place where you were born or brought up, especially if it be some
place in which you passed those years in which the soul is formed to
the body, between, say, seven years of age and seventeen, and you may
look at the landscape of it from its height, but you will not be able
to determine how much in your strong affection is of man and how much
of God. True, nearly everything in a good European landscape has been
moulded, touched, coloured, and in a sense made by Christian men. It is
like a sort of tapestry which man has worked upon the stuff that God
gave him; but, still, any such landscape from the height of one of our
villages has surely more in it of God than of man. For one thing there
is the sky; and then it must be admitted that the lines of the hills
were there before man touched them, and though the definite outline
of the woods, the careful thinning of them which allows great trees
to grow, the noble choice and contrast of foliage, the sharp edge of
cultivated against forest land, the careful planting of the tallest
kinds of things, pine trees and elms, are all man’s work; and though
the sights of water in between are usually man’s work also, yet in the
air that clothes the scene and in all its major lines, man did not make
it at all: he has but used it and improved it under the inspiration of
That which made the whole.
But with the Old Towns it is not so. They please us in proportion to
their apparent intensity of effort; the more man has worked the more
can we embed ourselves within them. The more different is every stone
from another, and the more that difference is due to the curious spirit
of man the more are we pleased. We stand in little lanes where every
single thing about us, except the strip of sky overhead, is man’s
work, and the strip of sky overhead becomes what all skies are in all
pictures--something subordinate to man, an ornament.
One could make a list of the Old Towns and go on for ever: the
sea-light over the red brick of King’s Lynn from the east, and the
other sea-light from the south over that other King’s town, Lyme
Regis; the curious bunch of Rye; the hill of Poitiers all massed up
with history, and in whose uneven alleys all the armies go by, from
the armies of the Gauls to the army that makes a noise about them
to-day: the hill of Lincoln, where one looks up from the Roman Gate
to the towers completing the steep hill; the two hills of Cassel and
of Montreuil, similarly packed with all that men are, have been,
and remain; the quadrated towns, some surely Roman, some certainly
so; Chichester, Winchester, Horsham, Oxford, Chester, and a hundred
others--England is most fruitful in these; the towns that draw their
life from rivers and have high steep walls of stone or brick going
right down into the waters, Albi, Newcastle as it once was; in its own
small way Arundel as it still is; the towns of the great flats, where
men for some reason can best give rein to their fancy, Delft, Antwerp
(that part of it which counts), Bruges, Louvain; Ypres also where the
cooking is so vile.
One might continue for ever this futile list of towns--this is in
common to them all, that wherever men come across them in travel they
have a sense of home and the soul reposes.
Nowhere have I found this more than in the curious and to some the
disappointing town of Arles. Arles has about it, more than any other
town I know, the sentiment of protracted human experience. They dig
and find stone tools and weapons. They dig again and find marks of log
huts, bronze pins, and the arms of the Gauls. And then, apparent to
the eye and still living as it were, and still breathing, as it were,
the upper air which is also ours, not buried away like dead things,
but surviving, is Greece, is Rome, is the Dark Ages, is the Middle
Ages, is the Renaissance, is the religious quarrel, is the Eighteenth
Century, is the Revolution, is to-day. I have sometimes thought that
if a man should go to Arles with the desire deliberately to subject
himself at once to the illusion and to the reality of the past, here he
could do so. He could look curiously for a day at the map and see how
the Rhone had swept the place for thousands upon thousands of years,
making it a sort of corner at the head of its great estuary, and later
of its delta; then he might spend the day wondering at the flints and
the way they were chipped, and getting into the minds of the men that
made them. Then he should spend a day with bronze, and then a day with
the Gaulish iron. After that, for as many weeks as he chose, let him
study the stones which Greece and which Rome have still left in the
public places of the city; the half of the frontal of the great temple
built into his hotel; the amphitheatre upon which he suddenly comes as
he wanders up a narrow modern street; the Arenæ. The Dark Ages, which
have left so little in Europe, have here left massive towers in which
the echoes of the fighting linger, and huge rough stones which the Dark
Ages did not quarry but which they moved from the palaces of the Romans
to their own fortresses, and which by their very presence so removed
bring back to one the long generations in which Europe slept healthily
and survived.
St. Trophime is all the Middle Ages. You may walk quietly round its
cloister and see those ten generations of men, from the hugeness of
the Crusades to the last delicacies of the fifteenth century. The
capitals of the columns go in order, the very earliest touch on that
archaic grotesque which underlies every civilisation, the latest in
their exact realism and their refinement, prove the decline of a whole
period of the soul. Lest Arles should take up too much of this short
space, I would remind the reader only of this ironical and striking
thing: that on its gates as you go out of the city northward, you may
see sculptured in marble what the Revolution but--a century ago--took to
be a primal truth common to all mankind. It concerns the sanctity of
property. Consider that doctrine to-day!
But not Arles, though it is so particular an example, not Delft, not
the old English seaports which so perfectly enshrine our past, not
Coutances which everyone should know, alone explain what the Old Towns
are, but rather a knowledge of them all together explains it.
The Old Towns are ourselves; they are mankind. In their contortion, in
their ruined regularity, in their familiar oddities, and in their awful
corners of darkness, in their piled experience of the soul which has
soaked right into their stone and their brick and their lime, they are
the caskets of man. Note how the trees that grow by licence from the
crevices of their battlements are a sort of sacramental saving things,
exceptional to the fixed lines about them, and note how the grass
which grows between the setts of their paving stones comes up ashamedly
and yet universally, as good memories do in the oldness of the human
mind, and as purity does through the complexity of living.
Which reminds me: Once there was a band of men, foolish men, Bohemian
men, indebted men, who went down to paint in a silly manner, and chose
a town of this sort which looked to them very old and wonderful; and
there they squatted for a late summer month and talked the detestable
jargon of their trade. They talked of tones and of values and of the
Square Touch, and Heaven knows what nonsense, the meanwhile daubing
daub upon daub on to the canvas; praising Velasquez (which after all
was right) and ridiculing the Royal Academy. They ridiculed the Royal
Academy.
Well, now, these men were pleased to see in autumn grass growing
between the setts of the street, especially in one steep street where
they lived. It rejoiced their hearts; they said within themselves,
“This is indeed an Old Town!” But the Town Council of that town
had said among themselves, “What if it become publicly known that
grass grows in our streets? We shall be thought backward; the rich
will not come to visit us. We shall not make so much money, and our
brothers-in-law and others indebted to us will also grow impoverished.
Come! Let us pull up this grass.”
So they paid a poor man, who would otherwise have starved, the amount
of his food on the condition that he should painfully pull up all the
grass, which he did.
Then the artists, seeing him at work, paid him more not to pull it
up. Then the Town Council, finding out this, dismissed him from their
employ, and put upon the job a distant man from some outlandish county,
and had him watched, and he pulled up all the grass, every blade of it,
by night, but thoroughly. The next morning the artists saw what had
been done, and they went out by train to another town, and bought grass
seed and also a little garden soil, and the next night they scattered
the soil carefully between the stones and sowed the grass seed; and the
comedy is not yet ended.
There is a moral to this, but I will not write it down, for in the
first place it may not be a good moral, and in the second place I have
forgotten what it was.
A Crossing of the Hills
When it was nearly noon my companion said to me:
“By what sign or track do you propose to cross the mountains?” For
the mountains here seem higher than any of highest clouds: the valley
beneath them is broad and full of fields: beyond, a long day off,
stands in a huge white wall the Sierra del Cadi. Yet we must cross
these hills if ever we were to see the secluded and little-known
Andorrans. For the Andorrans live in a sort of cup fenced in on every
side by the Pyrenees; it was on this account that my companion asked me
how I would cross over to their land and by what sign I should find my
way.
When I had thought a little I answered:
“By none. I propose to go right up at them, and over unless I find some
accident by which I am debarred.”
“Why, then,” said he, “let us strike up at once, walking steeply until
we come into a new country.”
This advice was good, and so, though we had no longer any path, and
though a mist fell upon us, we began walking upwards, and it was like
going up a moor in the West Riding, except that it went on and on and
on, hour after hour, and was so steep that now and then one had to use
one’s hands.
The mist was all round us; it made a complete silence, and it drifted
in the oddest way, making wisps of vapour quite close to our faces. Nor
had we any guide except the steepness of the hill. For it is a rule
when you are caught in a storm or mist upon the hills, if you are going
up, to go the steepest way, and though in such a fog this often took us
over a knoll which we had to descend again, yet on the whole it proved
a very good rule. It was perhaps the middle of the afternoon, we had
been climbing some five hours, we had ascended some six thousand or
seven thousand feet, when to our vast astonishment we stumbled upon a
sort of road.
It must here be explained why we were astonished. The way we had come
led nowhere; there were no houses and no men. The Andorrans whom we
were about to visit have no communication northward with the outer
world except a thin wire leading over the hills, by which those who
wish to telephone to them can do so; and of all places in Europe,
Andorra is the place out of which men least desire to get and to
which men least desire to go. It is like that place beyond Death of
which people say that it gives complete satisfaction and from which
certainly no one makes any effort to escape, and yet to which no one is
very anxious to go. When, therefore, we came to this road, beginning
suddenly half way up a bare mountain and appearing unexplained through
the mist, we were astonished.
It was embanked and entrenched and levelled as would be any great
French military road near the frontier fortresses. There was a little
runnel running underneath the road, conveying a mountain stream; it was
arched with great care, and the arch was made of good hewn stone well
smoothed. But when we came right on to this road we found something
more astonishing still: we found that it was but the simulacrum or
ghost of a road. It was not metalled; it was but the plan or trace or
idea of a road. No horses had ever trod its soft earth, no wheels had
ever made a rut in it. It had not been used at all. Grass covered it.
The explanation of this astonishing sight we did not receive until
we had spoken in their own tongue the next day to the imperturbable
Andorrans.
It was as though a school of engineers had been turned on here for
fun, to practise the designing of a road in a place where land was
valueless, upon the very summit of the world.
We two men, however, reasoned thus (and reasoned rightly as it turned
out):
“The tall and silent Andorrans in a fit of energy must have begun this
road, though later in another fit they abandoned it. Therefore it will
lead towards their country.”
And as we were very tired of walking up a steep which had now lasted
for so many hours, we determined to follow the large zigzags of this
unknown and magic half-road, and so we did.
It was the oddest sensation in the world walking in the mist a mile
and more above the habitations of men, upon unmetalled, common earth
which yet had the exact shape of pavements, cuttings, and embankments
upon either side, with no sort of clue as to where it led or as to why
men began to make it, and still less of an argument as to why they had
ceased.
It went up and up in great long turns and z’s upon the face of the
mountain, until at last it grew less steep; the mist grew colder, and
after a long flat I thought the land began to fall a little, and I said
to my companion:
“We are over the watershed, and beneath us, miles beneath us, are the
Andorrans.”
When by the continuance of the fall of the land we were certain of
this we took off our hats, in spite of the fog which still hung round
us very wet and very cold and quite silent, and expected any moment a
revelation.
We were not disappointed. Indeed, this attitude of the mind is never
disappointed. Without a moment’s warning the air all round us turned
quite bright and warm, a strong gust blew through the whirling vapour,
and we saw through the veil of it the image of the sun. In a moment
his full disc and warmth was on us. The clouds were torn up above us;
the air was immediately quite clear, and we saw before us, stamped
suddenly upon the sight, a hundred miles of the Pyrenees.
They say that everything is in the mind. If that be true, then he and I
saw in that moment a country which was never yet on earth, for it was
a country which our minds had not yet conceived to be possible, and it
was as new as though we had seen it after the disembodiment of the soul.
The evening sun from over Spain shone warm and low, and every
conceivable colour of the purples and the browns filled up the mountain
tangle, so that the marvel appeared as though it had been painted
carefully in a minute way by a man’s hand; but the colours were filled
with light, and so to fill colour with light is what art can never do.
The main range ran out upon either side, and the foothills in long
series of peaks and ridges fell beneath it, until, beyond, in what
might have been sky or might have been earth, was the haze of the
plains of Ebro.
“It is no wonder,” said I to my companion, “that the Andorrans
jealously preserve their land and have refused to complete this road.”
When I had said that we went down the mountain side. The lower our
steps fell the more we found the wealth and the happiness of men. At
last walls and ploughed land appeared. The fields grew deep, the trees
more sturdy, and under the shelter of peaks with which we had just been
acquainted, but which after an hour or so of descent seemed hopelessly
above us, ran rivers which were already tamed and put to a use. One
could see mills standing upon them. So we went down and down.
There is no rejuvenescence like this entry into Andorra, and there is
no other experience of the same sort, not even the finding of spring
land after a month of winter sea: that vision of brilliant fields
coming down to meet one after the endless grey waste of the sea.
It was, I tell you again, a country completely new, and it might have
been of another world, much better than our own.
So we came at last to the level of the valley, and the first thing we
saw was a pig, and the second was a child, and the third was a woman.
The pig ran at us: for he was lean. The child at first smiled at us
because we were human beings, and then divining that we were fiends who
had violated his sacred home began to cry. The woman drove the pig from
us and took in the child, and in great loneliness and very sad to be so
received we went until we should find men and citizens, and these we
found of our own size, upstanding and very dignified, and recognised
them at once to be of the wealthy and reserved Andorrans. It was clear
by their faces that the _lingua franca_ was well known to them, so I
said to the first in this universal tongue:
“Sir, what is the name of this village?”
And he replied: “It is Saldeu.” But this he said in his own language,
which is somewhat more difficult to understand than the _lingua franca_.
“I take it, therefore,” said I, “that I am in the famous country of
Andorra.”
To which he replied: “You are not many miles from the very town itself:
you approach Andorra ‘the Old.’”
The meaning of this I did not at first exactly understand, but as we
went on, the sun having now set, I said to my companion: “Were not
those epithets right which we attached to the Andorrans in our fancy
before we attempted these enormous hills? Were we not right to call
them the smiling and the tall Andorrans?”
“You are right,” he answered to me, thinking carefully over every word
that he said. “To call them the secluded and the honourable Andorrans
is to describe them in a few words.”
We then continued our way down the darkening valley, whistling little
English songs.
The Barber
Humanity, my dear little human race, is at once more difficult to get
at and more generally present than you seem to know. You are yourselves
human beings, dear people. Yet how many have so fully understood their
fellows (that is, themselves) that they could exactly say how any man
will behave or why any man behaves as he does? But with that I am not
to-day concerned. I am concerned with another matter, which is the
impossibility of getting away from these brothers of ours, even if we
desire to do so.
Note you here, humans, that in reality you do not, even the richest of
you, try to get away from your brothers. You do not like solitudes; you
like sham, theatrical solitudes. You like the Highlands on condition
that you have driven away the people rooted there, but also on
condition that you may have there the wine called champagne. Now if you
had seen that wine made, the gathering of the apples in the orchards
of the Rhine and the Moselle, the adding of the sugar, the watching of
the fermentation, and the corking with a curious machine, you would
appreciate that if you insist upon champagne in the Highlands, then
you are certainly taking humanity with you. If you could follow the
thing farther and see them all passing the stuff on, each a little
afraid of being found out, then you would know that as you drank your
champagne in the most solitary valley you had done far from getting
rid of humanity. All the grotesque of man and all his jollity, all his
stupidity and all his sin, went with you into your hermitage and it
would have gone with you anyhow without the champagne. You cannot make
a desert except by staying away from it yourself. All of which leads me
to the Barber.
First, then, to give you the true framework of that astonishing man.
For exactly thirty-six hours there had been nothing at all in the way
of men; and if thirty-six hours seems but a short time to you as you
read it, it certainly was a mighty long time for me who am writing
this. Of those thirty-six hours the first few had been enlivened (that
is, from five in the morning till about noon) with the sight of a
properly made road, of worked stone, of mown grass, and of all that
my fellow beings are busily at throughout the world. For though I had
not seen a man, yet the marks of men were all around, and at last as I
went into the Uplands I bade farewell to my kind in the shape of an old
rusty pair of rails still united by little iron sleepers, one link of a
Decauville railway which a generation before had led to a now abandoned
mine.
My way over the mountains lay up a gulley which turned as unexpectedly
as might the street of a mediæval town; and which was quite as narrow
and as enwalled as the street of any city; but instead of houses there
were ugly rocks, and instead of people very probably viewless devils.
Still, though I hated to be away from men I went on because I desired
to cross the high ridge which separated me from a dear pastoral people,
of whom I had heard from poets and of whom I had read in old books.
They were a democracy simple and austere, though a little given to
thieving, and every man was a master of his house and a citizen within
the State. This curious little place I determined to see, though the
approach to it was difficult. There are many such in Europe, but this
one lies peculiarly alone, and is respected, and I might say in a sense
worshipped, by the powerful Government to which it is nominally subject.
Well, then, I went on up over the ridge and, by that common trick of
mountains, the great height and the very long way somehow missed me; it
grew dark before I was aware, and when I could have sworn I was about
four thousand feet up I was close upon eight thousand. I had hoped to
manage the Farther Valleys before nightfall, but when I found it was
impossible what I did was this: I scrambled down the first four or five
hundred feet of the far side before it was quite dark, until I came
to the beginnings of a stream that leapt from ledge to ledge. It was
not large enough to supply a cottage well, but it would do to camp
by, for all one needs is water, and there was a little brushwood to
burn. Next morning with the first of the light I went on my scramble
downwards--and it was the old story (which everyone who has wandered
in the great mountains of Europe knows so well), I was in the Wrong
Valley. I was used to that sort of thing, and I recognised the signs of
it at once. I made up my mind for a good day’s effort, which, when one
is by oneself, is an exasperating thing; I tried to guess from my map
what sort of error I had made (and failed). I knew that if I followed
running water I should come at last to men. At about three o’clock in
the afternoon I made a good meal of stale bread, wine, and my companion
the torrent, which had now grown to be a sort of river and made as much
noise as though it were a politician. Then I thought I would sleep
a little, and did so (you must excuse so many details, they are all
necessary). It was five when I rose and took up my journey again. I
shouldered the pack and stolidly determined that another night out in
these warmer lowlands would not hurt me, when I saw something which is
quite unmistakable upon the grass of those particular hills, a worn
patch, and another worn patch a yard or two ahead. That meant a road,
and a road means men--sooner or later.
Sure enough, within half a mile, the worn patches having become now
almost continuous, I rounded a big rock and there was a group of huts.
There were perhaps two dozen of them, perhaps more. Three-quarters were
built of great logs with large, very flat roofs over them held down by
stones; one quarter were built of the same rough stones, and there was
a tiny church of dirt colour, with two windows; and neither window had
glass in it. I had found men. And I had found something more.
For as I went down the main street of this Polity (they had “Main
Street” stuck up in their language at the corner of the only possible
mud alley of their town) I saw that blessed sight which sings to the
heart and is one of the thirteen signs of civilisation, a barber’s
pole. It was not very good; it was not planed or polished; the bark was
still upon the chestnut wood of it; but there was a spiral of red round
it in the orthodox fashion, at the end of it a tuft of red wool, and
underneath it in very faded rough letters upon a board the words, “Here
it is barbered.” More was to follow. I confess that I desired to draw,
for beyond the little huts the mountains, once dreadful, now, being
so far above me, compelled my attention. But just as I had sat down
upon a great stone to draw their outline, there appeared through the
disgusting little door under the barber’s pole one of those humans whom
I have mentioned so often in these lines.