operation even than the vagaries of seeds; I come to the wanderings, alightings, fertilisings of man's thought. Will you forgive my starting off with a small personal experience which (since we have just been talking of a very common weed) may here come in not inappropriately? I received a message the other day from an acquaintance, a young engineer in Vancouver. He had been constructing a large dam on the edge of a forest, himself the only European, with a gang of Japanese labourers. But the rains proved so torrential, washing down the sides of the dam as fast as they were heaped, and half drowning the diggers, that at length the whole party sought shelter in the woods. There, as he searched about, my young engineer came upon a log-shanty, doorless, abandoned, empty, save for two pathetic objects left on the mud floor-the one a burst kettle, the other a "soiled copy" (as the booksellers say) of one of my most unpopular novels. You see, there is no room for vanity in the narrative—a burst kettle and this book-the only two things not worth taking away! Yet I-who can neither make nor mend kettles-own to a thrill of pride to belong to a calling that can fling the other thing so far; and nurse a hope that the book did, in its hour, cheer rather than dispirit that unknown dweller in the wilderness. But indeed-to come to more serious and less dead, though more ancient, authors—you never can tell how long this or that of theirs will lie dormant, then suddenly spring to life. Someone copies down a little poem on reed paper, on the back of a washing bill: the paper goes to wrap a mummy; long centuries pass; a tomb is laid bare of the covering sand, and from its dead ribs they unwind a passionate lyric of Sappho: Οἱ μὲν ἱππήων στρότον, οἱ δὲ πέσδων, Troops of horse-soldiers, regiments of footmen, I believe that this one was actually recovered from a rubbish-heap: but another such is unwrapped from the ribs of a mummy, of a woman thousands of years dead. Was it bound about them because her heart within them perchance had beaten to it?-wrapped by her desire -by the hands of a lover-or just by chance? As Sir Thomas Browne says What song the syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture. What time the persons of these ossuaries entered the famous nations of the dead, and slept with princes and counsellors, might admit a wide solution. But who were the proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a question above antiquarism. IV But these travels and resuscitations of the written or the printed word, though they may amuse our curiosity, are nothing to marvel at; we can account for them. I am coming to something far more mysterious. A friend of mine, a far traveller, once assured me that if you wanted to find yourself in a real "gossip shop"as he put it-you should go to the Sahara. That desert, he informed me solemnly, "is one great sounding-board. You scarcely dare to whisper a secret there. You cannot kill a man in the Algerian Sahara even so far south as Fort Mirabel but the news of it will be muttered abroad somewhere in the Libyan desert, say at Ain-elSheb, almost as soon as a telephone (if there were one, which there is not) could carry it." Well, doubtless my friend overstated it. But how do you account for the folk-stories? Take any of the fairytales you know best. Take Cinderella, or Red Riding Hood or Hop o' my Thumb. How can you explain that these are common not only to widely scattered nations of the race we call Aryan, from Asia to Iceland, but common also to savages in Borneo and Zululand, the South Sea Islander, the American Indian? The missionaries did not bring them, but found them. There are tribal and local variations, but the tale itself cannot be mistaken. Shall we choose Beauty and the Beast? That is not only and plainly, as soon as you start to examine it, the Greek tale of Cupid and Psyche, preserved in Apuleius; not only a tale told by nurses in Norway and Hungary; not only a tale recognisable in the Rig-Veda: but a tale told by Bornuese and by Algonquin Indians. Shall we choose The Wolf who ate the Six Kids while the Seventh was hidden in the Clockcase? That again is negro as well as European: you may find it among the exploits of Brer Rabbit. Or shall we choose the story of the adventurous youth who lands on a shore commanded by a wizard, is made spellbound and set to do heavy tasks, is helped by the wizard's pretty daughter and escapes with her aid. That is the story of Jason and Medea: you may find all the first half of it in Shakespeare's The Tempest: but you may also find it (as Andrew Lang sufficiently proved) "in Japan, among the Eskimo, among the Bushmen, the Samoyeds, and the Zulus, as well as in Hungarian, Magyar, Celtic, and other European household tales." Well, I shall not give a guess, this evening, at the way in which these immemorial tales were carried and spread. As Emerson said But the camp-fires around which men told these old tales have been broken up for the next day's march, and the embers trodden out, centuries and centuries ago. V Well, now, let us work back for a few minutes towards this inexplicable thing through something of which, though marvellous, we may catch at an understanding. In the beginning of the eighth century in the remote north of a barbarous tract of England, a monk called Bede founds a school. He is (I suppose) of all men in the world the least-as we should put it nowadaysself-advertising. He just labours there, in the cloisters of Jarrow, never leaving them, intent only on his page, for the love of scholarship. Between his solitary lamp and the continent of Europe stretches a belt of fens, of fog, of darkness, broad as two-thirds of England; beyond that, the Channel. Yet the light reaches across and over. As Portia beautifully says How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world. Men on the continent have heard of Jarrow: eyes are watching; in due time Bede's best pupil, Alcuin of York, gets an invitation to come over to the court of Charlemagne, to be its educational adviser. So Alcuin leaves York, soon to be destroyed with its fine school and library by the Scandinavian raiders (for your true barbarian, even when he happens to be a pedantic one, always destroys a library. Louvain is his sign-manual) -Alcuin leaves York and crosses over to France with his learning. Very well: but how can you explain it, save by supposing a community of men in Europe alert for learning as merchants for gold, kept informed of where the best thing was to be had, and determined to have it? Yes, and we are right in supposing this. For when light begins to glimmer, day to break, on the Dark Ages (as we call them, and thereby impute to them, I think, along with their own darkness no little of ours, much as the British seaman abroad has been heard to commiserate "them poor ignorant foreigners")—when daylight begins to flow, wavering, and spreads for us over the Dark Ages, what is the first thing we see? I will tell you what is the first thing I see. It is the Roads. VI That is why-to your mild wonder, maybe I began this lecture by talking of the old trade-routes. I see the Roads glimmer up out of that morning twilight |