“The other end of the world?” he asked.
“Where is that?”
“It is in Walham Green,” I whispered hoarsely.
“You see it on the London omnibuses.
‘World’s End and Walham Green.’
Oh, I know how good this is; I love your vineyards
and your free peasantry, but I want the English end
of the world. I love you like a brother, but
I want an English cabman, who will be funny and ask
me what his fare ‘is.’ Your bugles
stir my blood, but I want to see a London policeman.
Take, oh, take me to see a London policeman.”
He stood quite dark and still against the end of the
sunset, and I could not tell whether he understood
or not. I got back into his carriage.
“You will understand,” I said, “if
ever you are an exile even for pleasure. The
child to his mother, the man to his country, as a
countryman of yours once said. But since, perhaps,
it is rather too long a drive to the English end of
the world, we may as well drive back to Besancon.”
Only as the stars came out among those immortal hills
I wept for Walham Green.
In the Place de La Bastille
On the first of May I was sitting outside a cafe in
the Place de la Bastille in Paris staring at the exultant
column, crowned with a capering figure, which stands
in the place where the people destroyed a prison and
ended an age. The thing is a curious example
of how symbolic is the great part of human history.
As a matter of mere material fact, the Bastille when
it was taken was not a horrible prison; it was hardly
a prison at all. But it was a symbol, and the
people always go by a sure instinct for symbols; for
the Chinaman, for instance, at the last General Election,
or for President Kruger’s hat in the election
before; their poetic sense is perfect. The Chinaman
with his pigtail is not an idle flippancy. He
does typify with a compact precision exactly the thing
the people resent in African policy, the alien and
grotesque nature of the power of wealth, the fact
that money has no roots, that it is not a natural
and familiar power, but a sort of airy and evil magic
calling monsters from the ends of the earth.
The people hate the mine owner who can bring a Chinaman
flying across the sea, exactly as the people hated
the wizard who could fetch a flying dragon through
the air. It was the same with Mr. Kruger’s
hat. His hat (that admirable hat) was not merely
a joke. It did symbolise, and symbolise extremely
well, the exact thing which our people at that moment
regarded with impatience and venom; the old-fashioned,
dingy, Republican simplicity, the unbeautiful dignity
of the bourgeois, and the heavier truisms of political
morality. No; the people are sometimes wrong
on the practical side of politics; they are never
wrong on the artistic side.
