towering up above you from between and above two houses gabled and
almost meeting. It is what the builders meant when one comes out from
such fissures into the great Place, the parvis of the cathedral, like
a sailor from a river into the sea. Not that certain buildings were
not made particularly for wide approaches and splendid roads, but that
these, when they are the rule, sterilize and kill a town. Napoleon was
wise enough when he designed that there should lead all up beyond the
Tiber to St. Peter's a vast imperial way. But the modern nondescript
horde, which has made Rome its prey, is very ill advised to drive those
new Straight Streets foolishly, emptily, with mean façades of plaster
and great gaps that will not fill.
You will have noted in your travels how the Crooked Streets gather
names to themselves which are as individual as they, and which are
bound up with them as our names are with all our own human reality and
humour. Thus I bear in mind certain streets of the town where I served
as a soldier. There was the Street of the Three Little Heaps of Wheat,
the Street of the Trumpeting Moor, the Street of the False Heart, and
an exceedingly pleasant street called "Who Grumbles at It?" and another
short one called "The Street of the Devil in His Haste," and many
others.
From time to time those modern town councillors from whom Heaven has
wisely withdrawn all immoderate sums of money, and who therefore have
not the power to take away my Crooked Streets and put Straight ones in
their places, change old names to new ones. Every such change indicates
some snobbery of the time: some little battle exaggerated to be a great
thing; some public fellow or other, in Parliament or what not; some fad
of the learned or of the important in their day.
Once I remember seeing in an obscure corner a twist of dear old houses
built before George III was king, and on the corner of this row was
painted "Kipling Street: late Nelson Street."
Upon another occasion I went to a little Norman market town up among
the hills, where one of the smaller squares was called "The Place of
the Three Mad Nuns," and when I got there after so many years and was
beginning to renew my youth I was struck all of a heap to see a great
enamelled blue and white affair upon the walls. They had renamed the
triangle. They had called it "The Place Victor Hugo"!
However, all you who love Crooked Streets, I bid you lift up your
hearts. There is no power on earth that can make man build Straight
Streets for long. It is a bad thing, as a general rule, to prophesy
good or to make men feel comfortable with the vision of a pleasant
future; but in this case I am right enough. The Crooked Streets will
certainly return.
Let me boldly borrow a quotation which I never saw until the other day,
and that in another man's work, but which, having once seen it, I shall
retain all the days of my life.
"Oh, passi graviora, dabit Deus his quoque finem," or words to that
effect. I can never be sure of a quotation, still less of scansion, and
anyhow, as I am deliberately stealing it from another man, if I have
changed it so much the better.
XIX
THE PLACE APART
Little pen, be good and flow with ink (which you do not always do)
so that I may tell you what came to me once in a high summer and the
happiness I had of it.
* * * * *
One Summer morning as I was wandering from one house to another among
the houses of men, I lifted up a bank from a river to a village and
good houses, and there I was well entertained. I wish I could recite
the names of those chance companions, but I cannot, for they did not
tell me their names. June was just beginning in the middle lands where
there are vines, but not many, and where the look of the stonework is
still northern. The place was not very far from the Western Sea.
The bank on which the village stood above that river had behind it
a solemn slope of woodland leading up gently to where, two miles
or more away, yet not three hundred feet above me, the new green of
the tree-tops made a line along the sky. Clouds of a little, happy,
hurrying sort ran across the gentle blue of that heaven, and I thought,
as I went onward into the forest upland, that I had come to very good
things: but indeed I had come to things of a graver kind.
A path went on athwart the woods and upwards. This path was first
regular, and then grew less and less marked, though it still preserved
a clear-way through the undergrowth. The new leaves were opened all
about me, and there was a little breeze: yet the birds piped singly
and the height was lonely when I reached it, as though it were engaged
in a sort of contemplation. At the summit was first one small clearing
and then another, in which coarse grass grew high within the walls of
trees; men had not often come that way, and those men only the few of
the countryside.
Just where the slope began to go downwards again upon the further
side, these little clearings ceased and the woods closed in again. The
path, or what was left of it, wholly failed, and I had now to push my
way through many twigs and interlacing brambles, till in a little while
that forest ceased abruptly upon the edge of a falling sward, and I saw
before me the Valley.
Its floor must have lain higher than that river which I had crossed
and left the same morning, for my ascent had been one of two miles or
so, and my pushing downward on the further slope far less than one;
moreover, that descent had been gentle.
The Valley opened to the right at my issue from the wood. To my left
hand was a circle of the same trees as those through which I had
passed, but to the right and so away northward, the pleasant empty dale.
Let me describe it.
Upon the further bank (for it was not steep enough to call a wall),
the western bank which shut that valley in, grew a thick growth of low
chestnuts with here and there a tall silver birch standing up among
them. All this further slope was so held, and the chestnuts made a dark
belt from which the tall graces of the birches lifted. The sunlight was
behind that long afternoon of hills.
Opposite, the higher eastern slope stood full though gentle to the
glorious light, and it was all a rise of pasture land. Its crest, which
followed up and away northward for some miles, showed here and there
a brown rock, aged and strong but low and half covered in the grass.
These rocks were warm and mellow. The height of this eastern boundary
was enough to protect the hollow below, but not so high as to carry any
sense of savagery. It warned rather than forbade the approach of human
kind. Between it and its opposing wooded fellow the narrowing floor
of that Eden lay; winding, closing slowly, until it ended in a little
cuplike pass, an easy saddle of grass where the two sides of the valley
converged upon its northern conclusion. This pass was perhaps four
miles away from me as I gazed, or perhaps a little less. The sun as I
have said was shining upon all this: it made upon the little cuplike
place a gentle shadow and a gentle light, both curved as the light
might fall low and aslant upon a wooden bowl clothed in a soft green
cloth. This was a lovely sight, and it invited me to go forward.
Therefore I went down the sward that fell from the abrupt edge of the
wood, and set out to follow northward along the lower grasses of this
single and most unexpected vale.
So strange was the place, even at this first sight, that I thought to
myself: "I have happened upon one of those holidays God gives us."
For we cannot give ourselves holidays: nor, if we are slaves, can our
masters give us holidays, but God only: until at last we lay down the
business and leave our work for good and all. And so much for holidays.
Anyhow, the valley was a wonder to me there.
It was not as are common and earthly things. There was a peace about
it which was not a mere repose, but rather something active which
invited and intrigued. The meadows had a summons in them; and all
was completely still. I heard no birds from the moment when I left
the woodland, but a little brook, not shallow, ran past me for a
companion as I went on. It made no murmur, but it slid full and at once
mysterious and prosperous, brimming up to the rich field upon either
side. I thought there must be chalk beneath it from its way of going.
The pasture was not mown yet it was short, but if it had been fed there
was no trace of herds anywhere; and indeed the grass was rather more in
height than the grass of fed land, though it was not in flower. No wind
moved it.
There were no divisions in this little kingdom; there were no walls or
fences or hedges: it was all one field, with the woods upon the western
slope to my left, and the tilted green of the eastern ridge to my right
on which the sunlight softly and continually lay. Never have I found a
place so much its own master and so contentedly alone.
If any man owned that Valley, blessed be that man, but if no man owned
it, and only God, then I could better understand the benediction which
it imposed upon me, a chance wanderer, for something little less than
an hour. Here was a place in which thought settled upon itself, and was
not concerned with unanswerable things; and here was a place in which
memory did not trouble one with the incompletion of recent trial, but
rather stretched back to things so very old that all sense of evil had
been well purged out of them. The ultimate age of the world which is
also its youth, was here securely preserved. I was not so foolish as to
attempt a prolongation of this blessedness: these things are not for
possession: they are an earnest only of things which we may perhaps
possess, but not while the business is on.
I went along at a good sober pace of travelling, taking care to hurt no
blossom with my staff and to destroy no living thing, whether of leaves
or of those that have movement.
So I went until I came to the low pass at the head of the place,
and when I had surmounted it I looked down a steep great fall into
quite another land. I had come to a line where met two provinces, two
different kinds of men, and this second valley was the end of one.
The moor (for so I would call it) upon the further side fell away and
away distantly, till at its foot it struck a plain whereon I could see,
further and further off to a very distant horizon, cities and fields
and the anxious life of men.
XX
THE EBRO PLAIN
I wish I could put before men who have not seen that sight, the abrupt
shock which the Northern eye receives when it first looks from some
rampart of the Pyrenees upon the new deserts of Spain.
"Deserts" is a term at once too violent and too simple. The effect of
that amazement is by no means the effect which follows from a similar
vision of the Sahara from the red-burnt and precipitous rocks of Atlas;
nor is it the effect which those stretches of white blinding sand give
forth when, looking southward toward Mexico and the sun, a man shades
his eyes to catch a distant mark of human habitation along some rare
river of Arizona from the cliff edge of a cut tableland.
Corn grows in that new Spain beneath one: many towns stand founded
there; Christian Churches are established; a human society stands
firmly, though sparsely, set in that broad waste of land. But to the
Northern eye first seeing it--nay, to a Northerner well acquainted with
it, but returning to the renewal of so strange a vision--it is always
a renewed perplexity how corn, how men, how worship, how society (as
he has known them) can have found a place there; and that, although he
knows that nowhere in Europe have the fundamental things of Europe been
fought for harder and more steadfastly maintained than they have along
this naked and burnt valley of the Ebro.
I will suppose the traveller to have made his way on foot from the
boundaries of the Basque country, from the Peak of Anie, down through
the high Pyrenean silences to those banks of Aragon where the river
runs west between parallel ranges, each of which is a bastion of the
main Pyrenean chain. I will suppose him to have crossed that roll of
thick mud which the tumbling Aragon is in all these lower reaches, to
have climbed the further range (which is called "The Mountains of
Stone," or "The Mountains of the Rock"), and, coming upon its further
southern slope, to see for the first time spread before him that vast
extent of uniform dead-brown stretching through an air metallically
clear to the tiny peaks far off on the horizon, which mark the springs
of the Tagus. It is a characteristic of the stretched Spanish upland,
from within sight of the Pyrenees to within sight of the Southern Sea,
that it may thus be grasped in less than half a dozen views, wider than
any views in Europe; and, partly from the height of that interior land,
partly from the Iberian aridity of its earth, these views are as sharp
in detail, as inhuman in their lack of distant veils and blues, as
might be the landscapes of a dead world.
The traveller who should so have passed the high ridge and watershed of
the Pyrenees, would have come down from the snows of the Anie through
forests not indeed as plentiful as those of the French side, but still
dignified by many and noble trees, and alive with cascading water.
While he was yet crossing the awful barriers (one standing out parallel
before the next) which guard the mountains on their Spainward fall,
he would continuously have perceived, though set in dry, unhospitable
soil, bushes and clumps of trees; something at times resembling his own
Northern conception of pasture-land. The herbage upon which he would
pitch his camp, the branches he would pick for firewood, still, though
sparse and Southern, would have reminded him of home.
But when he has come over the furthest of these parallel reaches, and
sees at last the whole sweep of the Ebro country spread out before him,
it is no longer so. His eye detects no trees, save that belt of green
which accompanies the course of the river, no glint of water. Though
human habitation is present in that landscape, it mixes, as it were,
with the mud and the dust of the earth from which it rose; and, gazing
at a distant clump in the plains beneath him, far off, the traveller
asks himself doubtfully whether these hummocks are but small, abrupt,
insignificant hills or a nest of the houses of men--things with
histories.
For the rest all that immeasurable sweep of yellow-brown bare earth
fills up whatever is not sky, and is contained or framed upon its final
limit by mountains as severe as its own empty surface. Those far and
dreadful hills are unrelieved by crag or wood or mist; they are a mere
height, naked and unfruitful, running along wall-like and cutting off
Aragon from the south and the old from the new Castile, save where the
higher knot of the Moncayo stands tragic and enormous against the sky.
This experience of Spain, this first discovery of a thing so unexpected
and so universally misstated by the pens of travellers and historians,
is best seen in autumn sunsets, I think, when behind the mass of the
distant mountains an angry sky lights up its unfruitful aspect of
desolation, and, though lending it a colour it can never possess in
commoner hours and seasons, in no way creates an illusion of fertility
or of romance, of yield or of adventure, in that doomed silence.
The vision of which I speak does not, I know, convey this peculiar
impression even to all of the few who may have seen it thus--and they
are rare. They are rare because men do not now approach the old places
of Europe in the old way. They come into a Spanish town of the north
by those insufficient railways of our time. They return back home with
no possession of great sights, no more memorable experience than of
urban things done less natively, more awkwardly, more slowly than in
England. Yet even those few, I say, who enter Spain from the north, as
Spain should be entered--over the mountain roads--have not all of them
received the impression of which I speak.
I have so received it, I know; I could wish that to the Northerner it
were the impression most commonly conveyed: a marvel that men should
live in such a place: a wonder when the ear catches the sound of a
distant bell, that ritual and a creed should have survived there--so
absolute is its message of desolation.
With a more familiar acquaintance this impression does not diminish,
but increases. Especially to one who shall make his way painfully on
foot for three long days from the mountains to the mountains again,
who shall toil over the great bare plain, who shall cross by some
bridge over Ebro and look down, it may be, at a trickle of water
hardly moving in the midst of a broad, stony bed, or it may be at
a turbid spate roaring a furlong broad after the rains--in either
case unusable and utterly unfriendly to man; who shall hobble from
little village to little village, despairing at the silence of men
in that silent land and at their lack of smiles and at the something
fixed which watches one from every wall; who shall push on over the
slight wheel-tracks which pass for roads--they are not roads--across
the infinite, unmarked, undifferenced field; to one who has done all
these things, I say, getting the land into his senses hourly, there
comes an appreciation of its wilful silence and of its unaccomplished
soul. That knowledge fascinates, and bids him return. It is like
watching with the sick who were thought dead, who are, in your night
of watching, upon the turn of their evil. It is like those hours of
the night in which the mind of some troubled sleeper wakened can
find neither repose nor variety, but only a perpetual return upon
itself--but waits for dawn. Behind all this lies, as behind a veil
of dryness stretched from the hills to the hills, for those who will
discover it, the intense, the rich, the unconquerable spirit of Spain.
XXI
THE LITTLE RIVER
Men forget too easily how much the things they see around them in the
landscapes of Britain are the work of men. Most of our trees were
planted and carefully nurtured by man's hand. Our ploughs for countless
centuries have made even the soil of the plains the lines of a great
view; its groups of hedge and of building, of ridge and of road are
very largely the creation of that curious and active breed which was
set upon this dull round of the earth to enliven it--which, alone of
creatures, speaks and has foreknowledge of death and wonders concerning
its origin and its end. It is man that has transformed the surface
and the outline of the old countries, and even the rivers carry his
handiwork.
There is a little river on my land which very singularly shows the
historical truth of what I am here saying. As God made it, it was
but a drain rambling through the marshy clay of tangled underwood,
sluggishly feeling its way through the hollows in general weathers,
scouring in a shapeless flood after the winter rains, dried up and
stagnant in isolated pools in our hot summers. Then, no one will ever
know how many centuries ago, man came, busy and curious, and doing with
his hands. He took my little river; he began to use it, to make it, and
to transform it, and to erect of it a human thing. He gave to it its
ancient name, which is the ancient name for water, and which you will
find scattered upon streams large and small from the Pyrenees up to the
Northern Sea and from the West of Germany to the Atlantic. He called it
the Adur; therefore pedants pretend that the name is new and not old,
for pedants hate the fruitful humour of antiquity.
Well, not only did man give my little river (an inconceivable number of
generations ago) the name which it still bears, but he bridged it and
he banked it, he scoured it and he dammed it, until he made of it a
thing to his own purpose and a companion of the countryside.
With the fortunes of man in our Western and Northern land the fortunes
of my little river rose and fell. What the Romans may have done with it
we do not know, for a clay soil preserves but little--coins sink in it
and the foundations of buildings are lost.
In the breakdown which we call the Dark Ages, and especially perhaps
after the worst business of the Danish Invasion, it must have broken
back very nearly to the useless and unprofitable thing it had been
before man came. The undergrowth, the little oaks and the maples, the
coarse grass, the thistle patches, and the briars encroached upon
tilled land; the banks washed down, floods carried away the rotting
dams, the waterwheels were forgotten and perished. There seem to have
been no mills. There is no good drinking water in that land, save here
and there at a rare spring, unless you dig a well, and the people of
the Dark Ages in Britain, broken by the invasion, dug no wells in the
desolation of my valley.
Then came the Norman: the short man with the broad shoulders and the
driving energy, and that regal sense of order which left its stamp
wherever he marched, from the Grampians to the Euphrates. He tamed that
land again, he ploughed the clay, he cut the undergrowth, and he built
a great house of monks and a fine church of stone where for so long
there had been nothing but flying robbers, outlaws, and the wolves of
the weald.
To my little river the Norman was particularly kind. He dug it out and
deepened it, he bridged it again and he sluiced it; it brimmed to its
banks, it was once more the companion of men, and, what is more, he dug
it out so thoroughly all the twenty miles to the sea that he could even
use it for barges and for light boats, so that this head of the stream
came to be called Shipley, for goods of ships could be floated, when
all this was done, right up to the wharf which the Knight Templars had
built above the church to meet the waters of the stream.
All the Middle Ages that fruitfulness and that use continued. But
with the troubles in which the Middle Ages closed and in which so
much of our civilisation was lost, the little river was once more
half abandoned. The church still stood, but stone by stone the great
building of the Templars disappeared. The river was no longer scoured;
its course was checked by dense bush and reed, the wild beasts came
back, the lands of the King were lost. One use remained to the
water--the Norman's old canalisation was forgotten and the wharf had
slipped into a bank of clay, and was now no more than a tumbled field
with no deep water standing by. This use was the use of the Hammer
Ponds. Here and there the stream was banked up, and the little fall
thus afforded was used to work the heavy hammers of the smithies in
which the iron of the countryside was worked. For in this clay of
ours there was ironstone everywhere, and the many oaks of the weald
furnished the charcoal for its smelting. The metal work of the great
ships that fought the French, many of their guns also, and bells and
railings for London, were smithied or cast at the issue of these Hammer
Ponds. But coal came and the new smelting; our iron was no longer
worked, and the last usefulness of the little river seemed lost.
Then for two generations all that land lay apart, the stream quite
choked or furiously flooding, the paths unworkable in winter: no roads,
but only green lanes, and London, forty miles away, unknown.
The last resurrection of the little river has begun to-day. The railway
was the first bringer of good news (if you will allow me to be such an
apologist for civilisation); then came good hard roads in numbers, and
quite lately the bicycle, and, last of all, the car. The energy of men
reached Adur once again, and once again began the scouring and making
of the banks and the harnessing of the water for man; so that, though
we have not tackled the canal as we should (that will come), yet with
every year the Adur grows more and more of a companion again. It has
furnished two fine great lakes for two of my neighbours, and in one
place after another they have bridged it as they should, and though
clay is a doubtful thing to deal with they have banked it as well.
The other day as I began a new and great and good dam with sluices
and with puddled clay behind oak boards and with huge oak uprights
and oaken spurs to stand the rush of the winter floods, I thought to
myself, working in that shimmering and heated air, how what I was doing
was one more of the innumerable things that men had done through time
incalculable to make the river their own, and the thought gave me great
pleasure, for one becomes larger by mixing with any company of men,
whether of our brothers now living or of our fathers who are dead.
This little river--the river Adur before I have done with it--will be
as charming and well-bred a thing as the Norman or the Roman knew.
It shall bring up properly to well-cut banks. These shall be boarded.
It shall have clear depths of water in spite of the clay, and reeds
and water lilies shall grow only where I choose. In every way it shall
be what the things of this world were made to be--the servant and the
instrument of Man.
XXII
SOME LETTERS OF SHAKESPEARE'S TIME
_From Lord Mulberry to his sister, Mrs. Blake_