how noble is our inheritance. the more one thinks of it the more suffused with pleasure one's mind becomes; for the inheritance of a man living in this country is not one of this sort or of that sort, but of all sorts. it is, indeed, a necessary condition for the enjoyment of that inheritance that a man should be free, and we have really so muddled things that very many men in england are not free, for they have either to suffer a gross denial of mere opportunity—i mean they cannot even leave their town for any distance—or they are so persecuted by the insecurity of their lives that they have no room for looking at the world, but if an englishman is free what an inheritance he has to enjoy!
it is the fashion of great nations to insist upon some part of their inheritance, their military memories, or their letters, or their religion, or some other thing. but in modern europe, as it seems to me, three or four of the great nations can play upon many such titles to joy as upon an instrument. for a man in italy, or england, or france, or spain, if he is weary of the manifold literature of his own[pg 253] country can turn to its endurance under arms (in which respect, by the way, victory and defeat are of little account), or if he is weary of these military things, or thinks the too continued contemplation of them hurtful to the state (as it often is, for it goes to the head like wine), he can consider the great minds which his nation has produced, and which give glory to his nation not so much because they are great as because they are national. then, again, he can consider the landscapes of his own land, whether peaceably, as do older men, or in a riot of enthusiasm as do all younger men who see england in the midst of exercising their bodies, as it says in the song of the man who bicycled:
... and her distance and her sea.
here is wealth that has no measure,
all wide england is my treasure,
park and close and private pleasure:
all her hills were made for me.
then he can poke about the cities, and any one of them might occupy him almost for a lifetime. hereford, for instance. i know of nothing in europe like the norman work of hereford or ludlow, where you will perpetually find new things, or leominster just below, or ledbury just below that again; and the inn at each of these three places is called the feathers.
then a man may be pleased to consider the recorded history of this country, and to inform the fields he knows with the past and with the actions of[pg 254] men long dead. in this way he can use a battlefield with no danger of any detestable insolence or vulgar civilian ways, for the interest in a battlefield, if it is closely studied, becomes so keen and hot that it burns away all foolish violence, and you will soon find if you study this sort of terrain closely that you forget on which side your sympathies fail or succeed: an excellent corrective if, as it should be with healthy men, your sympathies too often warp evidence and blind you. on this account also one should always suspect the accuracy of military history when it betrays sneering or crowing, because, in the first place, that is a very unmilitary way of looking at battles, and, in the second place, it argues that the historian has not properly gone into all his details. if he had he would have been much too interested in such questions as the measurement of ranges, or, latterly, the presence and nature of cover to bother about crowing or sneering.
when a man tires of these there is left to him the music of his country, by which i mean the tunes. these he can sing to himself as he goes along, and if ever he tires of that there is the victuals and the drink, which, if he has travelled, he may compare to their advantage over those of any other land. but they must be national. let him take no pleasure in things cooked in a foreign way. there was a man some time ago, in attempting to discover whose name i have spent too much energy, who wrote a most admirable essay upon cold beef and pickles, remarking that these two elements of english life[pg 255] are retreating as it were into the strongholds where england is still holding out against the dirty cosmopolitan mud which threatens every country to-day. he traced the retreat of cold beef and pickles eastward towards the city from the west end all along piccadilly and the strand right into fleet-street, where, he said, they were keeping their positions manfully. they stand also isolated and besieged in one hundred happy english country towns....
the trouble about writing an article like this is that one wanders about: it is also the pleasure of it. the limits or trammels to an article like this are that, by a recent and very dangerous superstition, the printed truth is punishable at law, and all one's memories of a thousand places upon the icknield way, the stane street, the pilgrim's way, the rivers ouse (all three of them), the cornish road, the black mountain, ferry side, the three rivers, all the pennines, all the cheviots, all the cotswolds, all the mendips, all the chilterns, all the malvern hills, and all the downs—to speak of but a few—must be memories of praise—by order of the court. one may not blame: therefore i say nothing of northwich.
* * * * * * *
some men say that whereas wealth can be accumulated and left to others when we die, this sort of inheritance can not, and that the great pleasure a man took in his own land and the very many ways in which he found that pleasure and his increase in that pleasure as his life proceeded, all die with him.[pg 256] this you will very often hear deplored. as noble a woman as ever lived in london used to say, speaking of her father (and she also is dead), that all she valued in him died with him, although he had left her a considerable fortune. by which she meant that not only in losing him she had lost a rooted human affection and had suffered what all must suffer, because there is a doom upon us, but that those particular things in which he was particularly favoured had gone away for ever. his power over other languages and over his own language, his vast knowledge of his own county, his acquired courtesy and humour, all mellowed by the world and time, these, she said, were altogether gone. and to us of a younger generation it was her work to lament that we should never know what had once been in england. among others she vastly admired the first duke of wellington, and said that he was tall—which was absurd. now this noble woman, it seems to me, was in error, for all of us who have loved and enjoyed know not only that we carry something with us elsewhere (as we are bound to believe), but leave also in some manner which i do not clearly perceive a legacy to our own people. we take with us that of which peter wanderwide spoke when he said or rather sang these lines—
if all that i have loved and seen
be with me on the judgment day,
i shall be saved the crowd between
from satan and his foul array.
[pg 257]
we carry it with us. and though it is not a virtue it is half a virtue, and when we go down in the grave like the character in everyman, there will go down with us, i think, not only good deeds, a severe female, but also a merry little hobbling comrade who winks and grins and keeps just behind her so that he shall not be noticed and driven away. this little fellow will also speak for us, i think, and he is the pleasure we took in this jolly world.
but i say that not only do we carry something with us, but that we leave something also; and this has been best put, i think, by the poet ronsard when he was dying, who said, if i have rightly translated him, this—
"of all those vanities" (he is speaking of the things of this world), "the loveliest and most praiseworthy is glory—fame. no one of my time has been so filled with it as i; i have lived in it and loved and triumphed in it through time past, and now i leave it to my country to garner and possess it after i shall die. so do i go away from my own place as satiated with the glory of this world as i am hungry and all longing for that of god."
that is very good. it would be very difficult to put it better, and if you complain that here ronsard was only talking of fame or glory, why, i can tell you that the pleasure one takes in one's country is of the same stuff as fame. so true is this that the two commonly go together, and that those become most glorious who have most enjoyed their own land.
