The Hill and the Horizon
THE HILL AND THE HORIZON THE dyspeptic Frenchman who saw all he wanted to of England at a tea for tourists given just off the rue de la Paix may have been a philosopher but, obviously, he had...
...For instance, the English have watched with especial care over a thing which is a symbol for all mankind, the flame of the hearth, the fire which burns in freedom...
...Civic profit may be derived, for example, from a careful study of the manner in which His Majesty's judges dispose of cases quite like those which the United States judiciary allows to wander down incalculably tenuous avenues of argument...
...and it is passing strange that a nation which is eager to measure its progress in mechanics or finance with the work done anywhere and everywhere else, should ignore the obvious lessons of comparison in a matter so fundamental as the administration of law...
...The methods of intellectual commerce are no less interestingly comparable...
...There are stoves in many of the lands of Europe...
...In his conversation lies the valuable wonder of the grown-up child...
...Or shall we prefer to admit that our country is the still continuing confluence of many streams, each beautiful and memorable...
...We pick up a cheap morning paper and find a screechy editorial on The King Business Hits the Skids —a rapid sketch in the mood of those who are not prepared to respect or understand anything but the culture of their own monotony...
...The spiritually homeless are unable to endure a vista of serried chimneytops and walled, immemorial gardens...
...But though there is lurking injury in the gossip exchanged between peoples, one cannot be blind to the possible emancipation that sometimes results from mingled opinions...
...For the hill of Christ is a healing mountain beyond which we shall never climb, and from it there streams the light of happy peace upon all the horizons of mankind...
...It is really being drowned in the flood of fashion...
...John Drinkwater's vision of "a mounted policeman at full gallop, as if he were heading a cavalry charge, and thirty yards or so behind him three great motor fire-engines driven by huge men, bareheaded and stripped to the waist of everything but armless 'zephyrs,' straining over their driving wheels like the athletes of the Roman circus...
...Yes, it is really a good thing for England—as well as for us—that the judgments of even Mr...
...They can find consolation in the surety that London fogs are likely to remain unimitated, at least until the code of Sparta shall have been revived...
...We have our own heroes, habits, and lingering vistas of fantasy...
...and to come across it in every chamber and corridor leaves an impression which is simply depressing...
...Intellects cannot motor comfortably and speedily down the tortuous roads of difference...
...It is as if the cities of Europe should undertake to reproduce the fogs of London...
...Perhaps there is a salutary guide to the answer in the festival for all the world which we are to sponsor during the coming summer...
...But is there anything further in this gossip, either of profit or of danger...
...But though we may shake our heads at the illustration, we can profitably weigh the suggestion...
...That is possibly why (though there may be other reasons of lesser moment) we Americans never fail to be interested in England, or more especially in that part of England which comes voyaging to Manhattan and occasionally ventures as far as Denver...
...The contemporary world does live too closely in the dust of the gossip on its far-flung, crowded highways...
...Naturally, talk is easier and more satisfying when cast in the mold of a common language which has grown, at least largely, out of communal experience...
...We have seen the picture a hundred times, but the strange man makes the etching bright and clear again...
...Similarly, to return to Mr...
...We should mount guard about the things which are truly national," he says, "because they are at the same time firmly human and need no apology...
...Edmund Gosse should be subject to revision by men whom the new world has made wise...
...It is just as if alien artists should come from the ends of the earth to rear structures in a new style derived from the architecture of railway stations...
...An American who appraises his country with a becoming fondness will note the myriad priceless intimacies of its past and present...
...The hostility to textbooks and the fondness for "mature and mellow men of wide learning and human sympathies," are notably in conformity with the ideal which the dons of many generations have upheld with varying success in the halls of Balliol and Magdalen...
...But steam-heat is stifling and is not picturesque...
...Or possibly, we chance upon a random exotic journal which concludes that the only art worth talking about is being produced, at this very moment, in a Portuguese studio...
...THE HILL AND THE HORIZON THE dyspeptic Frenchman who saw all he wanted to of England at a tea for tourists given just off the rue de la Paix may have been a philosopher but, obviously, he had never tasted the delights of gossip...
...Englishmen can no longer be indifferent to the busy young men and women from across the water, who nose in pamphlets and documents until, like Professor Wallace and many another, they emerge with conclusions which set the conservative and cocksure old "authority" agog...
...It is the outlook of people who are aghast at the omnipresence of their ancestral hills...
...Chesterton, prefer to take their morning air raw, ought not to look with too much severity upon their less heroic brethren...
...Well, this American invention of a quality truly inferior is being installed everywhere in English 478 THE COMMONWEAL March 10, 1926 hotels and even in English houses...
...It wants a clean sweep everywhere—a boulevard or a bog...
...If we may trust Dickens, time was when British magistrates would have dealt with the case of Senator Fall in the same manner as that which our morning papers describe—the manner of Simon Simple who was forever emptying a barrel of water with a sieve...
...There is, for instance, a contagious thrill in Mr...
...Wallace Buttrick's recent criticism of our collegiate educational practice —a criticism which really ought not to be filed with the innumerable other utterances on the same subject —was obviously founded upon some steady observation of what is being done at Oxford...
...Doctor Faustus may have been exaggerating when he found Helen of Troy, rather than the women of his own city, more lovely than "the evening air, clad in the beauty of a thousand stars," but the encounter with her should have been helpful toward escaping from provincial smugness...
...Chesterton, Americans realize the practical value of English standards and experience...
...And in the vision which his brother poet, Alfred Noyes, reported from Fifth Avenue—"the softly illuminated heads of the shadowy towers, elfin domes and cupolas, like little temples thrust into the sky"—there is that which makes us crane our necks to see...
...In a recent paper which went the rounds of Europe in the guise of translation, Mr...
...But though there is much to be said for this effort to smash the too restraining machines of culture, American students have taken their own straightcut to the conquest of information...
...Here, as in numberless other places, there is evidence of a growing illiberalism which might be termed the illiberalism of horizons...
...Perhaps it is the product of weariness...
...The important thing about the methods of justice is that they should really be methodical...
...And if we are still more deferent to the older countries than they are to us, we have commendably outgrown the habit of feeling uncomfortable whenever The Spectator or London Times peers condescendingly westward...
...and they are at least picturesque...
...Shall we find a revolutionary symbol for this truth, and by welding Emerson and Whitman declare that our positive quality is to deny the rest of the world...
...The bliss of travel is in talk," observed an antique Chinaman who had once braved the fringes of the Great Wall...
...The Eucharistic Congress is a point at which a swirl of differing national temperaments and ideals will come to a reverent pause: it will celebrate the unity of western civilizations by the very fact that it does homage to the Heart of civilization...
...G. K. Chesterton took a wistful stand against the tendency to internationalize symbols...
...Englishmen who, like Mr...
...Isn't it that we are really seeking when we climb over the hill which hides the world from view, and loiter on strange highways...
...No matter where he may wander, he will feel with Hawthorne "a desire to be at home once more...
...But in all truth, our destiny is to acquire more of all these things—more with each decade, and from every part of the world, because the colors of our culture are motley and not yet dry...
...Whenever America ceases to grow, it will in a sense cease to be...
...One might observe with some pertinence that comfort is the mother of modern change...
Vol. 3 • March 1926 • No. 18
