The Old Things


Those who travel about England for their pleasure, or, for that matter,
about any part of Western Europe, rightly associate with such travel the
pleasure of history; for history adds to a man, giving him, as it were,
a great memory of things--like a human memory, but stretched over a far
longer space than that of one human life. It makes him, I do not say
wise and great, but certainly in communion with wisdom and greatness.

It adds also to the soil he treads, for to this it adds meaning. How
good it is when you come out of Tewkesbury by the Cheltenham road to
look upon those fields to the left and know that they are not only
pleasant meadows, but also the place in which a great battle of the
mediaeval monarchy was decided, or as you stand by that ferry, which is
not known enough to Englishmen (for it is one of the most beautiful
things in England), and look back and see Tewkesbury tower, framed
between tall trees over the level of the Severn, to see also the Abbey
buildings in your eye of the mind--a great mass of similar stone with
solid Norman walls, stretching on hugely to the right of the Minster.

All this historical sense and the desire to marry History with Travel is
very fruitful and nourishing, but there is another interest, allied to
it, which is very nearly neglected, and which is yet in a way more
fascinating and more full of meaning. This interest is the interest in
such things as lie behind recorded history, and have survived into our
own times. For underneath the general life of Europe, with its splendid
epic of great Rome turned Christian, crusading, discovering, furnishing
the springs of the Renaissance, and flowering at last materially into
this stupendous knowledge of today, the knowledge of all the Arts, the