AUCTOR. Pray take books as you find them, and treat travel as travel.
For you, when you go to a foreign country, see nothing but what you
expect to see. But I am astonished at a thousand accidents, and always
find things twenty-fold as great as I supposed they would be, and far
more curious; the whole covered by a strange light of adventure. And
that is the peculiar value of this book. Now, if you can explain these
priests---
LECTOR. I can. It was the season of the year, and they were swarming.
AUCTOR. So be it. Then if you will hear nothing of what interests me,
I see no reason for setting down with minute care what interests you,
and I may leave out all mention of the Girl who could only speak
German, of the Arrest of the Criminal, and even of the House of
Marshal Turenne--- this last something quite exceptionally
entertaining. But do not let us continue thus, nor push things to an
open quarrel. You must imagine for yourself about six miles of road,
and then--then in the increasing heat, the dust rising in spite of the
morning rain, and the road most wearisome, I heard again the sound of
bugles and the sombre excitement of the drums.
It is a thought-provoking thing, this passing from one great garrison
to another all the way down the frontier. I had started from the busy
order of Toul; I had passed through the silence and peace of all that
Moselle country, the valley like a long garden, and I had come to the
guns and the tramp of Epinal. I had left Epinal and counted the miles
and miles of silence in the forests, I had crossed the great hills and
come down into quite another plain draining to another sea, and I
heard again all the clamour that goes with soldiery, and looking
backward then over my four days, one felt--one almost saw--the new
system of fortification, the vast entrenched camps each holding an
army, the ungarnished gaps between.
As I came nearer to Belfort, I saw the guns going at a trot down a
side road, and, a little later, I saw marching on my right, a long way
off, the irregular column, the dust and the invincible gaiety of the
French line. The sun here and there glinted on the ends of
rifle-barrels and the polished pouches. Their heavy pack made their
tramp loud and thudding. They were singing a song.
I had already passed the outer forts; I had noted a work close to the
road; I had gone on a mile or so and had entered the long and ugly
suburb where the tramway lines began, when, on one of the ramshackle
houses of that burning, paved, and noisy endless street, I saw written
up the words,
Wine; shut or open.
As it is a great rule to examine every new thing, and to suck honey
out of every flower, I did not--as some would--think the phrase odd
and pass on. I stood stock-still gazing at the house and imagining a
hundred explanations. I had never in my life heard wine divided into
shut and open wine. I determined to acquire yet one more great
experience, and going in I found a great number of tin cans, such as
the French carry up water in, without covers, tapering to the top, and
standing about three feet high; on these were pasted large printed
labels, '30', '40', and '50', and they were brimming with wine. I
spoke to the woman, and pointing at the tin cans, said--
'Is this what you call open wine?'
'Why, yes,' said she. 'Cannot you see for yourself that it is open?'
That was true enough, and it explained a great deal. But it did not
explain how--seeing that if you leave a bottle of wine uncorked for
ten minutes you spoil it--you can keep gallons of it in a great wide
can, for all the world like so much milk, milked from the Panthers of
the God. I determined to test the prodigy yet further, and choosing
the middle price, at fourpence a quart, I said--
'Pray give me a hap'orth in a mug.'
This the woman at once did, and when I came to drink it, it was
delicious. Sweet, cool, strong, lifting the heart, satisfying, and
full of all those things wine-merchants talk of, bouquet, and body,
and flavour. It was what I have heard called a very pretty wine.
I did not wait, however, to discuss the marvel, but accepted it as one
of those mysteries of which this pilgrimage was already giving me
examples, and of which more were to come--(wait till you hear about
the brigand of Radicofani). I said to myself--
'When I get out of the Terre Majeure, and away from the strong and
excellent government of the Republic, when I am lost in the Jura Hills
to-morrow there will be no such wine as this.'
So I bought a quart of it, corked it up very tight, put it in my sack,
and held it in store against the wineless places on the flanks of the
hill called Terrible, where there are no soldiers, and where Swiss is
the current language. Then I went on into the centre of the town.
As I passed over the old bridge into the market-place, where I
proposed to lunch (the sun was terrible--it was close upon eleven), I
saw them building parallel with that old bridge a new one to replace
it. And the way they build a bridge in Belfort is so wonderfully
simple, and yet so new, that it is well worth telling.
In most places when a bridge has to be made, there is an infinite
pother and worry about building the piers, coffer-dams, and heaven
knows what else. Some swing their bridges to avoid this trouble, and
some try to throw an arch of one span from side to side. There are a
thousand different tricks. In Belfort they simply wait until the water
has run away. Then a great brigade of workmen run down into the dry
bed of the river and dig the foundations feverishly, and begin
building the piers in great haste. Soon the water comes back, but the
piers are already above it, and the rest of the work is done from
boats. This is absolutely true. Not only did I see the men in the bed
of the river, but a man whom I asked told me that it seemed to him the
most natural way to build bridges, and doubted if they were ever made
in any other fashion.
There is also in Belfort a great lion carved in rock to commemorate
the siege of 1870. This lion is part of the precipice under the
castle, and is of enormous size--- how large I do not know, but I saw
that a man looked quite small by one of his paws. The precipice was
first smoothed like a stone slab or tablet, and then this lion was
carved into and out of it in high relief by Bartholdi, the same man
that made the statue of Liberty in New York Harbour.
The siege of 1870 has been fixed for history in yet another way, and
one that shows you how the Church works on from one stem continually.
For there is a little church somewhere near or in Belfort (I do not
know where, I only heard of it) which, a local mason and painter being
told to decorate for so much, he amused himself by painting all round
it little pictures of the siege--of the cold, and the wounds, and the
heroism. This is indeed the way such things should be done, I mean by
men doing them for pleasure and of their own thought. And I have a
number of friends who agree with me in thinking this, that art should
not be competitive or industrial, but most of them go on to the very
strange conclusion that one should not own one's garden, nor one's
beehive, nor one's great noble house, nor one's pigsty, nor one's
railway shares, nor the very boots on one's feet. I say, out upon such
nonsense. Then they say to me, what about the concentration of the
means of production? And I say to them, what about the distribution of
the ownership of the concentrated means of production? And they shake
their heads sadly, and say it would never endure; and I say, try it
first and see. Then they fly into a rage.
When I lunched in Belfort (and at lunch, by the way, a poor man asked
me to use _all my influence_ for his son, who was an engineer in the
navy, and this he did because I had been boasting of my travels,
experiences, and grand acquaintances throughout the world)--when, I
say, I had lunched in a workman's cafe at Belfort, I set out again on
my road, and was very much put out to find that showers still kept on
falling.
In the early morning, under such delightful trees, up in the
mountains, the branches had given me a roof, the wild surroundings
made me part of the out-of-doors, and the rain had seemed to marry
itself to the pastures and the foaming beck. But here, on a road and
in a town, all its tradition of discomfort came upon me. I was angry,
therefore, with the weather and the road for some miles, till two
things came to comfort me. First it cleared, and a glorious sun showed
me from a little eminence the plain of Alsace and the mountains of the
Vosges all in line; secondly, I came to a vast powder-magazine.
To most people there is nothing more subtle or pleasing in a
powder-magazine than in a reservoir. They are both much the same in
the mere exterior, for each is a flat platform, sloping at the sides
and covered with grass, and each has mysterious doors. But, for my
part, I never see a powder-magazine without being filled at once with
two very good feelings--- laughter and companionship. For it was my
good fortune, years and years ago, to be companion and friend to two
men who were on sentry at a powder-magazine just after there had been
some anarchist attempts (as they call them) upon such depots--and for
the matter of that I can imagine nothing more luscious to the
anarchist than seven hundred and forty-two cases of powder and fifty
cases of melinite all stored in one place. And to prevent the enormous
noise, confusion, and waste that would have resulted from the
over-attraction of this base of operations to the anarchists, my two
friends, one of whom was a duty-doing Burgundian, but the other a
loose Parisian man, were on sentry that night. They had strict orders
to challenge once and then to fire.
Now, can you imagine anything more exquisite to a poor devil of a
conscript, fagged out with garrison duty and stale sham-fighting, than
an order of that kind? So my friends took it, and in one summer night
they killed a donkey and wounded two mares, and broke the thin stem of
a growing tree.
This powder-magazine was no exception to my rule, for as I approached
it I saw a round-faced corporal and two round-faced men looking
eagerly to see who might be attacking their treasure, and I became
quite genial in my mind when I thought of how proud these boys felt,
and of how I was of the 'class of ninety, rifled and mounted on its
carriage' (if you don't see the point of the allusion, I can't stop to
explain it. It was a good gun in its time--now they have the
seventy-five that doesn't recoil--_requiescat), _and of how they were
longing for the night, and a chance to shoot anything on the sky line.
Full of these foolish thoughts, but smiling in spite of their folly, I
went down the road.
Shall I detail all that afternoon? My leg horrified me with dull pain,
and made me fear I should never hold out, I do not say to Rome, but
even to the frontier. I rubbed it from time to time with balm, but, as
always happens to miraculous things, the virtue had gone out of it
with the lapse of time. At last I found a side road going off from
the main way, and my map told me it was on the whole a short cut to
the frontier. I determined to take it for those few last miles,
because, if one is suffering, a winding lane is more tolerable than a
wide turnpike.
Just as I came to the branching of the roads I saw a cross put up, and
at its base the motto that is universal to French crosses--
_Ave Crux Spes Unica._
I thought it a good opportunity for recollection, and sitting down, I
looked backward along the road I had come.
There were the high mountains of the Vosges standing up above the
plain of Alsace like sloping cliffs above a sea. I drew them as they
stood, and wondered if that frontier were really permanent. The mind
of man is greater than such accidents, and can easily overleap even
the high hills.
Then having drawn them, and in that drawing said a kind of farewell to
the influences that had followed me for so many miles--the solemn
quiet, the steady industry, the self-control, the deep woods, of
Lorraine--1 rose up stiffly from the bank that had been my desk, and
pushed along the lane that ran devious past neglected villages.
The afternoon and the evening followed as I put one mile after another
behind me. The frontier seemed so close that I would not rest. I left
my open wine, the wine I had found outside Belfort, untasted, and I
plodded on and on as the light dwindled. I was in a grand wonderment
for Switzerland, and I wished by an immediate effort to conquer the
last miles before night, in spite of my pain. Also, I will confess to
a silly pride in distances, and a desire to be out of France on my
fourth day.
The light still fell, and my resolution stood, though my exhaustion
undermined it. The line of the mountains rose higher against the sky,
and there entered into my pilgrimage for the first time the loneliness
and the mystery of meres. Something of what a man feels in East
England belonged to this last of the plain under the guardian hills.
Everywhere I passed ponds and reeds, and saw the level streaks of
sunset reflected in stagnant waters.
The marshy valley kept its character when I had left the lane and
regained the highroad. Its isolation dominated the last effort with
which I made for the line of the Jura in that summer twilight, and as
I blundered on my whole spirit was caught or lifted in the influence
of the waste waters and of the birds of evening.
I wished, as I had often wished in such opportunities of recollection
and of silence, for a complete barrier that might isolate the mind.
With that wish came in a puzzling thought, very proper to a
pilgrimage, which was: 'What do men mean by the desire to be dissolved
and to enjoy the spirit free and without attachments?' That many men
have so desired there can be no doubt, and the best men, whose
holiness one recognizes at once, tell us that the joys of the soul are
incomparably higher than those of the living man. In India, moreover,
there are great numbers of men who do the most fantastic things with
the object of thus unprisoning the soul, and Milton talks of the same
thing with evident conviction, and the Saints all praise it in chorus.
But what is it? For my part I cannot understand so much as the meaning
of the words, for every pleasure I know comes from an intimate union
between my body and my very human mind, which last receives, confirms,
revives, and can summon up again what my body has experienced. Of
pleasures, however, in which my senses have had no part I know
nothing, so I have determined to take them upon trust and see whether
they could make the matter clearer in Rome.
But when it comes to the immortal mind, the good spirit in me that is
so cunning at forms and colours and the reasons of things, that is a
very different story. _That_, I do indeed desire to have to myself at
whiles, and the waning light of a day or the curtains of autumn
closing in the year are often to me like a door shutting after one, as
one comes in home. For I find that with less and less impression from
without the mind seems to take on a power of creation, and by some
mystery it can project songs and landscapes and faces much more
desirable than the music or the shapes one really hears and sees. So
also memory can create. But it is not the soul that does this, for the
songs, the landscapes, and the faces are of a kind that have come in
by the senses, nor have I ever understood what could be higher than
these pleasures, nor indeed how in anything formless and immaterial
there could be pleasure at all. Yet the wisest people assure us that
our souls are as superior to our minds as are our minds to our inert
and merely material bodies. I cannot understand it at all.
As I was pondering on these things in this land of pastures and lonely
ponds, with the wall of the Jura black against the narrow bars of
evening--(my pain seemed gone for a moment, yet I was hobbling
slowly)--I say as I was considering this complex doctrine, I felt my
sack suddenly much lighter, and I had hardly time to rejoice at the
miracle when I heard immediately a very loud crash, and turning half
round I saw on the blurred white of the twilit road my quart of Open
Wine all broken to atoms. My disappointment was so great that I sat
down on a milestone to consider the accident and to see if a little
thought would not lighten my acute annoyance. Consider that I had
carefully cherished this bottle and had not drunk throughout a painful
march all that afternoon, thinking that there would be no wine worth
drinking after I had passed the frontier.
I consoled myself more or less by thinking about torments and evils to
which even such a loss as this was nothing, and then I rose to go on
into the night. As it turned out I was to find beyond the frontier a
wine in whose presence this wasted wine would have seemed a wretched
jest, and whose wonderful taste was to colour all my memories of the
Mount Terrible. It is always thus with sorrows if one will only wait.
So, lighter in the sack but heavier in the heart, I went forward to
cross the frontier in the dark. I did not quite know where the point
came: I only knew that it was about a mile from Delle, the last French
town. I supped there and held on my way. When I guessed that I had
covered this mile I saw a light in the windows on my left, a trellis
and the marble tables of a cafe. I put my head in at the door and
said--
'Am I in Switzerland?'
A German-looking girl, a large heavy man, a Bavarian commercial
traveller, and a colleague of his from Marseilles, all said together
in varying accents: 'Yes.'
'Why then,' I said, 'I will come in and drink.'
This book would never end if I were to attempt to write down so much
as the names of a quarter of the extraordinary things that I saw and
heard on my enchanted pilgrimage, but let me at least mention the
Commercial Traveller from Marseilles.
He talked with extreme rapidity for two hours. He had seen all the
cities in the world and he remembered their minutest details. He was
extremely accurate, his taste was abominable, his patriotism large,
his wit crude but continual, and to his German friend, to the host of
the inn, and to the blonde serving-girl, he was a familiar god. He
came, it seems, once a year, and for a day would pour out the torrent
of his travels like a waterfall of guide-books (for he gloried in
dates, dimensions, and the points of the compass in his descriptions);
then he disappeared for another year, and left them to feast on the
memory of such a revelation.
For my part I sat silent, crippled with fatigue, trying to forget my
wounded feet, drinking stoup after stoup of beer and watching the
Phocean. He was of the old race you see on vases in red and black;
slight, very wiry, with a sharp, eager, but well-set face, a small,
black, pointed beard, brilliant eyes like those of lizards, rapid
gestures, and a vivacity that played all over his features as sheet
lightning does over the glow of midnight in June.
That delta of the Rhone is something quite separate from the rest of
France. It is a wedge of Greece and of the East thrust into the Gauls.
It came north a hundred years ago and killed the monarchy. It caught
the value in, and created, the great war song of the Republic.
I watched the Phocean. I thought of a man of his ancestry three
thousand years ago sitting here at the gates of these mountains
talking of his travels to dull, patient, and admiring northerners, and
travelling for gain up on into the Germanics, and I felt the
changeless form of Europe under me like a rock.
When he heard I was walking to Rome, this man of information turned
off his flood into another channel, as a miller will send the racing
water into a side sluice, and he poured out some such torrent as this:
'Do not omit to notice the famous view S.E. from the Villa So and So
on Monte Mario; visit such and such a garden, and hear Mass in such
and such a church. Note the curious illusion produced on the piazza of
St Peter's by the interior measurements of the trapezium, which are so
many years and so many yards,...' &c., and so forth... exactly like
a mill.
I meanwhile sat on still silent, still drinking beer and watching the
Phocean; gradually suffering the fascination that had captured the
villagers and the German friend. He was a very wonderful man.
He was also kindly, for I found afterwards that he had arranged with
the host to give me up his bed, seeing my weariness. For this, most
unluckily, I was never able to thank him, since the next morning I was
off before he or any one else was awake, and I left on the table such
money as I thought would very likely satisfy the innkeeper.
It was broad day, but not yet sunrise (there were watery thin clouds
left here and there from the day before, a cold wind drove them) when,
with extreme pain, going slowly one step after the other and resting
continually, I started for Porrentruy along a winding road, and
pierced the gap in the Jura. The first turn cut me off from France,
and I was fairly in a strange country.
The valley through which I was now passing resembled that of the
lovely river Jed where it runs down from the Cheviots, and leads like
a road into the secret pastures of the lowlands. Here also, as there,
steep cliffs of limestone bounded a very level dale, all green grass
and plenty; the plateau above them was covered also with perpetual
woods, only here, different from Scotland, the woods ran on and
upwards till they became the slopes of high mountains; indeed, this
winding cleft was a natural passage through the first ridge of the
Jura; the second stood up southward before me like a deep blue storm.
I had, as I passed on along this turning way, all the pleasures of
novelty; it was quite another country from the governed and ordered
France which I had left. The road was more haphazard, less carefully
tended, and evidently less used. The milestones were very old, and
marked leagues instead of kilometres. There was age in everything.
Moss grew along the walls, and it was very quiet under the high trees.
I did not know the name of the little river that went slowly through
the meadows, nor whether it followed the custom of its French
neighbours on the watershed, and was called by some such epithet as
hangs to all the waters in that gap of Belfort, that plain of ponds
and marshes: for they are called 'the Sluggish', 'the Muddy', or 'the
Laggard'. Even the name of the Saone, far off, meant once 'Slow
Water'.
I was wondering what its name might be, and how far I stood from
Porrentruy (which I knew to be close by), when I saw a tunnel across
the valley, and I guessed by the trend of the higher hills that the
river was about to make a very sharp angle. Both these signs, I had
been told, meant that I was quite close to the town; so I took a short
cut up through the forest over a spur of hill--a short cut most
legitimate, because it was trodden and very manifestly used--and I
walked up and then on a level for a mile, along a lane of the woods
and beneath small, dripping trees. When this short silence of the
forest was over, I saw an excellent sight.
There, below me, where the lane began to fall, was the first of the
German cities.
LECTOR. How 'German'?
AUCTOR. Let me explain. There is a race that stretches vaguely,
without defined boundaries, from the Baltic into the high hills of the
south. I will not include the Scandinavians among them, for the
Scandinavians (from whom we English also in part descend) are
long-headed, lean, and fierce, with a light of adventure in their pale
eyes. But beneath them, I say, there stretches from the Baltic to the
high hills a race which has a curious unity. Yes; I know that great
patches of it are Catholic, and that other great patches hold varying
philosophies; I know also that within them are counted long-headed and
round-headed men, dark and fair, violent and silent; I know also that
they have continually fought among themselves and called in Welch
allies; still I go somewhat by the language, for I am concerned here
with the development of a modern European people, and I say that the
Germans run from the high hills to the northern sea. In all of them
you find (it is not race, it is something much more than race, it is
the type of culture) a dreaminess and a love of ease. In all of them
you find music. They are those Germans whose countries I had seen a
long way off, from the Ballon d'Alsace, and whose language and
traditions I now first touched in the town that stood before me.
LECTOR. But in Porrentruy they talk French!
AUCTOR. They are welcome; it is an excellent tongue. Nevertheless,
they are Germans. Who but Germans would so preserve--would so rebuild
the past? Who but Germans would so feel the mystery of the hills, and
so fit their town to the mountains? I was to pass through but a narrow
wedge of this strange and diffuse people. They began at Porrentruy,
they ended at the watershed of the Adriatic, in the high passes of the
Alps; but in that little space of four days I made acquaintance with
their influence, and I owe them a perpetual gratitude for their
architecture and their tales. I had come from France, which is full of
an active memory of Rome. I was to debouch into those larger plains of
Italy, which keep about them an atmosphere of Rome in decay. Here in
Switzerland, for four marches, I touched a northern, exterior, and
barbaric people; for though these mountains spoke a distorted Latin
tongue, and only after the first day began to give me a Teutonic
dialect, yet it was evident from the first that they had about them
neither the Latin order nor the Latin power to create, but were
contemplative and easily absorbed by a little effort.
The German spirit is a marvel. There lay Porrentruy. An odd door with
Gothic turrets marked the entry to the town. To the right of this
gateway a tower, more enormous than anything I remembered to have
seen, even in dreams, flanked the approach to the city. How vast it
was, how protected, how high, how eaved, how enduring! I was told
later that some part of that great bastion was Roman, and I can
believe it. The Germans hate to destroy. It overwhelmed me as visions
overwhelm, and I felt in its presence as boys feel when they first see
the mountains. Had I not been a Christian, I would have worshipped and
propitiated this obsession, this everlasting thing.
As it was I entered Porrentruy soberly. I passed under its deep
gateway and up its steep hill. The moment I was well into the main
street, something other of the Middle Ages possessed me, and I began
to think of food and wine. I went to the very first small guest-house
I could find, and asked them if they could serve me food. They said
that at such an early hour (it was not yet ten) they could give me
nothing but bread, yesterday's meat, and wine. I said that would do
very well, and all these things were set before me, and by a custom of
the country I paid before I ate. (A bad custom. Up in the Limousin,
when I was a boy, in the noisy valley of the Torrent, on the Vienne, I
remember a woman that did not allow me to pay till she had held the
bottle up to the light, measured the veal with her finger, and
estimated the bread with her eye; also she charged me double. God
rest her soul!) I say I paid. And had I had to pay twenty or
twenty-three times as much it would have been worth it for the wine.
I am hurrying on to Rome, and I have no time to write a georgic. But,
oh! my little friends of the north; my struggling, strenuous,
introspective, self-analysing, autoscopic, and generally reentrant
friends, who spout the 'Hue! Pater, oh! Lenae!' without a ghost of an
idea what you are talking about, do you know what is meant by the god?
Bacchus is everywhere, but if he has special sites to be ringed in and
kept sacred, I say let these be Brule, and the silent vineyard that
lies under the square wood by Tournus, the hollow underplace of Heltz
le Maurupt, and this town of Porrentruy. In these places if I can get
no living friends to help me, I will strike the foot alone on the
genial ground, and I know of fifty maenads and two hundred little
attendant gods by name that will come to the festival.
What a wine!
I was assured it would not travel. 'Nevertheless,' said I, 'give me a
good quart bottle of it, for I have to go far, and I see there is a
providence for pilgrims.'
So they charged me fourpence, and I took my bottle of this wonderful
stuff, sweet, strong, sufficient, part of the earth, desirable, and
went up on my way to Rome.
Could this book be infinite, as my voyage was infinite, I would tell
you about the shifty priest whom I met on the platform of the church
where a cliff overhangs the valley, and of the anarchist whom I met
when I recovered the highroad--- he was a sad, good man, who had
committed some sudden crime and so had left France, and his hankering
for France all those years had soured his temper, and he said he
wished there were no property, no armies, and no governments.
But I said that we live as parts of a nation, and that there was no
fate so wretched as to be without a country of one's own--what else
was exile which so many noble men have thought worse than death, and
which all have feared? I also told him that armies fighting in a just
cause were the happiest places for living, and that a good battle for
justice was the beginning of all great songs; and that as for
property, a man on his own land was the nearest to God.
He therefore not convinced, and I loving and pitying him, we
separated; I had not time to preach my full doctrine, but gave him
instead a deep and misty glass of cool beer, and pledged him
brotherhood, freedom, and an equal law. Then I went on my way, praying
God that all these rending quarrels might be appeased. For they would
certainly be appeased if we once again had a united doctrine in
Europe, since economics are but an expression of the mind and do not
(as the poor blind slaves of the great cities think) mould the mind.
What is more, nothing makes property run into a few hands but the
worst of the capital sins, and you who say it is 'the modern
facilities of distribution' are like men who cannot read large print
without spectacles; or again, you are like men who should say that
their drunkenness was due to their drink, or that arson was caused by
matches.
But, frankly, do you suppose I came all this way over so many hills to
talk economics? Very far from it! I will pray for all poor men when I
get to St Peter's in Rome (I should like to know what capital St Peter
had in that highly capitalistic first century), and, meanwhile, do you
discuss the margin of production while I go on the open way; there are
no landlords here, and if you would learn at least one foreign
language, and travel but five miles off a railway, you town-talkers,
you would find how much landlordism has to do with your 'necessities'
and your 'laws'.
LECTOR. I thought you said you were not going to talk economics?
AUCTOR. Neither am I. It is but the backwash of a wave... Well, then,
I went up the open way, and came in a few miles of that hot afternoon
to the second ridge of the Jura, which they call 'the Terrible Hill',
or 'the Mount Terrible'--and, in truth, it is very jagged. A steep,
long crest of very many miles lies here between the vale of Porrentruy
and the deep gorge of the Doubs. The highroad goes off a long way
westward, seeking for a pass or neck in the chain, but I determined to
find a straight road across, and spoke to some wood-cutters who were
felling trees just where the road began to climb. They gave me this
curious indication. They said--
'Go you up this muddy track that has been made athwart the woods and
over the pastures by our sliding logs' (for they had cut their trunks
higher up the mountains), 'and you will come to the summit easily.
From thence you will see the Doubs running below you in a very deep
and dark ravine.'
I thanked them, and soon found that they had told me right. There,
unmistakable, a gash in the forest and across the intervening fields
of grass, was the run of the timber.
When I had climbed almost to the top, I looked behind me to take my
last view of the north. I saw just before me a high isolated rock;
between me and it was the forest. I saw beyond it the infinite plain
of Alsace and the distant Vosges. The cliff of limestone that bounded
that height fell sheer upon the tree-tops; its sublimity arrested me,
and compelled me to record it.
'Surely,' I said, 'if Switzerland has any gates on the north they are
these.' Then, having drawn the wonderful outline of what I had seen, I
went up, panting, to the summit, and, resting there, discovered
beneath me the curious swirl of the Doubs, where it ran in a dark gulf
thousands of feet below. The shape of this extraordinary turn I will
describe in a moment. Let me say, meanwhile, that there was no
precipice or rock between me and the river, only a down, down, down
through other trees and pastures, not too steep for a man to walk, but
steeper than our steep downs and fells in England, where a man
hesitates and picks his way. It was so much of a descent, and so long,
that one looked above the tree-tops. It was a place where no one would
care to ride.
I found a kind of path, sideways on the face of the mountain, and
followed it till I came to a platform with a hut perched thereon, and
men building. Here a good woman told me just how to go. I was not to
attempt the road to Brune-Farine--that is, 'Whole-Meal Farm'--as I had
first intended, foolishly trusting a map, but to take a gully she
would show me, and follow it till I reached the river. She came out,
and led me steeply across a hanging pasture; all the while she had
knitting in her hands, and I noticed that on the levels she went on
with her knitting. Then, when we got to the gully, she said I had but
to follow it. I thanked her, and she climbed up to her home.
This gully was the precipitous bed of a stream; I clanked down
it--thousands of feet--warily; I reached the valley, and at last, very
gladly, came to a drain, and thus knew that I approached a town or
village. It was St Ursanne.
The very first thing I noticed in St Ursanne was the extraordinary
shape of the lower windows of the church. They lighted a crypt and ran
along the ground, which in itself was sufficiently remarkable, but
much more remarkable was their shape, which seemed to me to approach
that of a horseshoe; I never saw such a thing before. It looked as
though the weight of the church above had bulged these little windows
out, and that is the way I explain it. Some people would say it was a
man coming home from the Crusades that had made them this eastern way,
others that it was a symbol of something or other. But I say--
LECTOR. What rhodomontade and pedantry is this talk about the shape of
a window?
AUCTOR. Little friend, how little you know! To a building windows are
everything; they are what eyes are to a man. Out of windows a building
takes its view; in windows the outlook of its human inhabitants is
framed. If you were the lord of a very high tower overlooking a town,
a plain, a river, and a distant hill (I doubt if you will ever have
such luck!), would you not call your architect up before you and say--
'Sir, see that the windows of my house are _tall, narrow, thick_, and
have a _round top to them'?_
Of course you would, for thus you would best catch in separate
pictures the sunlit things outside your home.
Never ridicule windows. It is out of windows that many fall to their
deaths. By windows love often enters. Through a window went the bolt
that killed King Richard. King William's father spied Arlette from a
window (I have looked through it myself, but not a soul did I see
washing below). When a mob would rule England, it breaks windows, and
when a patriot would save her, he taxes them. Out of windows we walk
on to lawns in summer and meet men and women, and in winter windows
are drums for the splendid music of storms that makes us feel so
masterly round our fires. The windows of the great cathedrals are all
their meaning. But for windows we should have to go out-of-doors to
see daylight. After the sun, which they serve, I know of nothing so
beneficent as windows. Fie upon the ungrateful man that has no
window-god in his house, and thinks himself too great a philosopher to
bow down to windows! May he live in a place without windows for a
while to teach him the value of windows. As for me, I will keep up the
high worship of windows till I come to the windowless grave. Talk to
me of windows!
Yes. There are other things in St Ursanne. It is a little tiny town,
and yet has gates. It is full of very old houses, people, and speech.
It was founded (or named) by a Bear Saint, and the statue of the saint
with his bear is carved on the top of a column in the market-place.
But the chief thing about it, so it seemed to me, was its remoteness.
The gorge of the Doubs, of which I said a word or two above, is of
that very rare shape which isolates whatever may be found in such
valleys. It turns right back upon itself, like a very narrow U, and
thus cannot by any possibility lead any one anywhere; for though in
all times travellers have had to follow river valleys, yet when they
come to such a long and sharp turn as this, they have always cut
across the intervening bend.
Here is the shape of this valley with the high hills round it and in
its core, which will show better than description what I mean. The
little picture also shows what the gorge looked like as I came down on
it from the heights above.
In the map the small white 'A' shows where the railway bridge was, and
in this map, as in the others, the dark is for the depth and the light
is for the heights. As for the picture, it is what one sees when one
is coming over the ridge at the north or top of the map, and when one
first catches the river beneath one.
I thought a good deal about what the Romans did to get through the
Mont Terrible, and how they negotiated this crook in the Doubs (for
they certainly passed into Gaul through the gates of Porrentruy, and
by that obvious valley below it). I decided that they probably came
round eastward by Delemont. But for my part, I was on a straight path
to Rome, and as that line lay just along the top of the river bend I
was bound to take it.
Now outside St Ursanne, if one would go along the top of the river
bend and so up to the other side of the gorge, is a kind of subsidiary
ravine--awful, deep, and narrow--and this was crossed, I could see, by
a very high railway bridge.
Not suspecting any evil, and desiring to avoid the long descent into
the ravine, the looking for a bridge or ford, and the steep climb up
the other side, I made in my folly for the station which stood just
where the railway left solid ground to go over this high, high bridge.
I asked leave of the stationmaster to cross it, who said it was
strictly forbidden, but that he was not a policeman, and that I might
do it at my own risk. Thanking him, therefore, and considering how
charming was the loose habit of small uncentralized societies, I went
merrily on to the bridge, meaning to walk across it by stepping from
sleeper to sleeper. But it was not to be so simple. The powers of the
air, that hate to have their kingdom disturbed, watched me as I began.
I had not been engaged upon it a dozen yards when I was seized with
terror.
I have much to say further on in this book concerning terror: the
panic that haunts high places and the spell of many angry men. This
horrible affection of the mind is the delight of our modern
scribblers; it is half the plot of their insane 'short stories', and
is at the root of their worship of what they call 'strength', a
cowardly craving for protection, or the much more despicable
fascination of brutality. For my part I have always disregarded it as
something impure and devilish, unworthy of a Christian. Fear I think,
indeed, to be in the nature of things, and it is as much part of my
experience to be afraid of the sea or of an untried horse as it is to
eat and sleep; but terror, which is a sudden madness and paralysis of
the soul, that I say is from hell, and not to be played with or
considered or put in pictures or described in stories. All this I say
to preface what happened, and especially to point out how terror is in
the nature of a possession and is unreasonable.
For in the crossing of this bridge there was nothing in itself
perilous. The sleepers lay very close together--I doubt if a man
could have slipped between them; but, I know not how many hundred feet
below, was the flashing of the torrent, and it turned my brain. For
the only parapet there was a light line or pipe, quite slender and low
down, running from one spare iron upright to another. These rather
emphasized than encouraged my mood. And still as I resolutely put one
foot in front of the other, and resolutely kept my eyes off the abyss
and fixed on the opposing hill, and as the long curve before me was
diminished by successive sharp advances, still my heart was caught
half-way in every breath, and whatever it is that moves a man went
uncertainly within me, mechanical and half-paralysed. The great height
with that narrow unprotected ribbon across it was more than I could
bear.
I dared not turn round and I dared not stop. Words and phrases began
repeating themselves in my head as they will under a strain: so I know
at sea a man perilously hanging on to the tiller makes a kind of
litany of his instructions. The central part was passed, the
three-quarters; the tension of that enduring effort had grown
intolerable, and I doubted my ability to complete the task. Why? What
could prevent me? I cannot say; it was all a bundle of imaginaries.
Perhaps at bottom what I feared was sudden giddiness and the fall--
At any rate at this last supreme part I vowed one candle to Our Lady
of Perpetual Succour if she would see that all went well, and this
candle I later paid in Rome; finding Our Lady of Succour not hung up
in a public place and known to all, as I thought She would be, but
peculiar to a little church belonging to a Scotchman and standing
above his high altar. Yet it is a very famous picture, and extremely
old.
Well, then, having made this vow I still went on, with panic aiding
me, till I saw that the bank beneath had risen to within a few feet of
the bridge, and that dry land was not twenty yards away. Then my
resolution left me and I ran, or rather stumbled, rapidly from sleeper
to sleeper till I could take a deep breath on the solid earth beyond.
I stood and gazed back over the abyss; I saw the little horrible strip
between heaven and hell--the perspective of its rails. I was made ill
by the relief from terror. Yet I suppose railway-men cross and recross
it twenty times a day. Better for them than for me!
There is the story of the awful bridge of the Mont Terrible, and it
lies to a yard upon the straight line--_quid dicam_--the segment of
the Great Circle uniting Toul and Rome.
The high bank or hillside before me was that which ends the gorge of
the Doubs and looks down either limb of the sharp bend. I had here not
to climb but to follow at one height round the curve. My way ran by a
rather ill-made lane and passed a village. Then it was my business to
make straight up the farther wall of the gorge, and as there was wood
upon this, it looked an easy matter.
But when I came to it, it was not easy. The wood grew in loose rocks
and the slope was much too steep for anything but hands and knees, and
far too soft and broken for true climbing. And no wonder this ridge
seemed a wall for steepness and difficulty, since it was the watershed
between the Mediterranean and the cold North Sea. But I did not know
this at the time. It must have taken me close on an hour before I had
covered the last thousand feet or so that brought me to the top of the
ridge, and there, to my great astonishment, was a road. Where could
such a road lead, and why did it follow right along the highest edge
of the mountains? The Jura with their unique parallels provide twenty
such problems.
Wherever it led, however, this road was plainly perpendicular to my
true route, and I had but to press on my straight line. So I crossed
it, saw for a last time through the trees the gorge of the Doubs, and
then got upon a path which led down through a field more or less in
the direction of my pilgrimage.
Here the country was so broken that one could make out but little of
its general features, but of course, on the whole, I was following
down yet another southern slope, the southern slope of the _third_
chain of the Jura, when, after passing through many glades and along a
stony path, I found a kind of gate between two high rocks, and emerged
somewhat suddenly upon a wide down studded with old trees and also
many stunted yews, and this sank down to a noble valley which lay all
before me.
The open down or prairie on which I stood I afterwards found to be
called the 'Pasturage of Common Right', a very fine name; and, as a
gallery will command a great hall, so this field like a platform
commanded the wide and fading valley below.
It was a very glad surprise to see this sight suddenly unrolled as I
stood on the crest of the down. The Jura had hitherto been either
lonely, or somewhat awful, or naked and rocky, but here was a true
vale in which one could imagine a spirit of its own; there were corn
lands and no rocks. The mountains on either side did not rise so high
as three thousand feet. Though of limestone they were rounded in form,
and the slanting sun of the late afternoon (all the storm had left the
sky) took them full and warm. The valley remaining wide and fruitful
went on out eastward till the hills became mixed up with brume and
distance. As I did not know its name I called it after the village
immediately below me for which I was making; and I still remember it
as the Valley of Glovelier, and it lies between the third and fourth
ridges of the Jura.
Before leaving the field I drew what I saw but I was much too tired by
the double and prodigious climb of the past hours to draw definitely
or clearly. Such as it is, there it is. Then I went down over the
smooth field.
There is something that distinguishes the rugged from the gracious in
landscape, and in our Europe this something corresponds to the use and
presence of men, especially in mountainous places. For men's habits
and civilization fill the valleys and wash up the base of the hills,
making, as it were, a tide mark. Into this zone I had already passed.
The turf was trodden fine, and was set firm as it can only become by
thousands of years of pasturing. The moisture that oozed out of the
earth was not the random bog of the high places but a human spring,
caught in a stone trough. Attention had been given to the trees.
Below me stood a wall, which, though rough, was not the haphazard
thing men pile up in the last recesses of the hills, but formed of
chosen stones, and these bound together with mortar. On my right was
a deep little dale with children playing in it--and this' I afterwards
learned was called a 'combe': delightful memory! All our deeper
hollows are called the same at home, and even the Welsh have the word,
but they spell it _cwm_; it is their mountain way. Well, as I was
saying, everything surrounding me was domestic and grateful, and I was
therefore in a mood for charity and companionship when I came down the
last dip and entered Glovelier. But Glovelier is a place of no
excellence whatever, and if the thought did not seem extravagant I
should be for putting it to the sword and burning it all down.
For just as I was going along full of kindly thoughts, and had turned
into the sign of (I think it was) the 'Sun' to drink wine and leave
them my benediction--
LECTOR. Why your benediction?
AUCTOR. Who else can give benedictions if people cannot when they are
on pilgrimage? Learn that there are three avenues by which blessing
can be bestowed, and three kinds of men who can bestow it.
(1) There is the good man, whose goodness makes him of himself a giver
of blessings. His power is not conferred or of office, but is
_inhaerens persona_; part of the stuff of his mind. This kind can
confer the solemn benediction, or _Benedictio major_, if they choose;
but besides this their every kind thought, word, or action is a
_Benedictio generalise_ and even their frowns, curses, angry looks and
irritable gestures may be called _Benedictiones minores vel incerti_.
I believe I am within the definitions. I avoid heresy. All this is
sound theology. I do not smell of the faggot. And this kind of
Benedictory Power is the fount or type or natural origin, as it were,
of all others.
(2) There is the Official of Religion who, in the exercise of his
office--