The New Jerusalem | Page 2

place from which
Christmas came. For it is often necessary to walk backwards, as a man
on the wrong road goes back to a sign-post to find the right road. The
modern man is more like a traveller who has forgotten the name of his
destination, and has to go back whence he came, even to find out where
he is going. That the world has lost its way few will now deny; and it
did seem to me that I found at last a sort of sign-post, of a singular and
significant shape, and saw for a moment in my mind the true map of
the modern wanderings; but whether I shall be able to say anything of
what I saw, this story must show.
I had said farewell to all my friends, or all those with my own limited
number of legs; and nothing living remained but a dog and a donkey.
The reader will learn with surprise that my first feeling of fellowship
went out to the dog; I am well aware that I lay open my guard to a
lunge of wit. The dog is rather like a donkey, or a small caricature of
one, with a large black head and long black ears; but in the mood of the
moment there was rather a moral contrast than a pictorial parallel. For
the dog did indeed seem to stand for home and everything I was
leaving behind me, with reluctance, especially that season of the year.
For one thing, he is named after Mr. Winkle, the Christmas guest of Mr.
Wardle; and there is indeed something Dickensian in his union of
domesticity with exuberance. He jumped about me, barking like a small
battery, under the impression that I was going for a walk; but I could
not, alas, take him with me on a stroll to Palestine. Incidentally, he
would have been out of place; for dogs have not their due honour in the
East; and this seemed to sharpen my sense of my own domestic sentinel
as a sort of symbol of the West. On the other hand, the East is full of
donkeys, often very dignified donkeys; and when I turned my attention
to the other grotesque quadruped, with an even larger head and even
longer ears, he seemed to take on a deep shade of oriental mystery. I

know not why these two absurd creatures tangled themselves up so
much in my train of thought, like dragons in an illuminated text; or
ramped like gargoyles on either side of the gateway of my adventure.
But in truth they were in some sense symbols of the West and the East
after all. The dog's very lawlessness is but an extravagance of loyalty;
he will go mad with joy three times on the same day, at going out for a
walk down the same road. The modern world is full of fantastic forms
of animal worship; a religion generally accompanied with human
sacrifice. Yet we hear strangely little of the real merits of animals; and
one of them surely is this innocence of all boredom; perhaps such
simplicity is the absence of sin. I have some sense myself of the sacred
duty of surprise; and the need of seeing the old road as a new road. But
I cannot claim that whenever I go out for a walk with my family and
friends, I rush in front of them volleying vociferous shouts of happiness;
or even leap up round them attempting to lick their faces. It is in this
power of beginning again with energy upon familiar and homely things
that the dog is really the eternal type of the Western civilisation. And
the donkey is really as different as is the Eastern civilisation. His very
anarchy is a sort of secrecy; his very revolt is a secret. He does not leap
up because he wishes to share my walk, but to follow his own way, as
lonely as the wild ass of Scripture. My own beast of burden supports
the authority of Scripture by being a very wild ass. I have given him the
name of Trotsky, because he seldom trots, but either scampers or stands
still. He scampers all over the field when it is necessary to catch him,
and stands still when it is really urgent to drive him. He also breaks
fences, eats vegetables, and fulfills other functions; between delays and
destructions he could ruin a really poor man in a day. I wish this fact
were more often remembered, in judging whether really poor men have
really been cruel to donkeys. But I assure the reader that I am not cruel
to my donkey; the cruelty is all the other way. He kicks the people who
try to catch him; and