was pink and white, his eyes were lively, his brown hair was short,
curled, trimmed and oily, and some fifteen degrees from the middle of
his head to the eastward went a very clear white line which was the
parting of his hair. His two little moustaches curled upwards like
rams’ horns; his chin was square and firm, but very full and healthy.
He was looking out for customers. Oh, Humanity, my brothers, Divine
Object of the Positivists, Plaything of the Theologians, Food of the
God of War, Great of Destiny, Victim of Experience, Doubtful of Doom,
Foreknowing of Death, Humanity enslaved, exultant, always on the march,
never arriving, the only thing yet made that can laugh and can cry,
Humanity, in fine, which was generously designed as matter for poets,
hear! He was looking out for customers! Even to the railways of his own
land it was nearly a hundred miles; no one read print; beyond Latin no
foreign language perhaps was known. No vehicle on wheels had ever been
into that place, even the maps were wrong, no one therein had seen a
metalled road, a ship of any kind, nor perhaps one polished stone. But
he was looking out for customers.
He spotted me. He used no subterfuge; he smiled and beckoned with his
finger, and I went at once, as men do when the Figure appears at the
Doorway of the Feast and beckons some one of the revellers into the
darkness. I obeyed. He put a towel round my neck; he lathered my chin;
I gazed at the ceiling, and he began to shave.
On the ceiling was an advertisement in the English tongue. I am inured
by this time to the inconceivable stupidity of modern commerce, but (as
the Pwca said to the Acorn) “the like of this I never saw.” There most
certainly was not a man in the whole place who had ever heard of the
English language, nor, I will bet a boot, had anyone been there before
me who did, at any rate not since the pilgrimages stopped. Yet there
was this advertisement staring me in the face, and what it told me to
do was to buy a certain kind of bicycle. It gave no evidence in favour
of the thing. It asserted. It said that this bicycle was the best.
There was a picture of a young man riding on the bicycle, and under it
in very small letters in the language of the country an address where
such bicycles might be bought. The address was in a town as far away as
Bristol is from Hull, and between it was range upon range of mountains,
and never a road.
I watched this advertisement, and the Barber all the while talked to me
of the things of this world.
He would have it that I was a stranger. He mentioned the place--it
was about eighty miles away--from which I came. He said he knew it at
once by my accent and my hesitation over their tongue. He asked me
questions upon the politics of the place, and when I could not reply
he assured me that he meant no harm; he knew that politics were not
to be discussed among gentlemen. He recommended to me what barbers
always recommend, and I saw that his bottles were from the ends of the
earth--some French, some German, some American--at least their labels
were. Then when he had shaved me he very politely began to whistle a
tune.
It was a music-hall tune. I had heard it first eighteen months before
in Glasgow, but it had come there from New York. It was already
beginning to be stale in London--it did not seem very new to the
Barber, for he whistled it with thorough knowledge, and he added trills
and voluntary passages of merit and originality. I asked him how much
there was to pay. He named so considerable a sum that I looked at him
doubtfully, but he still smiled, and I paid him.
I asked him next how far it might be to the next village down the
valley. He said three hours. I went on, and found that he had spoken
the truth.
In that next village I slept, and I went forward all the next day and
half the next before I came to what you would call a town. But all the
while the Barber remained in my mind. There are people like this all
over the world, even on the edges of eternity. How can one ever be
lonely?
On High Places
All over the world every kind of man has had for the high places of
his country, or for the high places that he has seen in travel (though
these last have made upon him a lesser impression), a sentiment closely
allied to religion and difficult to fit in with common words. It is
upon such sites that sacrifice upon special occasion has been offered.
It is here that you will find rare, unvisited, but very holy shrines
to-day, and even in its last and most degraded form the men of our
modern societies, who are atrophied in such things, spur themselves to
a special emotion by distant voyages in which they can satisfy this
adoration of a summit over a plain. It is not capable of analysis; but
how marvellously it fills the mind. It is not difficult to understand
that monk of the Dark Ages--to be accurate, of the early eleventh
century--who, having doubtless seen Paris a hundred times from the
height of Montmartre, could not believe that the martyrdom of St. Denis
had taken place on the plain. Something primal in him demanded the
high and lonely place as the scene of the foundation of the Church of
Lutetia, and he would have it that St. Denis was martyred there. All
the popular stories were with him, and the legend arose. Up and down
Europe, wherever there are hills, you will find upon conspicuous crags
or little peaks, upon the loneliest ridges, a chapel. There is one such
on a hill near Remiremont; there is another at Roncesvalles; there is
another on the high platform at Portofino; there is another on the
very height called Holy Cross above Urgel. In its way, St. Martha’s
in Surrey is of that kind. There are hundreds everywhere throughout
Christendom, and they witness to this need of man for which, I say,
there is no name.
I have heard of a mountain in Ireland, in the west of that country, to
the summit of which upon a certain day of the year the people and the
priests will go together, and Mass will be said in the open air upon
that height. And so it is in several places of the Vosges and of the
Pyrenees, and in one or two, I believe, of the foothills of the Alps.
Everywhere men associate the exaltation of the high places with worship.
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: