The Golden Legend.

THOSE lines, instinct with the dramatic possibilities of the road in far-off days, call to mind the old engravings and wood-cuts of the Durer school, in whose back-grounds, on the Hill Terrible, sits the City Beautiful, reached along a delectable road that wanders, now across open heaths and then disappears in the welcome shade of hoary woods; reappearing to reach its goal beside mountain streams and torrents, whose boulderous course it spans by high-arched bridges. Down such roads as these, in woodcuts such as those, go horsed and armed knights, very plumy and steely, ladies fair on their palfreys, with high-horned head-dresses; pages, men-at-arms, peasants, and all the mediÆval traffic of the highways; while the verminous hermit in his cell by the bridge comes to his door as the wayfarers go by, scratching himself with one hand, and in the other holding a scallop-shell for the alms he, in a pitiful voice and in the name of God and all the saints, implores.

Those lines, in that modern versification of the terrible old legend by Jacobus de Voragine, bring all these things vividly before the imagination. You may almost scent the hawthorn blossom on the wayside hedges, can all but feel the soft breath of the wind, or the heat o’ the sun, and can even smell the hermit, rich in pietistic dirt. Joy and disaster, love and hate, doing and daring, all had their place on the highway in those times: Romance and the Road were terms convertible.

Now all those things are as tales that are told; but for centuries the Road retained that old distinction: the mediÆval company had passed away: the knights and the ladies to their altar-tombs in the old country churches, the rest none knows whither; but after then came later generations, all travelling, living, hating, and loving along the highways, and so they continued to do, through the coaching era and until railways for a long series of years rendered the Road an obsolete institution.

When did the immemorial co-partnership of Romance and the Road begin to be dissolved? Let us consider. The first beginnings are found in the introduction of telegraphic signalling, when signal-stations were erected on the hills, and messages were passed on from one to another by means of revolving shutters or semaphore arms. The system originated about 1795, and came into use along this road in 1803. We read in the “Observer” of that period the startling announcement: “A line of communication, by means of telegraphs, is to be established between London and the north, by which intelligence will be conveyed in six hours at the distance of 400 miles.” Here, then, we find the parting of the ways! Instead of the horsed messenger, performing that distance in, let us say, forty-five hours, the telegraphists sent messages through in a fraction of that time, providing conditions were favourable. A very serious draw-back to the system was that in dull or stormy weather it was unworkable.

What the mechanical telegraph began the railways and the electric telegraph completed, and the roads—save for the cycles and the motor-cars from whose presence Romance flies abashed—have lost their intimate touch with life. They are largely removed from the sordid instant, and that is why we love them. Present-day romance will only be found by the next generation when, to adopt an American locution, it has become a “back number”: for ourselves, we are fain to the poor recourse of listening to the elfin harmonies of the winds in the wayside telegraph-poles, and to deduce romantic messages from those sounds; but alas! so little romantic may they be that the wires are probably flashing market reports to the effect that “grey shirtings are quiet,” or “bacon was steady.” Yet, on the other hand, a police message may be passing, to lead to the arrest of some fugitive: some fraudulent Napoleon of finance or one of the smaller fry: you never know!

In the old days, the criminal, visible to our physical eyes, would be seen, fleeing from justice, and after him, at a decent interval, the officers of the law, tailing away in a long perspective, properly exhausted and furious, their horses foaming and reeking with sweat in most appropriate style. You only see that sort of thing nowadays at Drury Lane or the Adelphi, but they do it very well there, even though the foam and the reek be applied with sponge and soap-suds.

He who would now find sights like these along the roads would need to wait long. The fugitives are as many as ever, but they are in yonder train. The telegraph has already outstripped such an one before he has gone a quarter of his journey, and the police are waiting at the other end, where, quite emotionless and regardless of dramatic necessities, they will presently arrest him.

Long stretches of the roads themselves are altered, with the growth of towns, into something new and strange, and where Terror stalked starkly in days of yore and Romance sped, flaunting, by, smug suburbs spread their vistas of red-brick, paved, and kerbed and lighted, and only the doctor, the collectors of rates and taxes, and the cries of the evening newspaper-boys stir the pulses of the inhabitants. The tragedies that sometimes await the doctor’s visits are a poor substitute for the soul-stirring days of old—they are too domestic: and that occasional inability to meet the demands of the tax-gatherer and the rate-collector which even the most respectable suburbs occasionally know is not tragedy in the inspiring sort.

The pilgrim of the roads therefore finds his account in the past; and it is to illustrate the long leagues for him that these pages are wrought out of long-forgotten things. Such an one, cycling, perchance, down the first few tramway-infested miles and cleansing himself after the almost inevitable muddy skid, may make shift to call a Tapleian philosophy to his aid, and exclaim with gratitude: “After all, it is an improvement upon two hundred years ago. Why, if I had been travelling here THEN, I should probably have been robbed and beaten—perhaps even murdered—by the highwaymen!”

CHARLES G. HARPER,

Petersham, Surrey,
October, 1907.