CHAPTER XX

WINCHESTER

I do not know what it is that moves me so deeply in the old cities of
Southern England, in Canterbury, Rochester, Chichester, most of all,
perhaps, in Winchester, unless it be that they sum up in a way nothing
else can do the England that is surely and irrevocably passing away.
How reverently we approach them, with what hesitation and misgiving we
try to express what we feel about them! They are indeed the sanctuaries
of England, sanctuaries in which it is wiser to pray than to exult,
since their beauty and antiquity, their repose and quietness, fill us
with an extraordinary uneasiness and amazement, a kind of nostalgia
which nothing really our own can satisfy. For if Winchester appeals to
us as the symbol of England, it is not the England of our day for which
she stands. Let Manchester or Sheffield stand for that, places so
unquiet, so meanly wretched and hopeless, that no one has ever thought
of them without a kind of fear and misery. Alas, they are the reality,
while Winchester gradually fades year by year into a mere dream city,
as it were Camelot indeed, too good to be true, established, if at all,
rather in the clouds, or in our hearts, than upon the earth we tread.
And if in truth she stands for something that was once our own, it is
for something we are gradually leaving behind us, discarding and
forgetting, something that after four centuries of disputation and
anarchy no man any longer believes capable of realisation here and now.
Yet Winchester endures in her beauty, her now so precarious
loveliness, and while she endures it is still possible to refuse to
despair of England. For she is co-eval with us; before we knew
ourselves or were aware of our destiny she stood beside the Itchen
within the shadow of her hills east and west, in the meads and the
water meadows. She saw the advent of the Roman, she claims to be
Arthur's chief city, as later she was the throne of the Saxon kings; in
her council chamber England was first named England.

Of what indeed she was before the Romans came and drew us within their
great administration, we are largely ignorant; but we know that they
established here a town of considerable importance, which they called
Venta Belgarum, larger than Silchester, if we may believe that the
mediaeval walls stand upon Roman foundations, and certainly a centre of
Roman administrative life. Four Roman roads undoubtedly found in her
their goal and terminus, co