Part 13

It is to be noticed that where men cannot satisfy this emotion by the spectacle of distant hills, or by the presence of nearer ones which they can climb upon occasion, they remedy the defect either in their architecture or with their trees. The people of Northern France lacked height in their landscape, and in their forests the trees were neither of the sort nor stature which commonly satisfy the need of which I speak. Their architecture supplies it. It has reached its most tremendous expression in Beauvais, its most stately in Flanders. No man well understands what height can be in architecture unless he has watched one of the great Flemish steeples from a vantage point upon another. They are sufficiently amazing when you see them, as they were meant to be seen, from the flat pastures outside the city walls. But where most you can appreciate the way in which they make up the impression of the Netherlands is from a platform such as that of Delft, halfway up the tower just below the bells. You look out to an horizon which is that of a misty sea, land absolutely level, and here and there the line between earth and sky is cut by these shafts of human effort whose purpose it is--and they achieve it--to give high places to a plain. So also Strasburg stands up in that great river plain of which it is the centre, and so Salisbury towers above the central upland of South England. And so Chichester over the deep loam of the sea plain of Sussex. You will further note that as you approach the mountains this attempt grows less in human effort, and is replaced by something else. At Bordeaux on the great flat sweep of the river, with the level vineyards all round about, you have a mighty spire, sprung probably from English effort and looking down the river as a landmark and a feature in the sky. But close against the Pyrenees, nay when, two days’ walking south of the city, you first begin to see those mountains, height fails you in architecture. You have not got it at Dax, nor in the splendid and deserted aisles of Auch, nor in the complicated detail of St. Bertrand; nor is there any example of it in Perpignan; but at Narbonne again, where what you have to look at are the flat approaches of the sea, height comes in in a peculiar way; it is the height not of towers, but of walls. It has been remarked by many that effect of this kind is lacking in Italy; but in Italy, wherever you may be, you have the mountains. South of the Sierra Guadarama there in no attempt to diversify the line of the horizon in this fashion. There is nothing in Madrid to which a man looks up in order to satisfy this need for the high places, nor in the churches of the villages round about. The millions spent upon the Escorial were spent with no such object; but then, south of those mountains, the range stands up in a steep escarpment and everywhere is master of the plain. To the North, where they sink away more gradually and form no crest upon which the eye can repose, at once man supplies for himself the uplifting of the face which his soul must have, and the glorious vision of Segovia is proof of it. The castle and the cathedral of that famous city are like a tall ship riding out to sea; or they are like a man preaching from a rock with uplifted hands; or they are like the miraculous appearance of some divine messenger standing facing one above the steeps of the hill.

It is so in all the places I can remember; it is so in the Valley of the Ebro, where Saragossa raises a tall nave and the tall columns of the Pilar, whereas, if you go northward and begin to see the hills this feature fails. It is not apparent in Huesca; Jaca, right under the High Pyrenees, has none of it. I can remember exceptions; one place, among the most famous in Europe, which was built for a mountain kingdom and under the influence of mountaineers, though it stands in a plain. And that is Brou, which seems to be made for mountains rather than for the plain. And there are many modern errors in the matter due to the copying of some style pedantically and to the absence of native inspiration. The chief of these is Lourdes, whose hideous basilica ought never to have attempted height in the midst of those solemn hills. But the history of man when he is dealing with his shrines is a history of perpetual betterment, and some day Lourdes will be replaced by a much worthier thing. The crypt is already excellent, and many good changes in European building have begun with the crypt. There are errors, I say, of this sort due to the modern divorce between personality and production, and there are accidents, though rare, like that of Brou, where a mountain building is set in a plain, though hardly ever a building of the plains in the mountains. But for the most part, and taking Europe as a whole, the rule holds good. Consider the church called L’Epine. It is not high, but every line of it is designed to give the effect of height, and the farther you are from it the more it seems to soar, and the greyer it gets the more finely is it drawn upwards. It stands in the roll of those vast Catalaunian plains where twice the fate of Europe has been decided; where first Attila was rolled backwards, and where more than a thousand years after the armies destined to destroy the Revolution failed. It is the mark and the centre of that plain. But as you get towards the Mountain of Rheims on the north, the Argonne upon the east, the note of height in stone is withdrawn. The Argonne is low, the Mountain of Rheims, though high and noble, is hardly a true mountain, but each uplifts the face.

Among the many misfortunes of men confined to this island, in the great cities of it, it may be counted a good fortune that they have, more than most men bound by modern industry, the opportunity of the high places. Lancashire especially has them at its doors, and anyone who will talk much to Lancashire folk will find how greatly the presence of the moors still enters into their lives. Notably is this true of the Peak just to the east of the great industrial plain, and the sense of height and the satisfaction of it is perhaps nowhere more splendidly met than by the spectacle of that plain beneath a winter sunset as one sees it from the height of the road above Glossop, if it be a Sunday evening when the smoke is not dense, because for twenty-four hours the factories have been silent. The smoke then hangs in wreaths like light clouds against the sunset and one perceives in a very marvellous and sudden fashion beneath one the life of industrial England. It is an aspect of the country not easily forgotten. And everywhere Englishmen have presented to them this effect of height within a smaller compass than the men of other European nations. For in the other nations men are either of the mountains or of the plains. But here the isolated and numerous masses of old rocks in Wales, in Cumberland, and just north of the Midlands, and the sharp escarpments of the five ranges of the chalk that radiate from Salisbury Plain, and the isolated ridge of the Malverns, and the wall of the Cotswolds over the Vale of Severn, make it so that nearly all those who live on this island, and especially those who live in the busiest part of it, have their line of hills before them. East Anglia and the Fens are an exception, and much of the Valley of the Thames as well. And here comes in the lack of London. London has no high places. It is the chief misfortune in the aspect of the city. It was not always so. Popular instinct was very powerful here. Since the Surrey hills had not their escarpment turned towards the Thames, and since looking nowhere round could the Londoner get height, he made it for himself, and the Gothic London of the Middle Ages was a mass of spires, chief and glorious above which was the highest spire in all Europe, higher than Strasburg and higher than Cologne, old St. Paul’s. It stood up on its hill above the river, and gave unity to all that scheme of spires below. Neglect began the ruin, the Great Fire did the rest, and height in London has disappeared. The tall houses and narrow gorges of streets that are the characteristic of Paris and of Edinburgh are unknown to London. Here and there the sense of which I speak is satisfied. Coming up Ludgate Hill, for instance, and seeing the mass of St. Paul’s above it, or in one place where, as you come out of a narrow Westminster street, the upshooting of the repetitive lines of Victoria Tower suddenly strike you. But as a whole height is lacking here. Nor in so vast a place, now fixed in certain traditions, can it be supplied. It is a pity.

On Some Little Horses

All the upland was full of little horses, little ponies of the upland. They looked with curious and interested eyes at man, but none of them had known his command. When men passed them riding they saw that there was some alliance between men and their brothers, and they asked news of it. Then they bent their heads down again soberly, to graze on the new pasture, and the wind blew through their manes and their tails; they were happy beasts, thinking of nothing, and knowing nothing but themselves, yet in their movements and the look of their eyes one could see what the skies were round them, and what the world--they were so much a part of it all.

In the hollows of the forest there were not many birds, not nearly as many as one had heard in the Weald, but one great hawk circled up in spirals against the wind. The wind was blowing splendidly through an air quite blue and clear for many miles, and growing clearer as the afternoon advanced in gladness. It was a sea wind that had been a gale the day before, but during the night everything had changed in South England, and the principal date of the year was passed, the date which is the true beginning of the year. The mist of the morning had scudded before thick Atlantic weather; by noon it was lifted into clouds, by mid-afternoon those clouds were large, heralding clouds of Spring against an unbounded capacity of sky. There was no longer any struggle between them and the gale; they went together in procession over the country and towards the east.

The ridges of the land, like great waves, rolled in also from the westward; they were clearer and they were sharper with every hour, until at last the points of white chalk pits upon hills a day’s ride away showed clearly under the sunlight, and a man could see the trees even upon the horizon line.

The water that one passed in the long ride seemed to grow clearer, and the woods to have more echoes. Then, whatever in the mind turned to memory, as the mind of all men does in Spring when they have done with their own springtime, turned to memory transformed and was full of visions; and whatever of the mind turned to the future, as most of the mind must do in men of any age when the vigour of the Almighty is abroad, looked at it through a veil which was magical.

It seemed as though under the growing sunlight the change that had come, the touch, the spell, was a thing appreciable in moments of time and growing as one watched. You would have said that all the forest was wakening. The flowers you would have said, and especially the daffodils, had just broken from the bud, and evergreens that had been in leaf all winter you would have said had somehow put on a new green. The movement of the wind in the branches of the beeches did not seem to move them but to find a movement responding to its own, and the colour of those branches against the blue sky and touched by the sun as it grew low was full of vivid promise. If it be not too much to ascribe a mood to all inanimate and animate things, there was a mood about one which was a complete forgetfulness of decay, a sort of trampling upon it, a rising out of it, and a using of it into life: a using of it up into life.

Over three ridges of land to the southward lay the sea. When the sea is in movement before a clear wind that is not a storm, and under a clear, sharp sky, its movement may be perceived for miles and miles. No one can see the waves, but the distant belt is shot with a pattern which one feels so far as the eye commands it, and that belt is alive, and it is a moving thing. Moreover, the high sea downs, the great chalk lifts of that shore of the world, are different on such days from what they are upon any others, and receive life from the sea that made them. All that world upon that morning you would have said was not only receiving gifts from the sea, but was itself apparently born from the sea, lived by the air of it, and had been engendered in the depths of it before ever men were on earth.

And of the sea also were the little horses.

When the Spring took them they would suddenly gallop forward without any purpose beyond their wanton pleasure, and arch their necks towards the ground, and bound as a wave bounds; or they would go together, first one starting, then a comrade, then half a dozen of the herd, with a short but easy gait which exactly recalled the movement of salt water under the call of the wind: the movement of salt water where the deeps are, following and following and following, before it rises to break upon the shallows, or to turn back on its course along the eddies of hidden streams.

Anyone seeing the little horses was ready to believe that they had come from the Channel and not from the land at all, but that divine mares had bred them which moved over the tops of the waves, and that their sires flew invisibly along with the south-west wind. The heather bent a little beneath their rapid raids, and when they swerved, halted, and lifted up their heads to let the breeze blow out their manes, then they became, even more thoroughly than before, things of the Channel and of the bowling air. They were full of gladness.

The little horses did not know that they were owned by men; and if now and then men gave them food in the cold weather, or now and then saw to the housing of them, or now and then marked them with a mark, a short, forgotten pain, all these things they took like any other brief and passing accidents of fate. It was not man that had made their home, nor man that ordered the things they saw and used. They had not in anything about them that look which animals have when they have learned that man is of all things upon earth the fullest of sorrow, nor that which beasts have, when they have seen in man, without understanding it, what a principal poet has called “the hideous secret of his mirth”--though “hideous” is an unfair word, for the secret sorrow of man is closely allied with something Divine in his destiny. Such beasts as are continually the companions of our souls and of whom another poet has said that they are “subject and dear to man,” take from him invariably something of his foreknowledge of death. And you may see in the patient oxen of the mountains and even in the herded sheep of the Downs something of man’s burden as they take their lives along. But most you will see what price is paid by those who accompany us when you watch dogs and find that, apart from the body, they can suffer, as we can suffer, and sometimes suffer to the death. So dogs that have known men know loneliness also, and make, as men make, for distant lights at night, and are not happy without living homes. Two things only they have not, which are speech and laughter. And those animals which men deal with continually come also into an easy or an uneasy subservience to him, and you may note their hesitation where there is an unaccustomed duty, and you may note their beginnings of panic when men are not there to decide some difficult thing for them.

These little horses of which I write had as yet known none of these things, and anyone who looked at them closely could see what it was that the saints meant by “innocence in Nature.” There was no evil in them at all, and the good that was in them was a simple good, of the earth and of the place in which they lived. There, away northward, it was the Downs; eastward and westward, the Forest; southward, under the sunlight, the Sea. That was all the little horses knew; and the man who in such a place and at that moment in the springtime could remember nothing more was very much more blessed than any other of his kind. But later he must remember Acheron; and what he will bear beyond Acheron--the consequence of things done.

Not so the Little Horses.

On Streams and Rivers

There is a pass called the Bon Agua, and also Bon Aigo, which leads from the heights of the Catalans to those other heights of Aragon, or as some would say of Bearn, for the pass is from the south of the mountains to the north; on the northern side one knows why it is called Bon Agua, because one sees many thousands of feet below one the little bracelet, the little chain, of the young Garonne.

Do not mistake me, there are two sources of the Garonne. That which is most famous does the most famous thing; for it rises on the far side of the mountains and it plunges into a pond, quite a little pond. Then it cascades underground, through dark passages of which no one knows anything, and comes out beyond the main chain of the hills to join its other quieter sister from the Bon Agua. This startling source, I say, is the most famous, because it does the most startling things, though not more wonderful than what a Yorkshire river does, for there is a Yorkshire river in the West Riding which runs into the pond called Mallam Tarn and reappears afterwards beyond a rocky ridge; but this Garonne of which I speak goes right under high and silent mountains where there are no men, and this is a feat performed, I think, by no other river, not even by the Rhone, which also is lost for the time underground (though few people know it), nor by the River Mole, which plays at being lost and never quite is, and certainly has not the courage to attempt the tunnelling of any hill, though it is proud to be called the “snouzling Mole,” which, by the way, it was first called in the year 1903--but I digress, and I must return to the Bon Agua.

Well, then, there I say under the Bon Agua runs the quieter of the two streams which unite in the Val D’Aran to form the Garonne, and there it was that a companion of mine seeing that little stream looked at it with profound sadness, and said--the things which shall be the text of what I have to say here. For he said:

“Poor little Garonne! Innocent and lovely little Garonne! I have never seen a stream so small, nor so pure, nor so young, nor so far from men. But you are on your way to things you do not know. For first of all you will join that boasting sister of yours which has come from under the hills, and can talk of nothing else; and then you will go past the King’s Bridge being no longer among kind and silent Spaniards, and you will have entered the territory of the Republic which is fierce and evil, and you will grow greater and wider and not more happy until you will come to the perfectly detestable town of Toulouse.... Thence after you will have no pleasure, but only a certain grandeur to be passing through the Gascon fields, and all your desire will be for the sea in which at last you shall merge and be lost. And so strong will be your desire for that dissolution that you will be willing to mix your name with another name, to marry the Dordogne, and then you will die and you will be glad of it.”

This is the way my friend spoke to the Garonne when he saw it first rising in the hills. He did not sing it as he might have sung it, the song it best likes to hear, which is called, “Had the Garonne but wished!” Nor did he try to console it with any flap-doodle about the common lot of rivers, knowing well that some rivers were happier and some less happy. But he spoke to the Garonne as to something that could hear and know. Now this is what men have always done to rivers.

It is in this way that rivers have acquired names, not only among men but among gods; and it is in this way that they convey a fate to the countrysides of which they are the souls.

There is no country of which this is more true than it is true of England. Englishmen of this time--or at least of the time just past--perpetually and rightly complained that somehow or other they missed themselves. Some took refuge in a dream of a sort of a mystical England which was not there. Others reposed in the idea of an older England which may once have been; others, more foolish, hoped to find England again in something overseas. None of these would have suffered their error had they learnt England down English waters, seeing the great memories of England reflected in the English rivers, and meeting them in the silence and the perfection of the streams. But our roads first, and then our railways, our commerce which is from ports, and which must go direct towards them, our life, which is now in vast cities independent of streams, has made us neglect these things.

Consider such a list as this: Arundel when you see it as you come up Arun on the full flood tide. Chichester as you see it on the flood tide from Chichester harbour. Durham as you see it coming down under that cliff with the Cathedral as massive as the rock. Chester as you see it, sailing up the Dee with a light north wind from the sea. Gloucester as you see it from the Severn. Or Winchester as you pull, if you can pull, or paddle which is easier, against the clear and violent thrust of the Itchin. Canterbury as you see it from above or from below, upon the easy water of the Stour; and Lincoln as you see it from its little ditch--and I wonder how many men now journey up in any fashion from Boston! So Norwich from the Yare. So Bramber for that matter from a place where the Adur grows narrow; and what a sight Bramber must have been when the Castle stood whole upon the hill, physically blocking the advance into the Weald.

There is only one stream left, the Thames, which we still know, and we very rightly know it; but we love it only for giving us one experience which we might, if we chose, repeat up and down England everywhere. There is no country in the world like this for rivers. The tide pushes up them to the very Midlands, from every sea. There is nothing of the history of England but is on a river, and as England is an island of birds, so is it more truly an island of rivers. Consider the River Eden, which is so difficult to descend; the Wiltshire Avon and the Hampshire Avon, and those little branch streams the Thame, the Cherwell, and the Evenlode.