It is a commonplace, and a true one, that the modern world is full of illusions, or rather that the things which we interest ourselves about to-day are nearly all of them matters upon which we have no direct knowledge. The climate of Jamaica, a foreign trial, a war between two nations neither of which we have visited, come to entertain us far more than things upon which we have immediate and personal experience. After a little while we come also to judge these things as though we knew them.

I say that the whole modern world (with the exception of the peasants) suffers heavily from this disease, and no one more than politicians and their electorate. Of a politician upon whose judgment may depend the happiness of the country, most of those who admire or hate him have an impression drawn from caricatures. Of the electorate whom they are supposed to serve politicians have a vague conception, drawn from the hurried aspect of vast crowds of poor men seen by gaslight after dinner in huge halls, and in the course of all the distractions of a speech.

This fantastic ignorance which modern conditions[Pg 31] have bred in the great towns seems to some to be wholly evil in its effect. It is not so; for among its effects are to be discovered a number of joyful surprises. Many things which we had imagined to be such and such and which we had deplored, turned out upon examination to be very different, and much better than our newspaper picture had conceived. Among these joyful surprises is the discovery that the earth is not full, that travel has not overspread it, and that there is perfect loneliness within the reach of all. No popular conception of the modern world is more firmly held, especially by educated, and therefore by jaded, men. There is none which it is more useful to explode. Two things have come side by side: first, an immense increase in the ease of communications; secondly, a positive delight in the crowd to associate with the crowd; and these two facts, the one economic and the other social, have more than counteracted all the expansion in numbers of those who travel about and defile the earth with their presence. In between the tracks of their travel, a few miles upon the centres in which they herd, pig and pen, there is an isolation which our forefathers never knew. A hundred years ago the Land's End and St. Davids were both places far removed from London; to-day the end of Cornwall is familiar to many thousands of men who are not native to it, but what about St. Davids? How many men who read this can say where it is or have visited it? A hundred years ago Midhurst, Petworth,[Pg 32] Pulborough, Horsham, East Grinstead, Crowborough Top, Haywards Heath, Heathfield, Burwash, were places upon the map of Sussex intimately known to the men of that county, and visited but rarely by men from beyond the weald. But though they were visited rarely they were visited equally, and if a man said he knew the county then he knew those places. Compare their fate to-day. Crowborough, Haywards Heath, and Heathfield are suburbs of London, and right through the heart of the county a long bridge—pure London all the way—unites London with its suburb of Brighton. Do you imagine upon that account that the isolation of Sussex is lost? Very far from it. It is considerably increased. Nay, the loneliness of that vast proportion of the county which lines of travel do not touch is, if anything, too great—it is in excess even of what the greatest lover of contemplation can desire. And you may within a mile of the Brighton road lie in a wood and watch small beasts behaving with a freedom and an ignorance of human intercourse which perhaps they never had when village life was really strong, when the great estates were not mortgaged to cosmopolitan finance, when the old families lived in their houses and made the county town five miles away their resort for purchase and even for amusement.

It is equally true of the North; the whole chain of the Pennines between the two main lines of travel to the east and to the west of them is utterly deserted. A man may walk thirty times in a year[Pg 33] from Hawes to Ribble Head and in not half those walks meet or speak to a man. This is true of the great high road across the chain, of the summits it is far truer. Go from Appleby over Cross Fell up Wild Boar Scar and down the water to Alston, and you will be as completely cut off from men the whole day long as you could be in the West of Canada. The same is true of the dales of Cheviot. From where Chevy Chase was fought all the way up Rededale is a fine great road that was once the highway to Scotland over Carter Fell. If a man goes lame upon the English side of it he cannot count upon getting a lift to Jedburgh; he must limp it all the way. And speaking of that road reminds one that not only has this novel isolation come upon a great part of Britain, but that as one watches it with a sense that is not wholly pleasurable (especially on winter evenings, after a day bereft of human intercourse) one has often around one evidences of a recent time when the activities of the country were more evenly spread. Upon this same great road from Carter Fell there is upon the Scotch side of the path a house which once paid a high rental and did great trade with the traffic. It is in ruins. Upon that same Cross Fell which is now completely alone, you come perpetually upon abandoned workings, upon bits of hardened road, now half sunk into the bog, and even upon the remains of broken bridges over streams.

In the quadrilateral which is formed by the railways in the south-west of Scotland there is a great[Pg 34] area of silence, and in that belt of Wales which separates the northern from the southern dialects, a belt which is again served by a fine high road, and which has been throughout English history the scene of the western advance from across the Marches into the Principality, there is silence also. Plinlimmon, the mountain which dominates this central part, is unknown, and the reason is easy enough to discover. Plinlimmon is not an abrupt mountain, astonishing in outline or difficult of ascent. It is, upon the contrary, a great rounded hill, but there is perhaps no height in the island more solemn nor commanding a more awful and spacious scene, and those few who would still take the trouble to reach it may find the north a chasm more wonderful, I think, than any in the range of Snowdon or in the neighbourhood of Cader Idris. All this is true of that little narrow space which lies between the North Sea and St. George's Channel, and when one considers the neighbouring countries of the Continent the instances that arise are innumerable. Within two days of London, and to be reached at about an expense of £2, there is a little democracy in which no man has ever been put to death, in which no wheeled vehicles have ever been seen, of which the few laws are made, or rather the ancient and honourable customs maintained, by the heads of families meeting for discussion. You can from the little village in its centre telephone to Paris if you wish, and yet who has been to that place? Or who knows the way there from London?[Pg 35] Probably not a dozen men. There is on one of the main railways of Europe a chain of mountains abrupt, intensely blue, comparable only to the background of certain mediæval illuminations, and, with their astonishing, unworldly aspect, making one understand how the active mediæval imagination could see, remember, and use things that we pass by. I know of no artist who has drawn that range nor of any traveller who has described it. You cannot see it from the train; it runs along a narrow and profound valley. You must leave the railway at a little roadside station, you must climb two thousand feet on to the plateau above, and from there, when you have turned a corner of the road, there breaks upon you this unearthly vision of the range.

Now consider that example—and it will not be difficult to discover how and why these places remain, or rather increasingly become, isolated from the modern world. For what must you do to obtain a view of what I have spoken? You must abandon the express, with its speed and luxury, to which you are accustomed; you must get into a little slow and dingy local train, you must climb a high hill in spite of weather. You may do it once from curiosity, but you are not compelled to the open air and the road as were your fathers, and for one man that will rarely be at the pains to go about to visit and to understand the world there are a thousand who would rather delude themselves into a simulacrum of the emotions of travel by reading of them in some book, and that[Pg 36] book will probably have been written by some one who has no more followed the road than themselves. For a man to know the world he must not sleep now and again in the open, or now and again for a freak in some dirty inn where there is bad cooking and bad wine; he must so sleep continually day after day. He must not have only an object before him in his journey, such as the visiting of a famous shrine; he must also have an object all the way along, to note whatever he may pass; and he must so draw his itinerary that it shall be something out of the common, that is, something exposing one always to discomfort and often to peril. There are few men who care to pay the price, and, after all, the effect of their hesitation is excellent, for they run off to vulgarise the New World and the Far East, and they leave England and Europe to the intimacy of those who love them best.