Pleiades
g0"71. 8'eoticOs 4p.ei.av ye IleNetez&op p) TriX6Oev'flapicova veioOac. (PrNDAR) This Storied Isle
IT is difficult, when you live day by day against the back- ground, and in the framework, of a long historical past to be regularly conscious of what is so regularly present.
To-day in particular, immersed as we are in the problems of the present, and looking forward as we must to the stormy clEards of an obscure future, it is easy to let the past slide into oblivion. We cannot, like the proud and buoyant Elizabethans, chime the glories of the past like a peal of bells to enhance our present glories. We cannot, like the established Victorians, reflect on the comfortable grace of a settled past as the earnest of a comfortable and settled future. For us, we well may feel, the dead must bury their dead ; and our motto must be the motto of the hero in Homer, the motto that one of our eighteenth-century statesman loved : " Since the Fates are upon us in their thousands, and a man may not fly or avoid them—let us go on."
But there is a comfort in the past which is deep and legitimate. However poignant and engrossing the days in which we live, our country has its record of a length of days before ; and it has come through them, and " gone on." That is not the only comfort. Indeed, in itself, it is only a rude and primitive comfort, as of men saying to themselves :- O pass/ graviora, dabil Deus his quoque finern.
The true consolation of the past is the reflection, and the thankful remembrance, that the unbought and inherited graces. of all the strivings and doings and buildings of our progenitors are still with us, and that they give a perspective and a dignity to our lives. You have only to live for a little while in a new country to realize the quality of these graces, and to know that, without them, life is somehow raw, sharp- edged, unrounded, an instantaneous clamour of raucous novelties. The Roman Wall along which you may walk in Northumberland ; the Roman mosaics you may see at Aldborough in Yorkshire (go to one of the village inns, and the landlord, taking you to a shed in the garden behind and sweeping the sawdust- from the floor, will suddenly make an Orpheus with his lute or a Helen of Troy glow in colours before your eyes) ; the Norman castle ; the Cistercian monastery ; the village church of the time of Richard II ; the Tudor manor-house ; the Georgian mansion—all these are more than ornaments, and more than monuments : they are the background, the framework, we may even say part of the substance, of a national life which would be other than it is, and poorer than it is, if it were without their associations and consecrations.
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Human life is very old in England. One of its oldest Scenes may be found in Norfolk. You can hardly measure its antiquity ; but perhaps you may say, at a venture, that men were living there some three thousand centuries ago. In one of the Southern villages of Norfolk, at a meeting of four cross roads, there is an old and welcoming inn which must go back to coaching days. , The village itself is' a green oasis of agriculture ; but around it lie the firs, the sand, the flints and the blasted heath of Norfolk. In the inn there is a large collection of the flints, the cunningly wrought flints, of early man ; and, indeed, the village seems to have been a centre of their manufacture and a place of their export, so that you may find aroturd, if you know their caches and their lurking-places, a variety of specirnens of all ages and Sizes and uses. If you study the collection, and muse upon its riches, you can almost reconstruct aboriginal English life. You can see a man in a sand-hole; his matted hair falling over his eyes and tossed back now and again as he works, chipping and flaking and rubbing the flints which are the essential implementi of his life. Soine become arrow-heads : they are curious little triangular pieces, sharp as a needle at the point of the triangle, and with three notches at the base for easier fitting into the arrow. Some becortie fishhooks ; and they are cunningly serrated along their edges so that they may hold when once they have engaged their prey. Some seem to be intended for curving and shaping clay into pottery ; and others, . again, seem meant for cleaning skins and hides. It is these last which have a particular interest—not that they are the most ingenious, but that it is especially easy to imagine them actually in use. The man—or perhaps the woman, if the cleaning of skins was remitted to her uncomplaining industry—would squat beside the stretched skin, holding the flint pressed by the four forgers against the palm of the hand. Armed in this way, the hand itself acquired a scraping or cutting edge : handiwork was actual hand-work ; manual labour was manual in the strictest sense of the word. Man's earliest tools are just part of his hand : they hardly show apart from his hand for more than a quarter of an inch : they have; you may say, no extension. It is only gradually that tools acquire a separate sort of existence, and stand out as something separate from the hand in which they are held. And long after that, you reflect, man gets to the height of separating his tools entirely from himself and housing them in a factory, where he need only stand and watch, with an occasional touch, and the tools will work by themselves. But the early Norfolk villagers, busy in their sandpits, or cleaning their skins on the bare heath (much the same then as now), had a long road to travel before they reached that age.
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A few miles north of this village is a little town called Swaffham. You will come to it in an hour if you are old- fashioned enough, and anxious enough for a quiet view of the countryside, to be using a bicycle. If you visit its church, as you will surely wish to do, you will find by the west door a little placard telling you that you may see the Spelman library. Here you are suddenly switched into the seventeenth century ; you leap, in one little hour, nearly three thousand whole centuries. Spelman, you remind yourself, was an historian and antiquary from Trinity College, Cambridge (alma mater clarorum virorum), who adOrned the reigns of Jainei I and Charles I : he it was, as another witty member of Trinity said, who " invented the feudal system " ; he it was who had the true theory of " folklarid," which Allen, absentee master of Dulwich College and habitué of Holland House, pererted two centuries later. It is obviously right to see Spelman's library—hoWever violent may, be the jump from the man chipping flints in his sand-pit or the woman cleansing a hide on the fir-sweet heath. The library is in a sort of priest's chamber over the ...vestry, and it is worth seeing. There is an illuminated manuscript, and there' are one or two incunabula; there is a good copy of Ortelius and his maps, and an early copy of Holinshed ; there are law-books, as you expect, and historical works in some hundreds. All are in a livery of sober dark brown, whiCh is alMost black ; and here again the tdols—the most' subtle and the noblest tools that man has inventedthe tools of thought.
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The rain came down, as the wanderer left Swaffham—April rain which will not harm Min, and rejoices and refreshes the earth. From the little height of land along which the road ran it was easy, looking across a dip of hind to the left, to' see in cloud and sunshine the village. of Castle Acre. ,Old memories of an old visit, a quarter of a century ago, came back to the mind. Yes, there were the grey ruins of the old Cluniac priory and its remembered west front ; and there were the ditches and mound and the dark huddled stones. that -looked like a Norman castle. Or did they say, a quarter of a century ago, that it was a Roman fort ? No Matter. Here was another glimpse of the undying past, just caught in passing, but treasured anew henceforth— the memory 'as a possession—a posiessiOn and a pernianent
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