Chapter VII (2)

The mist was all round us; it made a complete silence, and it drifted in the oddest way, making wisps of vapour quite close to our faces. Nor had we any guide except the steepness of the hill. For it is a rule when you are caught in a storm or mist upon the hills, if you are going up, to go the steepest way, and though in such a fog this often took us over a knoll which we had to descend again, yet on the whole it proved a very good rule. It was perhaps the middle of the afternoon, we had been climbing some five hours, we had ascended some six thousand or seven thousand feet, when to our vast astonishment we stumbled upon a sort of road.

It must here be explained why we were astonished. The way we had come led nowhere; there were no houses and no men. The Andorrans whom we were about to visit have no communication northward with the outer world except a thin wire leading over the hills, by which those who wish to telephone to them can do so; and of all places in Europe, Andorra is the place out of which men least desire to get and to which men least desire to go. It is like that place beyond Death of which people say that it gives complete satisfaction and from which certainly no one makes any effort to escape, and yet to which no one is very anxious to go. When, therefore, we came to this road, beginning suddenly half way up a bare mountain and appearing unexplained through the mist, we were astonished.

It was embanked and entrenched and levelled as would be any great French military road near the frontier fortresses. There was a little runnel running underneath the road, conveying a mountain stream; it was arched with great care, and the arch was made of good hewn stone well smoothed. But when we came right on to this road we found something more astonishing still: we found that it was but the simulacrum or ghost of a road. It was not metalled; it was but the plan or trace or idea of a road. No horses had ever trod its soft earth, no wheels had ever made a rut in it. It had not been used at all. Grass covered it. The explanation of this astonishing sight we did not receive until we had spoken in their own tongue the next day to the imperturbable Andorrans.

It was as though a school of engineers had been turned on here for fun, to practise the designing of a road in a place where land was valueless, upon the very summit of the world.

We two men, however, reasoned thus (and reasoned rightly as it turned out):

“The tall and silent Andorrans in a fit of energy must have begun this road, though later in another fit they abandoned it. Therefore it will lead towards their country.”

And as we were very tired of walking up a steep which had now lasted for so many hours, we determined to follow the large zigzags of this unknown and magic half-road, and so we did.

It was the oddest sensation in the world walking in the mist a mile and more above the habitations of men, upon unmetalled, common earth which yet had the exact shape of pavements, cuttings, and embankments upon either side, with no sort of clue as to where it led or as to why men began to make it, and still less of an argument as to why they had ceased.

It went up and up in great long turns and z’s upon the face of the mountain, until at last it grew less steep; the mist grew colder, and after a long flat I thought the land began to fall a little, and I said to my companion:

“We are over the watershed, and beneath us, miles beneath us, are the Andorrans.”

When by the continuance of the fall of the land we were certain of this we took off our hats, in spite of the fog which still hung round us very wet and very cold and quite silent, and expected any moment a revelation.

We were not disappointed. Indeed, this attitude of the mind is never disappointed. Without a moment’s warning the air all round us turned quite bright and warm, a strong gust blew through the whirling vapour, and we saw through the veil of it the image of the sun. In a moment his full disc and warmth was on us. The clouds were torn up above us; the air was immediately quite clear, and we saw before us, stamped suddenly upon the sight, a hundred miles of the Pyrenees.

They say that everything is in the mind. If that be true, then he and I saw in that moment a country which was never yet on earth, for it was a country which our minds had not yet conceived to be possible, and it was as new as though we had seen it after the disembodiment of the soul.

The evening sun from over Spain shone warm and low, and every conceivable colour of the purples and the browns filled up the mountain tangle, so that the marvel appeared as though it had been painted carefully in a minute way by a man’s hand; but the colours were filled with light, and so to fill colour with light is what art can never do. The main range ran out upon either side, and the foothills in long series of peaks and ridges fell beneath it, until, beyond, in what might have been sky or might have been earth, was the haze of the plains of Ebro.

“It is no wonder,” said I to my companion, “that the Andorrans jealously preserve their land and have refused to complete this road.”

When I had said that we went down the mountain side. The lower our steps fell the more we found the wealth and the happiness of men. At last walls and ploughed land appeared. The fields grew deep, the trees more sturdy, and under the shelter of peaks with which we had just been acquainted, but which after an hour or so of descent seemed hopelessly above us, ran rivers which were already tamed and put to a use. One could see mills standing upon them. So we went down and down.

There is no rejuvenescence like this entry into Andorra, and there is no other experience of the same sort, not even the finding of spring land after a month of winter sea: that vision of brilliant fields coming down to meet one after the endless grey waste of the sea.

It was, I tell you again, a country completely new, and it might have been of another world, much better than our own.

So we came at last to the level of the valley, and the first thing we saw was a pig, and the second was a child, and the third was a woman. The pig ran at us: for he was lean. The child at first smiled at us because we were human beings, and then divining that we were fiends who had violated his sacred home began to cry. The woman drove the pig from us and took in the child, and in great loneliness and very sad to be so received we went until we should find men and citizens, and these we found of our own size, upstanding and very dignified, and recognised them at once to be of the wealthy and reserved Andorrans. It was clear by their faces that the _lingua franca_ was well known to them, so I said to the first in this universal tongue:

“Sir, what is the name of this village?”

And he replied: “It is Saldeu.” But this he said in his own language, which is somewhat more difficult to understand than the _lingua franca_.

“I take it, therefore,” said I, “that I am in the famous country of Andorra.”

To which he replied: “You are not many miles from the very town itself: you approach Andorra ‘the Old.’”

The meaning of this I did not at first exactly understand, but as we went on, the sun having now set, I said to my companion: “Were not those epithets right which we attached to the Andorrans in our fancy before we attempted these enormous hills? Were we not right to call them the smiling and the tall Andorrans?”

“You are right,” he answered to me, thinking carefully over every word that he said. “To call them the secluded and the honourable Andorrans is to describe them in a few words.”

We then continued our way down the darkening valley, whistling little English songs.

The Barber

Humanity, my dear little human race, is at once more difficult to get at and more generally present than you seem to know. You are yourselves human beings, dear people. Yet how many have so fully understood their fellows (that is, themselves) that they could exactly say how any man will behave or why any man behaves as he does? But with that I am not to-day concerned. I am concerned with another matter, which is the impossibility of getting away from these brothers of ours, even if we desire to do so.

Note you here, humans, that in reality you do not, even the richest of you, try to get away from your brothers. You do not like solitudes; you like sham, theatrical solitudes. You like the Highlands on condition that you have driven away the people rooted there, but also on condition that you may have there the wine called champagne. Now if you had seen that wine made, the gathering of the apples in the orchards of the Rhine and the Moselle, the adding of the sugar, the watching of the fermentation, and the corking with a curious machine, you would appreciate that if you insist upon champagne in the Highlands, then you are certainly taking humanity with you. If you could follow the thing farther and see them all passing the stuff on, each a little afraid of being found out, then you would know that as you drank your champagne in the most solitary valley you had done far from getting rid of humanity. All the grotesque of man and all his jollity, all his stupidity and all his sin, went with you into your hermitage and it would have gone with you anyhow without the champagne. You cannot make a desert except by staying away from it yourself. All of which leads me to the Barber.

First, then, to give you the true framework of that astonishing man. For exactly thirty-six hours there had been nothing at all in the way of men; and if thirty-six hours seems but a short time to you as you read it, it certainly was a mighty long time for me who am writing this. Of those thirty-six hours the first few had been enlivened (that is, from five in the morning till about noon) with the sight of a properly made road, of worked stone, of mown grass, and of all that my fellow beings are busily at throughout the world. For though I had not seen a man, yet the marks of men were all around, and at last as I went into the Uplands I bade farewell to my kind in the shape of an old rusty pair of rails still united by little iron sleepers, one link of a Decauville railway which a generation before had led to a now abandoned mine.

My way over the mountains lay up a gulley which turned as unexpectedly as might the street of a mediæval town; and which was quite as narrow and as enwalled as the street of any city; but instead of houses there were ugly rocks, and instead of people very probably viewless devils. Still, though I hated to be away from men I went on because I desired to cross the high ridge which separated me from a dear pastoral people, of whom I had heard from poets and of whom I had read in old books. They were a democracy simple and austere, though a little given to thieving, and every man was a master of his house and a citizen within the State. This curious little place I determined to see, though the approach to it was difficult. There are many such in Europe, but this one lies peculiarly alone, and is respected, and I might say in a sense worshipped, by the powerful Government to which it is nominally subject.

Well, then, I went on up over the ridge and, by that common trick of mountains, the great height and the very long way somehow missed me; it grew dark before I was aware, and when I could have sworn I was about four thousand feet up I was close upon eight thousand. I had hoped to manage the Farther Valleys before nightfall, but when I found it was impossible what I did was this: I scrambled down the first four or five hundred feet of the far side before it was quite dark, until I came to the beginnings of a stream that leapt from ledge to ledge. It was not large enough to supply a cottage well, but it would do to camp by, for all one needs is water, and there was a little brushwood to burn. Next morning with the first of the light I went on my scramble downwards--and it was the old story (which everyone who has wandered in the great mountains of Europe knows so well), I was in the Wrong Valley. I was used to that sort of thing, and I recognised the signs of it at once. I made up my mind for a good day’s effort, which, when one is by oneself, is an exasperating thing; I tried to guess from my map what sort of error I had made (and failed). I knew that if I followed running water I should come at last to men. At about three o’clock in the afternoon I made a good meal of stale bread, wine, and my companion the torrent, which had now grown to be a sort of river and made as much noise as though it were a politician. Then I thought I would sleep a little, and did so (you must excuse so many details, they are all necessary). It was five when I rose and took up my journey again. I shouldered the pack and stolidly determined that another night out in these warmer lowlands would not hurt me, when I saw something which is quite unmistakable upon the grass of those particular hills, a worn patch, and another worn patch a yard or two ahead. That meant a road, and a road means men--sooner or later.

Sure enough, within half a mile, the worn patches having become now almost continuous, I rounded a big rock and there was a group of huts.

There were perhaps two dozen of them, perhaps more. Three-quarters were built of great logs with large, very flat roofs over them held down by stones; one quarter were built of the same rough stones, and there was a tiny church of dirt colour, with two windows; and neither window had glass in it. I had found men. And I had found something more.

For as I went down the main street of this Polity (they had “Main Street” stuck up in their language at the corner of the only possible mud alley of their town) I saw that blessed sight which sings to the heart and is one of the thirteen signs of civilisation, a barber’s pole. It was not very good; it was not planed or polished; the bark was still upon the chestnut wood of it; but there was a spiral of red round it in the orthodox fashion, at the end of it a tuft of red wool, and underneath it in very faded rough letters upon a board the words, “Here it is barbered.” More was to follow. I confess that I desired to draw, for beyond the little huts the mountains, once dreadful, now, being so far above me, compelled my attention. But just as I had sat down upon a great stone to draw their outline, there appeared through the disgusting little door under the barber’s pole one of those humans whom I have mentioned so often in these lines.

He was about thirty, but he had never known care; his complexion 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:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best of all, I think, as a memory or an experience is the Ouse, which runs from Bedford to the Wash, and has upon it the astonishing monument of Ely. Here is a river which no one can descend without feeling as he descends it the change of English provinces from the Midlands to the sea. He should start at Bedford; then he will pass through fields where tall elms give to the plains something more than could be given them by distant hills. The river runs between banks of deep grass in summer. It is contented everywhere; and as you go you are in the middle of a thousand years. You pass villages that have not changed; you carry your boat over weirs where there are mills, always shaded by large trees. Once in a day, at the most, you find an unchanging town: Huntingdon is such an one, or St. Ives, where I do believe the people are kinder than in any other town. Then, as you still go on, the land takes on another character. You begin to know that England is not only rich and full of fields but also was made by the sea. For you come to great flats--and that rather suddenly--where, as at sea, the sky is your contemplation. You notice the light, the colour, and the shapes of clouds. The birds that wheel and scream over these spaces seem to be sea birds. You expect at any moment to hear beyond the dead line of the horizon the sound of surf and to see the glint of live water. Above such a waste rises, on what is called “an island,” and is in truth “an island,” the superb strength of Ely.

No one has seen Ely who has not seen it from the Ouse. It is a hill upon a hill, and now permanently present in the midst of loneliness. It is something made with a framework all around of accidental marsh and emptiness. Thenceafter the Ouse goes on. You get through and down the deep step of a lock, and beyond it is the salt water and busy energy that comes and goes from the sea. Very deep banks, alive with the salt and the swirl of the tide, shut in the boat for miles, and there are very high bridges uniting village to village above one, till at last the whole thing broadens, and one sees under the sunlight the roofs and the spars of King’s Lynn; and, if one has no misadventure, one ends the journey at some narrow quay at a narrow lane of that delightful port and town.

There is one English river out of at least thirty others. I wish that all were known! That journey down the Ouse is three days’ journey--but it is such a slice of time and character and history as teaches you most you need know upon this Island. Only I warn anyone attempting it, let the boat be light and let it be shallow, and be ready to sleep in it; it is only thus that you can know an English river, and if you can draw, why it will be a greater pleasure. It is very cheap.

On Two Manuals

Flaubert, I believe, designed once to publish a Dictionary of Errors, and would actually have set about it had he not found the subject growing much too vast for any human pen. He also designed a reference book, or rather anthology, of follies, stupidities, rash judgments, and absurdities, but never lived to complete this great task. Now, reading this, I have wondered whether two little books might not be written which should prove useful severally to the undergraduate and to the politician. I do not say to the schoolboy, for no book yet written ever was or ever will be useful to him. But for the undergraduate a useful book might be written which I shall presently describe, and which would make a sort of foundation for all his studies. So also for the politician a second book might be written which should be of the greatest service. Let me now describe these two books. Perhaps among those who read this there will be so many men of leisure and learning as can in combination give the world the volumes I imagine.