THE THING

The wind awoke last night with so noble a violence that it was like the war in heaven; and I thought for a moment that the Thing had broken free.  For wind never seems like empty air.  Wind always sounds full and physical, like the big body of something; and I fancied that the Thing itself was walking gigantic along the great roads between the forests of beech.

Let me explain.  The vitality and recurrent victory of Christendom have been due to the power of the Thing to break out from time to time from its enveloping words and symbols.  Without this power all civilisations tend to perish under a load of language and ritual.  One instance of this we hear much in modern discussion:  the separation of the form from the spirit of religion.  But we hear too little of numberless other cases of the same stiffening and falsification; we are far too seldom reminded that just as church-going is not religion, so reading and writing are not knowledge, and voting is not self-government.  It would be easy to find people in the big cities who can read and write quickly enough to be clerks, but who are actually ignorant of the daily movements of the sun and moon.

The case of self-government is even more curious, especially as one watches it for the first time in a country district.  Self-government arose among men (probably among the primitive men, certainly among the ancients) out of an idea which seems now too simple to be understood.  The notion of self-government was not (as many modern friends and foes of it seem to think) the notion that the ordinary citizen is to be consulted as one consults an Encyclopaedia.  He is not there to be asked a lot of fancy questions, to see how he answers them.  He and his fellows are to be, within reasonable human limits, masters of their own lives.  They shall decide whether they shall be men of the oar or the wheel, of the spade or the spear.  The men of the valley shall settle whether the valley shall be devastated for coal or covered with corn and vines; the men of the town shall decide whether it shall be hoary with thatches or splendid with spires.  Of their own nature and instinct they shall gather under a patriarchal chief or debate in a political market-place.  And in case the word “man” be misunderstood, I may remark that in this moral atmosphere, this original soul of self-government, the women always have quite as much influence as the men.  But in modern England neither the men nor the women have any influence at all.  In this primary matter, the moulding of the landscape, the creation of a mode of life, the people are utterly impotent.  They stand and stare at imperial and economic processes going on, as they might stare at the Lord Mayor’s Show.

Round about where I live, for instance, two changes are taking place which really affect the land and all things that live on it, whether for good or evil.  The first is that the urban civilisation (or whatever it is) is advancing; that the clerks come out in black swarms and the villas advance in red battalions.  The other is that the vast estates into which England has long been divided are passing out of the hands of the English gentry into the hands of men who are always upstarts and often actually foreigners.