A Short History of England | Page 3

in shouldering mountains; and a prehistoric
tradition has taught it to look towards the sunset for islands yet
dreamier than its own. The islanders are of a kind with their islands.
Different as are the nations into which they are now divided, the Scots,
the English, the Irish, the Welsh of the western uplands, have
something altogether different from the humdrum docility of the inland

Germans, or from the bon sens français which can be at will trenchant
or trite. There is something common to all the Britons, which even Acts
of Union have not torn asunder. The nearest name for it is insecurity,
something fitting in men walking on cliffs and the verge of things.
Adventure, a lonely taste in liberty, a humour without wit, perplex their
critics and perplex themselves. Their souls are fretted like their coasts.
They have an embarrassment, noted by all foreigners: it is expressed,
perhaps, in the Irish by a confusion of speech and in the English by a
confusion of thought. For the Irish bull is a license with the symbol of
language. But Bull's own bull, the English bull, is "a dumb ox of
thought"; a standing mystification in the mind. There is something
double in the thoughts as of the soul mirrored in many waters. Of all
peoples they are least attached to the purely classical; the imperial
plainness which the French do finely and the Germans coarsely, but the
Britons hardly at all. They are constantly colonists and emigrants; they
have the name of being at home in every country. But they are in exile
in their own country. They are torn between love of home and love of
something else; of which the sea may be the explanation or may be
only the symbol. It is also found in a nameless nursery rhyme which is
the finest line in English literature and the dumb refrain of all English
poems--"Over the hills and far away."
The great rationalist hero who first conquered Britain, whether or no he
was the detached demigod of "Cæsar and Cleopatra," was certainly a
Latin of the Latins, and described these islands when he found them
with all the curt positivism of his pen of steel. But even Julius Cæsar's
brief account of the Britons leaves on us something of this mystery,
which is more than ignorance of fact. They were apparently ruled by
that terrible thing, a pagan priesthood. Stones now shapeless yet
arranged in symbolic shapes bear witness to the order and labour of
those that lifted them. Their worship was probably Nature-worship; and
while such a basis may count for something in the elemental quality
that has always soaked the island arts, the collision between it and the
tolerant Empire suggests the presence of something which generally
grows out of Nature-worship--I mean the unnatural. But upon nearly all
the matters of modern controversy Cæsar is silent. He is silent about
whether the language was "Celtic"; and some of the place-names have

even given rise to a suggestion that, in parts at least, it was already
Teutonic. I am not capable of pronouncing upon the truth of such
speculations, but I am of pronouncing upon their importance; at least,
to my own very simple purpose. And indeed their importance has been
very much exaggerated. Cæsar professed to give no more than the
glimpse of a traveller; but when, some considerable time after, the
Romans returned and turned Britain into a Roman province, they
continued to display a singular indifference to questions that have
excited so many professors. What they cared about was getting and
giving in Britain what they had got and given in Gaul. We do not know
whether the Britons then, or for that matter the Britons now, were
Iberian or Cymric or Teutonic. We do know that in a short time they
were Roman.
Every now and then there is discovered in modern England some
fragment such as a Roman pavement. Such Roman antiquities rather
diminish than increase the Roman reality. They make something seem
distant which is still very near, and something seem dead that is still
alive. It is like writing a man's epitaph on his front door. The epitaph
would probably be a compliment, but hardly a personal introduction.
The important thing about France and England is not that they have
Roman remains. They are Roman remains. In truth they are not so
much remains as relics; for they are still working miracles. A row of
poplars is a more Roman relic than a row of pillars. Nearly all that we
call the works of nature have but grown like fungoids upon this original
work of man; and our woods are mosses on the bones of a giant. Under
the seed of our harvests and the roots of our trees