I am full of curiosity about the Past. This does not mean that I read the memoirs of Napoleon's marshals, or that I write queries to antiquarian papers, or that I enjoy being taken to see invisible Pictish barrows and Roman encampments; in fact, nothing could be further from my character and habits. But the Past puzzles me; and I like being puzzled by the Past.
Not in its details, but in all manner of general questions, and such, moreover, as very rarely admit of an answer. What are the relations of the Past and Present? Where does the Past begin? And, to go further still, what _is_ the Past?
All this sounds abstract, and even metaphysical; but it is really quite the reverse. These speculations are always connected with some concrete place or person, and they arise in my mind (and in the mind of the twenty thousand persons whom I don't know, but whom I resemble), together with some perspective of street or outline of face, and always with a faint puff of emotion. I will give you a typical instance of one of these puzzles. It formulated itself in my mind a few weeks ago at Verona, while going to see a certain little church on the slopes above the Adige. You go through the priest's house and vineyard; there is a fine carved lintel and a bit of fresco, all in the midst of a rag fair of squalid streets. What a place this must once have been! I felt the charm and splendour of piled-up palace and hanging gardens in former days. In former days! And a little doubt dropped into it, "If former days there ever were." For who can tell? This crumbling, ragged business which to us means that we stand before the Past; this gradual perishing of things in neglect and defilement, may very well have formed a necessary part of our ancestors' present. Our own standard and habit of tidiness, decorum, and uniformity may be quite recent developments; barbarism, in the sense of decay and pollution, may have existed together with prosperity. It is quite possible that dead donkeys were left in the streets of Haroun-al-Raschid's Bagdad, or Semiramis' Babylon, as well as in those of poor little modern Tangier. And the Verona of the Scaligers may have been just such a Verona as this which delights and depresses us, only with new beautiful things being built quite naturally alongside of decayed and defiled ones; things nowadays all equally levelled in ruin and squalor. The splendour of the Past may be a mere fiction of our own, like the romance of the Past which we say we no longer believe in. But history gives us, I think, no definite answer.