After the war there happened to be in the French Parliament a vague uncertain majority more or less pledged to traditional things. The politicians most prominent in that gang approached the Carthusians who had been exiled, and had taken up a new home in Tarragona, and offered them a chance of returning to the Grande Chartreuse. These exiles very wisely refused, for they said: ‘How do we know that after all the expenditure of reëstablishing ourselves in our ancient foundation—venerable for centuries, peaceable, remote—we may not at your next “elections,” as you call them, find ourselves turned out?’ They were very wise: but what a commentary upon a system of government! Think of it! Here is a great House with its roots right back in the beginnings of the Middle Ages, with its oaken traditions, its reserves of strength available for itself and all men; doing nothing which could be construed as perilous under any system of common morals, either to the State or to any individual. Merely because a clique of anti-Christians hates them, this doctrine of artificial majorities can turn the whole community out of doors at a moment’s notice, exile its members, loot its fortune.
Nor let it be said that these things happen only in countries like France, to which the disease of parliaments is unnatural and of alien importation; they happen in one form or another wherever the parliamentary fraud is at work. In countries which have lost dogmatic religion and have only vague opinion left, the parliamentary evil takes another form, that of a perpetual restriction against common liberties; or it takes the form of putting finance secretly within the power of inferior men, who fill their pockets at the expense of the commonwealth; or it takes the form of treason in time of war—attempting to make peace with the enemy behind the back of the people and their allies. Or it takes the form of saving the enemy after his defeat. There is no form of parliamentary activity which is not deplorable, save in aristocracies.
For, in aristocracies, which are, of their nature, governments by a clique, a parliament—which is a clique—can be normal and natural. In communities based on the idea of equality and of action by the public will they are cancers, under which such nations always sicken and may die.
I can bear the thought of them no more. I must get back to realities and to things loved.
I must return to my Nona.
We came to Berry Head and opened Torbay.
It is with Torbay as with the Fowey coast. I have known it only under such weathers as leave a hint of heaven: never have I opened Torbay in passing Berry Head but it was morning, with the young sea delighting in a leading breeze; and once, a draught to last forever, I came up under such a dawn and with so tender a dying crescent in the sky that I spent an hour in Paradise.
What are those days of glory? They are not memories: are they premonitions, or, are they visions?
They are not memories, though perhaps Plato thought them so, and our modern pantheists, with Wordsworth for their spokesman here, called and believed them so.
I will hope that they are premonitions, hints granted beforehand of a state to be attained. At the worst they are visions of such a state lying all about us, the home of the Blessed, which we are permitted to glimpse at for a moment, even those of us sad ones who may never reach that place.
As for those who call such joy illusion, they are of that great _Schola Stultorum_, that new herd of fools peculiar to our day; they who have made the discovery that Something comes out of Nothing, who pour quarts out of pint-pots and give emptiness creative power.
Neglect them, but ask yourself, as I do when such rare moods are granted, whether they be visions or premonitions, and hope that premonitions they may be. For certainly they are the supports of this life, and we creep from one to another like travellers from inn to inn, and when they fail us, the world will be no more endurable.
Such thoughts I had—and have had repeatedly—in this run of water under a morning sky. It is inhabited, is all that air and sea, by something beneficent—at least, I have always found it so.
But there are pictures more definite and of the hard past which come into my mind every time I round Berry Head and see Torbay before me. And of all such thoughts that crowd upon me when I pass the point, and open that deep recess of water, two stand out most vividly. It was here on the southern shore of the Bay that the Dutch, and other mercenaries of William of Orange, landed for the destruction of the last poor remnants of English kingship; it was here that a Catholic priest discovered the first ancient human relics, and thus started our modern controversies.
This last is a most interesting story and little known. Here is what would seem to have happened:
There is a cave near Torquay in which the water, passing, I think, through limestone, leaves a deposit. Under this deposit a Catholic priest in the place, a certain Dr. McEnery (I suppose, an Irishman, but I have not read sufficiently about him) found a number of human bones; associated with them were barbaric implements and the remains of animals, some of such tropical kinds as can no longer live in our climate, others wholly extinct.
He came to the very just conclusion that he had here evidence of an antiquity for man far removed beyond the bounds which had been set by the idolators of the written word of Scripture. He started that ball rolling which has bounded down so devious a course through our time, until to-day the grossly ignorant talk of an imaginary being, whom they call a ‘cave man,’ and the half-learned can bamboozle the public at will with the pretence that they know all about what they call the ‘prehistory’ of our race.
That man, as man—I mean man as we know him (not imperfect man)—has lived upon this earth for very much more than ten thousand years, we are now pretty sure; and we owe the first step to this same Dr. McEnery—whose name no one hears. The later discoveries in the Somme Valley we also owe to another priest, and that is as it should be.
What a turmoil so simple a discovery aroused in Biblical countries, to be sure!
But that turmoil was but the forerunner of something prodigious: nothing less than the shaking, splitting, and at last the collapse of all the foundations upon which had been erected half the modern culture of the West.
For one may say that the modern culture of the West lay after 1600 in two halves, increasingly different one from the other: the Catholic culture and the Protestant.
Now, on the Catholic culture, physical discovery of any kind, in geology, or biology, or chemistry, can have no effect, save that of some slight expansion, that is, some addition to the general powers of its members; just as the learning of mathematics at Cambridge will not transform, but only somewhat extend the general culture of an English public school boy. The culture of an English public school is founded upon a system and tradition which mathematics do not affect one way or another, save somewhat to increase them. The Catholic culture is founded on a philosophy which physical science does not affect.
In the Catholic culture of Europe, and especially among the French, who are the leaders of all our discussions, the opposing camps were upon the one side those possessed of Catholic dogmatic theology, a strong metaphysical structure, and, on the other, those sceptics who denied and ridiculed the claims of such a theology, standing upon the platform of what they called pure reason; and this ideal of pure reason was as unaffected by material science as that of its opponents. The sceptical school of the Great Encyclopædists (which is still and will long remain the one half of the Catholic culture in Europe) was in no way shaken because certain of its adventitious conceptions, in no way connected with its general philosophy, were proved false. The profound effect of Voltaire was not lessened through his ridicule of fossils, and his conclusion that the imprint of fishbones upon Alpine rocks came from the dried herrings of mediæval pilgrims. These conceptions were proved false, but Voltaire’s power did not depend upon their truth. Nor were the Encyclopædists’ speculations upon some original, simple, incorrupt, and admirable savage so essential to their doctrine that the full discovery of the real savage affected their influence.
No more, on the other side, on the side of those practising and affirming religion of the Catholic culture, did any material discoveries upset doctrines which were not connected with specific material instances, but were transcendental. It mattered nothing to the two great antagonists, Belief and Unbelief, in Catholic Europe whether man had existed politically on earth for five, ten, twenty, or fifty thousand years. Their quarrel was on another and infinitely higher plane. The vast progress of modern physical discovery has somewhat extended the powers of either camp, but has not changed the main issue, which was joined far earlier, from before the middle of the eighteenth century, and which turns on the great question ‘Is Religion from God or from man?’ No mere physical discovery can affect the Catholic culture as a whole, whether in its clerical or in its anti-clerical branches. The ruin of the Darwinian nonsense during the last twenty years has been largely effected by anti-clerical biologists: the greatest achievements in research—Pasteur’s among others—have been the work of practising Catholics.