The Thing

The wind awoke last night with so noble a violence that it was like the
war in heaven; and I thought for a moment that the Thing had broken free.
For wind never seems like empty air. Wind always sounds full and
physical, like the big body of something; and I fancied that the Thing
itself was walking gigantic along the great roads between the forests of
beech.

Let me explain. The vitality and recurrent victory of Christendom have
been due to the power of the Thing to break out from time to time from its
enveloping words and symbols. Without this power all civilisations tend
to perish under a load of language and ritual. One instance of this we
hear much in modern discussion: the separation of the form from the spirit
of religion. But we hear too little of numberless other cases of the same
stiffening and falsification; we are far too seldom reminded that just as
church-going is not religion, so reading and writing are not knowledge,
and voting is not self-government. It would be easy to find people in the
big cities who can read and write quickly enough to be clerks, but who are
actually ignorant of the daily movements of the sun and moon.

The case of self-government is even more curious, especially as one
watches it for the first time in a country district. Self-government arose
among men (probably among the primitive men, certainly among the ancients)
out of an idea which seems now too simple to be understood. The notion
of self-government was not (as many modern friends and foes of it seem to
think) the notion that the ordinary citizen is to be consulted as one
consults an Encyclopaedia. He is not there to be asked a lot of fancy
questions, to see how he answers them. He and his fellows are to be,
within reasonable human limits, masters of their own lives. They shall
decide whether they shall be men of the oar or the wheel, of the spade or
the spear. The men of the valley shall settle whether the valley shall be
devastated for coal or covered with corn and vines; the men of the town
shall decide whether it shall be hoary with thatches or splendid with
spires. Of their own nature and instinct they shall gather under a
patriarchal chief or debate in a political market-place. And in case the
word "man" be misunderstood, I may remark that in this moral atmosphere,
this original soul of self-government, the women always have quite as much
influence as the men. But in modern England neither the men nor the women
have any influence at all. In this primary matter, the moulding of the
landscape, the creation of a mode of life, the people are utterly impotent.
They stand and stare at imperial and economic processes going on, as
they might stare at the Lord Mayor's Show.

Round about where I live, for