the very furniture she used and touched with her hands you may touch
with your hands. You shall come into the rooms that she inhabited, and
there you shall see her portrait, all light and movement and grace and
beatitude.

She is gone altogether, the voice will never return, the gestures will
never be seen again. She was under a law; she changed, she suffered, she
grew old, she died; and there was her place left empty. The not living
things remain; but what counted, what gave rise to them, what made them
all that they are, has pitifully disappeared, and the greater, the
infinitely greater, thing was subject to a doom perpetually of change
and at last of vanishing. The dead surroundings are not subject to such
a doom. Why?

All those boys who held the line of the low ridge or rather swell of
land from Hougoumont through the Belle Alliance have utterly gone. More
than dust goes, more than wind goes; they will never be seen again.
Their voices will never be heard--they are not. But what is the mere
soil of the field without them? What meaning has it save for their
presence?

I could wish to understand these things.

St. Patrick

If there is one thing that people who are not Catholic have gone wrong
upon more than another in the intellectual things of life, it is the
conception of a Personality. They are muddled about it where their own
little selves are concerned, they misappreciate it when they deal with
the problems of society, and they have a very weak hold of it when they
consider (if they do consider) the nature of Almighty God.

Now, personality is everything. It was a Personal Will that made all
things, visible and invisible. Our hope of immortality resides in this,
that we are persons, and half our frailties proceed from a
misapprehension of the awful responsibilities which personality involves
or a cowardly ignorance of its powers of self-government.

The hundred and one errors which this main error leads to include a bad
error on the nature of history. Your modern non-Catholic or
anti-Catholic historian is always misunderstanding, underestimating, or
muddling the role played in the affairs of men by great and individual
Personalities. That is why he is so lamentably weak upon the function of
legend; that is why he makes a fetish of documentary evidence and has no
grip upon the value of tradition. For traditions spring from some
personality invariably, and the function of legend, whether it be a
rigidly true legend or one tinged with make-believe, is to interpret
Personality. Legends have vitality and continue, because in their origin
they so exactly serve to explain or illustrate some personal character
in a man which no cold statement could give.

Now St. Patrick, the whole story and effect of him, is a matter of
Personality. There was once--twenty or thirty years ago--a whole school
of dunderheads who wondered whether St. Patrick ever existed, because
the mass of legends surrounding his name troubled them. How on earth
(one wonders) do such scholars consider their fellow-beings! Have they
ever seen a crowd cheering a popular hero, or noticed the expression
upon men's faces when they spoke of some friend of striking power
recently dead? A great growth of legends around a man is the very best
proof you could have not only of his existence but of the fact that he
was an origin and a beginning, and that things sprang from his will or
his vision. There were some who seemed to think it a kind of favour done
to the indestructible body of Irish Catholicism when Mr. Bury wrote his
learned Protestant book upon St. Patrick. It was a critical and very
careful bit of work, and was deservedly praised; but the favour done us
I could not see! It is all to the advantage of non-Catholic history that
it should be sane, and that a great Protestant historian should make
true history out of a great historical figure was a very good sign. It
was a long step back towards common sense compared with the German
absurdities which had left their victims doubting almost all the solid
foundation of the European story; but as for us Catholics, we had no
need to be told it. Not only was there a St. Patrick in history, but
there is a St. Patrick on the shores of his eastern sea and throughout
all Ireland to-day. It is a presence that stares you in the face, and
physically almost haunts you. Let a man sail along the Leinster coast on
such a day as renders the Wicklow Mountains clear up-weather behind him,
and the Mourne Mountains perhaps in storm, lifted clearly above the sea
down the wind. He is taking some such course as that on which St.
Patrick sailed, and if he will land from time to time from his little
boat at the end of each day's sailing, and hear Mass in the morning
before he sails further northward, he will know in what way St. Patrick
inhabits the soil which he rendered sacred.

We know that among the marks of holiness is the working of miracles.
Ireland is the greatest miracle any saint ever worked. It is a miracle
and a nexus of miracles. Among other miracles it is a nation raised from
the dead.

The preservation of the Faith by the Irish is an historical miracle
comparable to nothing else in Europe. There never was, and please God
never can be, so prolonged and insanely violent a persecution of men by
their fellow-men as was undertaken for centuries against the Faith in
Ireland: and it has completely failed. I know of no example in history
of failure following upon such effort. It had behind it in combination
the two most powerful of the evil passions of men, terror and greed. And
so amazing is it that they did not attain their end, that perpetually as
one reads one finds the authors of the dreadful business now at one
period, now at another, assuming with certitude that their success is
achieved. Then, after centuries, it is almost suddenly perceived--and in
our own time--that it has not been achieved and never will be.

What a complexity of strange coincidences combined, coming out of
nothing as it were, advancing like spirits summoned on to the stage, all
to effect this end! Think of the American Colonies; with one little
exception they were perhaps the most completely non-Catholic society of
their time. Their successful rebellion against the mother country meant
many things, and led to many prophecies. Who could have guessed that one
of its chief results would be the furnishing of a free refuge for the
Irish?

The famine, all human opinion imagined, and all human judgment was bound
to conclude, was a mortal wound, coming in as the ally of the vile
persecution I have named. It has turned out the very contrary. From it
there springs indirectly the dispersion, and that power which comes from
unity in dispersion, of Irish Catholicism.

Who, looking at the huge financial power that dominated Europe, and
England in particular, during the youth of our own generation, could
have dreamt that in any corner of Europe, least of all in the poorest
and most ruined corner of Christendom, an effective resistance could be
raised?

Behind the enemies of Ireland, furnishing them with all their modern
strength, was that base and secret master of modern things, the usurer.
He it was far more than the gentry of the island who demanded toll, and,
through the mortgages on the Irish estates, had determined to drain
Ireland as he has drained and rendered desert so much else. Is it not a
miracle that he has failed?

Ireland is a nation risen from the dead; and to raise one man from the
dead is surely miraculous enough to convince one of the power of a great
spirit. This miracle, as I am prepared to believe, is the last and the
greatest of St. Patrick's.

When I was last in Ireland, I bought in the town of Wexford a coloured
picture of St. Patrick which greatly pleased me. Most of it was green in
colour, and St. Patrick wore a mitre and had a crosier in his hand. He
was turning into the sea a number of nasty reptiles: snakes and toads
and the rest. I bought this picture because it seemed to me as modern a
piece of symbolism as ever I had seen: and that was why I bought it for
my children and for my home.

There was a few pence change, but I did not want it. The person who sold
me the picture said they would spend the change in candles for St.
Patrick's altar. So St. Patrick is still alive.

The Lost Things

I never remember an historian yet, nor a topographer either, who could
tell me, or even pretend to explain by a theory, how it was that certain
things of the past utterly and entirely disappear.

It is a commonplace that everything is subject to decay, and a
commonplace which the false philosophy of our time is too apt to forget.
Did we remember that commonplace we should be a little more humble in
our guesswork, especially where it concerns prehistory; and we should
not make so readily certain where the civilization of Europe began, nor
limit its immense antiquity. But though it is a commonplace, and a true
one, that all human work is subject to decay, there seems to be an
inexplicable caprice in the method and choice of decay.

Consider what a body of written matter there must have been to instruct
and maintain the technical excellence of Roman work. What a mass of
books on engineering and on ship-building and on road-making; what
quantities of tables and ready-reckoners, all that civilization must
have produced and depended upon. Time has preserved much verse, and not
only the best by any means, more prose, particularly the theological
prose of the end of the Roman time. The technical stuff, which must, in
the nature of things, have been indefinitely larger in amount, has (save
in one or two instances and allusions) gone.

Consider, again, all that mass of seven hundred years which was called
Carthage. It was not only seven hundred years of immense wealth, of
oligarchic government, of a vast population, and of what so often goes
with commerce and oligarchy--civil and internal peace. A few stones to
prove the magnitude of its municipal work, a few ornaments, a few
graves--all the rest is absolutely gone. A few days' marches away there
is an example I have quoted so often elsewhere that I am ashamed of
referring to it again, but it does seem to me the most amazing example
of historical loss in the world. It is the site of Hippo Regius. Here
was St. Augustine's town, one of the greatest and most populous of a
Roman province. It was so large that an army of eighty thousand men
could not contain it, and even with such a host its siege dragged on for
a year. There is not a sign of that great town today.

A suburb, well without the walls--to be more accurate, a neighbouring
village--carries on the name under the form of Bona, and that is all. A
vast, fertile plain of black rich earth, now largely planted with
vineyards, stands where Hippo stood. How can the stones have gone? How
can it have been worth while to cart away the marble columns? Why are
there no broken statues on such a ground, and no relics of the gods?

Nay, the wells are stopped up from which the people drank, and the
lining of the wells is not to be discovered in the earth, and the
foundations of the walls, and even the ornaments of the people and their
coins, all these have been spirited away.

Then there are the roads. Consider that great road which reached from
Amiens to the main port of Gaul, the Portus Itius at Boulogne. It is
still in use. It was in use throughout the Middle Ages. Up that road the
French Army marched to Crecy. It points straight to its goal upon the
sea coast. Its whole purpose lay in reaching the goal. For some
extraordinary reason, which I have never seen explained or even guessed
at, there comes a point as it nears the coast where it suddenly ceases
to be.

No sand has blown over it. It runs through no marshes; the land is firm
and fertile. Why should that, the most important section of the great
road which led northward from Rome, have failed, and have failed so
recently, in the history of man? Where this great road crosses streams
and might reasonably be lost, at its _pontes_, its bridges, it has
remained, and is of such importance as to have given a name to a whole
countryside--_Ponthieu_. But north of that it is gone.

Nearly every Roman road of Gaul and Britain presents something of the
same puzzle in some parts of its course. It will run clear and
followable enough, or form a modern highway for mile upon mile, and then
not at a marsh where one would expect its disappearance, nor in some
desolate place where it might have fallen out of use, but in the
neighbourhood of a great city and at the very chief of its purpose, it
is gone. It is so with the Stane Street that led up from the garrison of
Chichester and linked it with the garrison of London. You can
reconstruct it almost to a yard until you reach Epsom Downs. There you
find it pointing to London Bridge, and remaining as clear as in any
other part of its course: much clearer than in most other sections. But
try to follow it on from Epsom Racecourse, and you entirely fail. The
soil is the same; the conditions of that soil are excellent for its
retention; but a year's work has taught me that there is no
reconstructing it save by hypothesis and guesswork from this point to
the crossing of the Thames.

What happened to all that mass of local documents whereby we ought to be
able to build up the territorial scheme and the landed regime of old
France? Much remains, if you will, in the shape of chance charters and
family papers. Even in the archives of Paris you can get enough to whet
your curiosity. But not even in one narrow district can you obtain
enough to reconstruct the whole truth. There is not a scholar in Europe
who can tell you exactly how land was owned and held, even, let us say,
on the estates of Rheims or by the family of Conde. And men are ready to
quarrel as to how many peasants owned and how much of their present
ownership was due to the Revolution, evidence has already become so
wholly imperfect in that tiny stretch of historical time.

But, after all, perhaps one ought not to wonder too much that material
things should thus capriciously vanish. Time, which has secured Timgad
so that it looks like an unroofed city of yesterday, has swept and razed
Laimboesis. The two towns were neighbours--one was taken and the other
left--and there is no sort of reason any man can give for it. Perhaps
one ought not too much to wonder, for a greater wonder still is the
sudden evaporation and loss of the great movements of the human soul.
That what our ancestors passionately believed or passionately disputed
should, by their descendants in one generation or in two, become
meaningless, absurd, or false--this is the greatest marvel and the
greatest tragedy of all.

On the Reading of History

Let me at the beginning of this short article present two facts to the
reader. Neither can be disputed, and that is why I call them facts and
put them in the forefront before I begin upon my theories.

The first fact is that the record of what men have done in the past and
how they have done it is the chief positive guide to present action. The
second fact is that most men must now receive the impression of the past
through reading.

Put these two facts together and you get the fundamental truth that upon
the right reading of history the right use of citizenship in England
today will depend. It will of course depend upon other things as well:
chiefly upon the human conscience; for if you were to pack off to an
island a hundred families as ignorant as any human families can be of
tradition, and wholly ignorant of positive history, those families would
yet be able to create a human society and the voice of God within them
would give just limits to their actions.

Still, of those factors in civic action amenable to civic direction,
conscious and positively effective, there is nothing to compare with the
right teaching and the right reading of history. Now teaching is today
ruined. The old machinery by which the whole nation could be got to know
all essential human things, has been destroyed, and the teaching of
history in particular has been not only ruined but rendered ridiculous.
There is no historical school properly so-called in modern England; that
is, there is no organization framed with the sole object of extending
and co-ordinating historical knowledge and of choosing men for their
capacity to discover upon the one hand and to teach upon the other.
There is nothing approaching to it in the two ancient universities,
because the choice of teachers there depends upon a multitude of
considerations quite separate from those mentioned, and the capacity to
discover, to know, and to teach history, though it _may_ be present
in a tutor, will only be accidentally so present: while as for
co-ordination of knowledge, there is no attempt at it. Even where very
hard work is done, and, when it concerns local history, very useful
work, history as a general study is not grasped because the universities
have not grasped it.

History is to be had by the modern Englishman from his own reading only;
and I am here concerned with the question how he shall read history with
profit.

To read history with profit, history must be true, or at any rate the
reader must have a power of discerning what is true in the midst of much
that may be false. I will bargain, for instance, that in the summer of
1899 the great mass of men, and especially the great mass of men who had
passed through the universities, were under the impression that armies
had left England for the purpose of conquest in distant countries with
invariable success: that that success had been unique, unsupported and
always decisive, and that the wealth of the country after each success
had increased, not diminished. In other words, had history been studied
even by the tiny minority who have education today in England, Sir
William Butler would have counted more than the Joels, and the late Mr.
Barnato (as he called himself); the South African War would not have
taken place in a society which knew its past.

Again, you may pick almost any phrase referring to the Middle Ages out
of any newspaper--if you are a man read in the Middle Ages--and you will
find in it not only a definite historical falsehood with regard to the
fact referred to, or the analogy drawn, but also a false philosophy.

For instance, the other day I read this phrase with regard to the burial
of a certain gentleman of my neighbourhood in Sussex: "We are surely
past the phase of mediaeval thought in which it was imagined that a few
words spoken over the lifeless clay would determine the fate of the soul
for all eternity." Just notice the myriad falsehoods of a phrase like
that! I will not discuss what is connoted by the words "past the phase
of mediaeval thought"--it connotes of course that the human mind changes
fundamentally with the centuries, and therefore that whatever we think
is probably wrong, and that what we are sure of we cannot be sure of, an
absurd conclusion. I will only note the historical falsehoods. When on
earth did the "Middle Ages" lay down that a "few words over lifeless
clay determined the fate of the soul for all eternity"? On the contrary,
the Middle Ages laid it down--it was their peculiar doctrine--that it
was impossible to determine the fate of the soul; that no one could tell
the fate of any one individual soul; that it was a grievous sin, among
the most grievous of sins, to affirm positive knowledge that any
individual had lost his soul. More than this, the Middle Ages were
peculiar in their insistence upon the doctrine that a man might have
been very bad and might have had all the appearance of having lost his
soul so far as human judgment went, and yet was liable to a midway place
between salvation and damnation, and they affirmed that this midway
place did not lead to either fate but necessarily to salvation and to
salvation only.

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