Page:On everything.djvu/191

The Weald All that roll of land which lies held between and above the chalk of South-Eastern England, the clay and the sand, and the uncontinuous short trees, the muddy little rivers, the scattered homesteads, the absence of levels, and almost the absence of true hills, the distant prospects northwards and southwards of quite another land, the blue lines and naked heights a day's journey away against the sky—all that is the Weald. And it runs from the place where the two lines of chalk meet in Hampshire beyond Selborne, and beyond Petersfield, right away to the sea which it sweeps upon in a grand curve, between Pevensey (which was once the chief port of the Weald) and the heights round Hastings: for though these heights are in a manner part of the Weald, yet between them and the chalk again by Folkestone no true Wealden country lies.

Unless a man understands the Weald he cannot easily write about the beginnings of England, and yet historians have not understood it. Only the men mixed into it and married with it or born upon it have understood it, and these, I say, until lately were not permitted by constant travel that judgment by analogy and by contrast which teaches us the true meaning of things that we had hitherto only instinctively known. Now a Wealden man can say certain things about his countryside which are of real value to history and perhaps to politics as well; at any rate, to politics in that larger sense of patriotism intelligently appreciating the future of one's own 175