The Path to Rome | Page 3

(if there were any) they were
done by some other man that loved him not a groat and would not have
walked half a mile to see him hanged. But now it is so easy for a man
to scratch down what he sees and put it in his book that any fool may
do it and be none the worse--many others shall follow. This is the first.
Before you blame too much, consider the alternative. Shall a man
march through Europe dragging an artist on a cord? God forbid!
Shall an artist write a book? Why no, the remedy is worse than the
disease.
Let us agree then, that, if he will, any pilgrim may for the future draw
(if he likes) that most difficult subject, snow hills beyond a grove of
trees; that he may draw whatever he comes across in order to enliven
his mind (for who saw it if not he? And was it not his loneliness that
enabled him to see it?), and that he may draw what he never saw, with
as much freedom as you readers so very continually see what you never
draw. He may draw the morning mist on the Grimsel, six months
afterwards; when he has forgotten what it was like: and he may frame it
for a masterpiece to make the good draughtsman rage.
The world has grown a boy again this long time past, and they are

building hotels (I hear) in the place where Acedes discovered the Water
of Youth in a hollow of the hill Epistemonoscoptes.
Then let us love one another and laugh. Time passes, and we shall soon
laugh no longer--and meanwhile common living is a burden, and
earnest men are at siege upon us all around. Let us suffer absurdities,
for that is only to suffer one another.
Nor let us be too hard upon the just but anxious fellow that sat down
dutifully to paint the soul of Switzerland upon a fan.
When that first Proverb-Maker who has imposed upon all peoples by
his epigrams and his fallacious half-truths, his empiricism and his
wanton appeals to popular ignorance, I say when this man (for I take it
he was a man, and a wicked one) was passing through France he
launched among the French one of his pestiferous phrases, _'Ce n'est
que le premier pas qui coûté'_ and this in a rolling-in-the-mouth
self-satisfied kind of a manner has been repeated since his day at least
seventeen million three hundred and sixty-two thousand five hundred
and four times by a great mass of Ushers, Parents, Company Officers,
Elder Brothers, Parish Priests, and authorities in general whose office it
may be and whose pleasure it certainly is to jog up and disturb that
native slumber and inertia of the mind which is the true breeding soil of
Revelation.
For when boys or soldiers or poets, or any other blossoms and prides of
nature, are for lying steady in the shade and letting the Mind commune
with its Immortal Comrades, up comes Authority busking about and
eager as though it were a duty to force the said Mind to burrow and
sweat in the matter of this very perishable world, its temporary
habitation.
'Up,' says Authority, 'and let me see that Mind of yours doing
something practical. Let me see Him mixing painfully with
circumstance, and botching up some Imperfection or other that shall at
least be a Reality and not a silly Fantasy.'
Then the poor Mind comes back to Prison again, and the boy takes his
horrible Homer in the real Greek (not Church's book, alas!); the Poet
his rough hairy paper, his headache, and his cross-nibbed pen; the
Soldier abandons his inner picture of swaggering about in ordinary
clothes, and sees the dusty road and feels the hard places in his boot,
and shakes down again to the steady pressure of his pack; and

Authority is satisfied, knowing that he will get a smattering from the
Boy, a rubbishy verse from the Poet, and from the Soldier a long and
thirsty march. And Authority, when it does this commonly sets to work
by one of these formulae: as, in England north of Trent, by the
manifestly false and boastful phrase, 'A thing begun is half ended', and
in the south by 'The Beginning is half the Battle'; but in France by the
words I have attributed to the Proverb-Maker, _'Ce n'est que le premier
pas qui coûte'._
By this you may perceive that the Proverb-Maker, like every other
Demagogue, Energumen, and Disturber, dealt largely in metaphor--but
this I need hardly insist upon, for in his vast collection of published and
unpublished works it is amply evident that he took the silly pride of the
half-educated in a constant abuse of metaphor. There was a