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An essay by Hilaire Belloc |
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On Past Greatness |
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Title: On Past Greatness Author: Hilaire Belloc [More Titles by Belloc] There lies in the North-East of France, close against the Belgian frontier and within cannon shot of the famous battlefield of Malplaquet, a little town called Bavai--I have written of it elsewhere. Coming into this little town you seem to be entering no more than a decent, unimportant market borough, a larger village meant for country folk, perhaps without a history and certainly without fame. As you come to look about you one thing after another enlivens your curiosity and suggests something at once enormous and remote in the destinies of the place. In the first place, seven great roads go out like the seven rays of a star, plumb straight, darting along the line, across the vast, bare fields of Flanders, past and along the many isolated woods of the provinces, and making to great capitals far off--to Cologne, to Paris, to Treves, and to the ports of the sea. These roads are deserted in great part. Some of them are metalled in certain sections, and again in other sections are no more than lanes, and again no more than footpaths, as you proceed along their miles of way; but their exact design awfully impresses the mind. You know, as you follow such strict alignment, that you are fulfilling the majestic purpose of Imperial Rome. It was the Romans that made these things. Then, intrigued and excited by such remains of greatness, you read what you can of the place.... And you find nothing but a dust of legend. You find a story that once here a king, filled with ambition and worshipping strange gods, thrust out these great roads to the ends of the earth; desired his capital to be a hub and navel for the world. He put them under the protection of the seven planets and of the deities of those stars. Three he paved with black marble and four with white marble, and where they met upon the market place he put up a golden terminal. There the legend ends. It is only legend--a true product of the Dark Ages, when all that Rome had done rose like a huge dream in the mind of Europe and took on gorgeous and fantastic colouring. You learn (for the rest) very little--that ornaments and money have been found dating from two thousand years, that once great walls surrounded the place. It must have had noble buildings and solemn courts. In strict history all you will discover is that it was the capital of that tribe, the Nervii, against whom Caesar fought, and whose territory was early conquered for the Empire. You will find nothing more. There is no living tradition, there is no voice; the little town is dumb. The place is a figure, and a striking one, of greatness long dead, and a man visiting its small domestic interests to-day, and noting its comfort, its humility, and its sleep, is reminded of many things attaching to human fame. It would seem as though the ambitions of men, and that exalted appetite for glory which has produced the chief things of this world, suffer the effect of time somewhat as the body of an animal slain will suffer that. One part of the organism and then another decays and mixes back with nature. The effect of will has vanished. The thing is a prey to all that environment which, once alive, it combated, conquered, and transformed to its own use. One portion after another is lost, until at last only the most resisting stands--the skeleton and hard framework, the least expressive, the least personal part of the whole. This also decays and perishes. Then there remains no more but a score of hardened fragments that linger in their place, and what has passed away is fortunate if even the slightest or most fantastic legend of itself survives. The great dead are first forgotten in their physical habit; we lose the nature of their voices, we forget their sympathies and their affections. Bit by bit all that they intended to be eternal slips back into the common thing around. A blurred image, growing fainter and fainter, lingers. At last the person vanishes, and in its place some public raising material things--a monument, a tomb, an ornament, or weapon of enduring metal--is all that remains. If it were possible for the spring of appetite and quest to be dried up in man, such a spectacle would dry up that spring. It is not possible, for it is providentially in the nature of man to cherish these illusions of an immortal memory and of a life bestowed upon the shade or the mere name of his living greatness. Those various forms of fame which are young men's goals, and to which the eager creative power of early manhood so properly directs itself, seem each in turn or each for its varying temperament to promise the desired reward; and one imagines that his love, another that his discoveries, another that his victories in the field or his conspicuous acts of courage will remain permanently with his fellows long after he has left their feast. As though to give some substance to the flattering cheat, there is one kind of fame which men have been permitted to attain, and which does give them a sort of fixed tenure--if not for ever, yet for generations upon generations--in the human city. This sort of fame is the fame of the great poets. There is nothing more enduring. It has for some who were most blessed outlasted, you may say, all material things which they handled or they knew--all fabrics, all instruments, all habitations. It is comparable in its endurance to the years, and a man reads the "Song of Roland" and can still look on that same unchanged Cleft of Roncesvalles, or a man reads the Iliad and can look to-day westward from the shores to Tenedos. But wait a moment. Are they indeed blessed in this, the great poets? Ronsard debated it. He decided that they were, and put into the mouth of the muses the great lines:---- * * * * * Vela saigement dit, Ceux dont la fantaisie
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