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Title: Many cities
Author: Hilaire Belloc
Illustrator: Edmond L. Warre
Release date: October 18, 2026 [eBook #79824]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Constable & Co LTD, 1928
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79824
Credits: The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MANY CITIES ***
MANY CITIES
_By the same Author_
THE OLD ROAD
THE CRUISE OF THE “NONA”
THE JEWS
EUROPE AND THE FAITH
THE SERVILE STATE
_Constable_
_London_
[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL, SARAGOSSA.
Frontispiece.]
MANY CITIES
_by_
HILAIRE BELLOC
_Illustrated by_
EDMOND L. WARRE
LONDON
CONSTABLE & CO LTD
1928
_Printed in Great Britain by
Robert MacLehose and Co. Ltd., at the
University Press, Glasgow_
TO MRS. FRANK COLLIN
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PART ONE: SPAIN
I. THE ENTRY INTO SPAIN 3
II. SARAGOSSA 13
III. SEGOVIA 23
IV. LARAICHE AND CADIZ 31
V. TARRAGONA AND THE CATALANS 40
VI. SALAMANCA 49
PART TWO: PORTUGAL
VII. VIZEU 57
VIII. OPORTO 62
PART THREE: THE RECOVERED COUNTRY
IX. ISLAM AND CHRISTENDOM 71
X. CEFALU 80
XI. PALMA OF MAJORCA 87
XII. SOUSSE, WHICH IS HADRUMETUM 95
XIII. GUELMA 104
XIV. CONSTANTINE 111
XV. CHERCHELL, WHICH IS CÆSAREA 118
XVI. TIMGAD AND VOLUBILIS: THE OUTPOSTS OF THE DESERT 124
XVII. THE HILL OF CARTHAGE 131
PART FOUR: FRANCE
XVIII. THE MONUMENTS OF THE RHONE 139
XIX. ROCAMADOUR 145
XX. PÉRIGUEUX 150
XXI. THE GREAT HOUSE OF DURTAL 156
XXII. CHALUS 161
XXIII. VIRE 167
XXIV. LE MANS 172
PART FIVE: THE RHINE MARCH
XXV. AIX-LA-CHAPELLE 179
XXVI. METZ 186
XXVII. TREVES 194
XXVIII. BONN 201
XXIX. WORMS AND SPIRES 208
XXX. THE VOSGES 213
PART SIX: TOURNAI
XXXI. TOURNAI AND THE FIELD OF FONTENOY 223
PART SEVEN: THREE TOWNS OF LIFE AND DEATH
XXXII. NARBONNE 241
XXXIII. CHAISE DIEU 250
XXXIV. CORNETO OF THE TARQUINS 256
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Cathedral, Saragossa _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Cathedral and Roman Bridge, Salamanca 50
Salamanca and the Guadarrama 53
Casa da Concha, Salamanca 54
Vizeu, Portugal: Colonnade of Grao-Vasco Museum 58
Vizeu: The Cloister between Cathedral and Museum 60
View up the Douro. A Brunel Bridge and Wellington’s Ford beyond
the Bend 62
Fountain on the Ramped Pathway to the Cathedral, Oporto 64
The Bishops’ Palace, Oporto 66
The Tower of the Giralda, Seville 76
The Tomb of the Alcazar, Seville 78
The Rock and Town of Cefalu 80
Cefalu: East End of the Cathedral 82
Cefalu: The Mosaic of the Apse 84
The Port and Cathedral, Palma 87
Palma of Majorca: Tower showing Islamic Influence 88
The Walls of Sousse 96
Sousse: The Rough Tower of the Minaret 100
Kalaa Serhira, just North of Sousse: A Roman Suburban Town,
transformed and turned Mohammedan 102
Guelma 104
Guelma: Roman Theatre 106
Constantine: Mouth of the Rummel Gorge 111
The Fonduk or Stable, with Mosque beyond the Gorge 112
Constantine: The Native Quarter 114
Constantine: Corbelled and Tunnelled Road 116
The Trees and Roman Harbour of Cherchell 118
Cherchell: Roman Theatre, Moorish Baths and Christian Church 120
Cherchell: The Aqueduct 120
Cherchell: The Single Column against the Sea 122
Avignon: The Bridge 140
Avignon: Palais des Papes 142
Rocamadour 145
Rocamadour: Roland’s Sword and St. Anthony’s Chest (by
tradition), on the Terraced Platform of the Shrine 146
Périgueux 150
Périgueux: a Typical Feature on the Ascent to the Cathedral 152
The House of Durtal 156
The House of Durtal: A Courtyard above the Vaulted Cellars 158
Chalus 161
Chalus: The Outer Ward 163
Vire 167
Vire: The Tower Gate 168
Le Mans 172
Le Mans: The Cathedral 175
Aix-la-Chapelle: The Fish Market and Cathedral 179
Aix-la-Chapelle: The Shrine 180
Aix-la-Chapelle: The March Gate 182
Aix-la-Chapelle: The March Gate 183
Aix-la-Chapelle: Rathaus 184
Metz Cathedral 186
Metz: The Riverside and Cathedral 188
Metz: The German Gate 191
Metz: The German Gate 192
Treves: Porta Nigra 196
Treves: Our Lady’s Church 199
Treves: A Rococo Doorway 200
The Rhine at Bonn 201
Rolandsbogen, above Bonn 202
Rhine: The Draconfels 204
Bonn: A Corner of the Double Cloister 206
Worms: Old Houses on Market Place 208
Spires 210
Spires: The Cathedral through the Trees of the Close 212
Tournai 224
Tournai Cathedral 232
_Part I_
_Spain_
CHAPTER I
THE ENTRY INTO SPAIN
Of all the provinces of Christendom, Spain possesses most intensely that
kind of unity and personality which come from a defined boundary. Things
only are because they are one, and a city is most a city when it is
sharply defined by a wall.
Now the Peninsula, although since the old imperial times so many
accidents have come to divide it within, to make of its Western District
a separate nation, to give Catalonia in the north-east a separate
tradition, and to mark all the tableland and the Andalusian garden of the
south with the scars of alien advance and retreat, has this geographical
unity forever: it stands like a peninsular city cut off at its isthmus
by a wall, a wall running from sea to sea; and that wall is the very
high even line of the Pyrenees. You have no choice but to come to Spain
by sea or across that strict boundary of the hills—save at one doubtful
exception, the Cerdagne. The note of your entry always, unless you come
by one of those ports of hers which are so charged with memories, is the
passing of a wall.
The roads by which you may so enter Spain are few. They may be compared
to gates. There are the sea roads at either end, the high broad shelf of
the Cerdagne, but in the main central part, more than a day’s journey
from either sea, there are three such passages only: Roncesvalles, the
Somport—both Roman—and the new Sallent, which is close to, and not much
more than a doubling of, the Somport. It is striking indeed to see
upon the map, to experience with the senses in travel, the permanence
of such a boundary in our time when half the energy of man is spent in
multiplying communications. The great mountains run for twice the length
of the Scotch border with no passage through for wheels. It is as though
the Alps were thus shut over the whole line of Piedmont, with no St.
Bernard, no Mont Cénis, no Mont Genèvre: as if the whole of the Swiss and
Tyrolese frontier were blocked from the St. Bernard to Lake Garda.
I have entered Spain by many entries in the last twenty years: by
Barcelona, coming from Africa and the Balearics; by Cadiz, coming in a
little coastwise boat from Laraiche, in Morocco; by the Bay of Santander;
by Coruña and by Vigo. More often by the mountain roads—all of them—and
again by the easy but high cols, such as the Bonaigo, which have no roads
but tracks.
Whenever I so enter, whether by sea or by land, I find rising in me the
same emotions as were provoked by my first glimpse of a new habit in
houses and in men and of a new culture, unique in Europe, which came to
me in that first voyage from Africa when I was young. But most strongly
does one feel the contrast and change—the interest of exploration, the
appetite for the discovery of new things, and the weight of the past—most
strongly does one feel all those things when one passes into that proud,
separate, and reserved world, not even by a path, nor by any entry
commonly used, but alone, through some chance high notch of the ridge,
where, not without difficulty but without peril, the mountains may be
crossed and an approach made to Aragon through one of her innumerable
parched valleys.
I remember one such entry, also many years ago—it was in 1907—when I had
worked my way over a cleft on the skyline from which one could scramble
down at last on to the Gallego.
There are many such opportunities—there are hundreds—in the curious
formation of the Pyrenees; and though they can only be used for a short
part of the year, between the snow and the snow (when the snow has fallen
one must keep to known tracks, and even then _deep_ snow may render
them impassable), yet they give to the traveller in these mountains
an opportunity which he will find nowhere else in Europe: which is the
opportunity for personal and lonely discovery. For though that wall
is high and even as is no other of our mountain ranges, with very few
regular passes, yet there are no glaciers—unless one counts a small
attempt at one on the Maladetta. There are no vast fields of snow; there
are few precipitous formations so long that it is difficult to turn them.
Indeed, it has been complained that these splendid hills give little
sport to the climber. And that is as it should be—mountains were not made
for the amusement but for the religion of man; and to look to mountains
for a game is like going to sea with a Bermuda rig.
At any rate, such are those hills, and such is the best entry into Spain;
to take, alone, any one of the many French valleys: to scramble up the
steeps at the end, to pick one’s way over the further side, going down
where it may be just possible to go down without falling, and to make
a passage of one’s own in two days and a night from a road to a road,
from a main stream upon the north to one of the Ebro rivers, muddy water
rolling past burned banks under another and a more dangerous sun.
Such was that entry which I still so vividly remember, although it came
long after I had enjoyed many others, by sea and by land.
I had left the last village and the end of a road which had grown vague
and was at last no more than a few cobbles covered with grass. It had
dwindled into a path following the little stream, until that path also
was lost in the meadowland of the height, and there was nothing more to
guide me but the thin tumble of water and the shape of the ridge upon the
skyline beyond, 3000 feet above me. The evening fell, with a great moon,
and the night made the sound of the water louder, as it always does.
There was a little wind in the trees which hung upon either side of the
vale. Before midnight it had died down, and I had then to come to the
tarn which, in so many of these places, is the head of the water, with
nothing but dry, steep rocks above it, up to the edge of the main ridge.
These rocks, with the moon sailing beyond them to the south, were marble
dark and looked not like what they were but like a precipice. I thought I
would await daylight before I attempted them, and I lay down by the shore
of the tarn to sleep.
The night was warm, even at that height, for it was early August, and
the bare surfaces of these upland stones retain the heat of the day. I
woke with the first dawn. Soon it was light enough to see what the task
was before me—simple enough, but tedious. There was no track and nothing
to indicate where, upon the further side of the high circular ridge
above me, I should find my best chance of getting down the Spanish side.
What I had to do was to make for the lowest point of that ridge, or what
seemed to be the lowest point (for all was much the same height), toiling
painfully up a very steep surface, now loose, now firm, and finding ways
round occasional steeps of rock. The business was long, though it was no
very great height—no higher I dare say than the eastern face of Snowdon
above its lake. Before I had reached the summit the sun had risen, and
as I set foot upon the narrow, topmost ridge, I saw its disc between the
confused peaks to the east: and there, below me, lay Aragon. The name
alone is enough to fill a man with delight and to magnify him with the
story of twelve hundred years.
It was up the torrent of Aragon that the swarm of the Mohammedans rode
when they swept into Gaul. It was down from that first beckoning of water
that the first of the counter-attacks began, forcing its way down, march
by march, generation by generation, till, a thousand years ago, the
Christians held Jaca and Huesca a lifetime later; Huesca, the town of St.
Lawrence, the martyr; the town from which, for good or for evil, we of
Christendom got our institution of Parliament: King and Clergy, Lords and
Commons, all complete.
That thunderous little torrent of Aragon spread its name greatly
outwards till Saragossa was taken; then the dark, awful range above the
Castle of Job beyond; till, in battle after battle, after advances and
retreats innumerable, alliance and counter-alliance between the Christian
lords of rough keeps and the Moorish chiefs of the valleys, the tide
came to an end on the heights of the sources of the Tagus, and the whole
kingdom was formed.
More than Castille, more than Leon, does that advance of Aragon stand
for me as the type of reconquest and as the beginning of those ceaseless
adventures which are now the secret of the Spanish blood.
Once the Pyrenean foothills were left behind, the green, but burnt green,
of their scanty trees and thin grasses was left behind as well, and the
armoured men riding southward went over land in places so utterly bare
that they recall the slopes of Aurès, where it stands above the Sahara,
or those wastelands of the west, to which national pride alone prevents
the Americans from applying the title of desert. The Reconquistadores
went over a burning land; and this it was which lay now below me, far
away, its glare not yet too violent under the early sun, as I stood
upon the height of the main range, looking southward to where, so very
far below, a deep trench marked the beginnings of the Gallego. Away to
the west, beyond a barren high scar (which was red, sharply coloured,
taking the full light from the east), lay that other deep trench, still
in darkness, down which roared the torrent Aragon itself, the presiding
spirit of all I saw, with that huge peak Garganta towering up into the
light.
In the landscape below me and stretching so infinitely away (for between
the shoulders of the foothills could just be caught the treeless plains)
was the immensity of the past and the grave, profound appeal of Spain.
How often had I known that call! And yet, as I say, in that night and
morning passage of the hills, I felt it more strongly than ever before. I
was to see those villages which seemed part of the brown earth, and each
of which has been called impertinently a museum, but should be called,
reverently, a shrine. I was once more to stand astonished at the amazing
pillars of sandstone as high as mountains which take the traveller aback
as he turns the corner of the valley at Riglos. I was to come upon the
first of the great churches which continue and grow to this day, and
are the centres of this people, having in their plan, in the details of
their ornament, in the uncompromising national seclusion of the Coro—like
an inner mystery everywhere—the impress of something which is still of
Europe and yet more individually itself than anything else of the West.
For though it is a jest only that Africa begins with the Pyrenees, it
is true that there begins with the Pyrenees a place sharply different
from ours, in some things older, in others younger, having suffered
crucifixion, having re-arisen, subjected to every vicissitude of fortune
and misfortune, of glory and of humiliation, of satisfaction and regret;
but, above all, enduring and fed with an inward fire. Spain.
It is difficult to understand that degree of baseness and insufficiency
into which men can fall, men of the north, that degree of stupidity bred
from a vulgar pride which remains unaffected by the sight of such things,
by their memories, and by conjecture on their future.
Ignorance plays a great part, perhaps, in such folly, for ignorance
will always take the tangent to the curve; will think that what it
superficially touches for the moment is all there is to perceive, and
that from such a farthing basis the coming fate of a people may be judged.
Indeed, this Spain, which I was now coming into once more, is, to the
full mind, much more a provocative for musing upon future chances and
the perpetual eddy of change in history than it is for brooding upon the
known past—full of tragedy, of splendour, and of burden as that past may
be.
No man coming into Spain but should think long and deeply, not only upon
the fall, but upon the rise, of power; and especially upon the many
kinds of power and upon the vastness and complexity of those forces
which move and intertwine like the eddies in the rush of the torrent
Aragon, to weave and unweave, in spite of human will, the destinies of a
nation.
CHAPTER II
SARAGOSSA
They say that no man touches the spirit of Spain unless he travels across
its great wastes with the muleteers. But I should say that a Northerner
will get that spirit more fully if he goes painfully afoot, communing
with himself and marvelling at the endless barren solitudes around him.
Or if he has not time or power to carry on through all those leagues and
leagues and days and days of emptiness (on which the villages are strung
out at great intervals like beads on a chain and the towns are half a
week apart), then let him at least make trial of some interludes on foot,
alternating them with the slow railway or with one of those innumerable
motor-coaches which now cover all the roads in the north.
For here it must be said (as a digression) that no part of Europe has
changed more in the matter of transport than Catalonia and Aragon between
the Ebro and the Pyrenees. I find new and good roads where twenty years
ago were mule tracks, and everywhere good and punctual petrol services,
linking up the whole countryside in a network. This change is for the
better. It does not concentrate men in one place; it destroys nothing of
the past; it quickens the life of all these provinces.
Still I say, if you would get into the genius of the land, go as much
on foot as you can, at the price of a very heavy tedium and (in summer)
of fatigue under a new sun, worse than any you have known. For if you
so act, you are under the conditions which those also were under who
pushed back Islam: slowly recovered and rebuilt Christendom on these high
plains, half-a-mile above the world.
But a man does well to travel in this way by winter as well as by summer,
so that he may know the terrible cold under which the hardihood of the
race has been tempered. The men who spread their language over the new
world and (what was much more of a feat) their every social habit, their
very cooking and slang; the men who, for a century, held half Europe by
arms and who at last wearied themselves out in the Dutch and German and
French fighting, and in the attempt to hold at once all the seas, even
in the north; the men whose pignoned ramparts you find in Luxemburg as
in Sicily, and whose exuberant stone carvings are in Arras as on the
Pacific—these conquerors were tempered just as steel is tempered. For
steel white hot is plunged into freezing water; so they on these bleak
roofs of the peninsula, where the fierce summers turn suddenly into long
months of clear and biting cold. The popular proverb has it thus: ‘Nine
months of ice and three of hell.’
The peninsula is a great arid, upland steppe, traversed by gaunt and
barren ranges which run from east to west and divide it into broad bands:
great vistas. With one straining of the eyes from the foothills of the
Pyrenees (as from the Peña beyond Jaca) a man may see through that thin,
piercing air, right away to the sombre lift of the Moncayo; from the
Moncayo (somewhat eastward) to the summits of the Guadarrama; from these,
to the high hills, sharp blue, beyond Toledo; from these to the Morena,
and from the Morena, I am told (I have not seen that last sight), to the
snows of the Sierra Nevada itself, which overhang the southern shore. All
Spain in four wide bands.
And this vast plateau falls down everywhere upon its edges to the sea, so
that the whole land may be compared to a very high, ill-watered tableland
of dust surrounded by a belt of low, luxurious gardens, stretched between
the escarpment and the sea.
The masters of this people, those who have stamped their fierceness
for ever upon the face of the world, and whose mark you meet, from
California, eastward round to the Philippines again, were bred under
the harsh, firm discipline of the upland wastes and ruled the fertile
land below. It was in the bare high places that all the fighters of the
Reconquista made their advance, thrusting forward from mountain range
to mountain range, over the parched broad flats between. It is in the
direction of this advance that Spain should be learned; from north to
south.
Coming down from the Pyrenean boundary wall by the Gallego trench, you
follow the main riding of the men who at last seized and destroyed the
Emirate of Saragossa. You look upon things with their eyes, coming
daily to things which are new to you, as such things were then new to
them; leaving the trees and scant grasses of the foothills and coming
to that incredible white wilderness, without a blade or leaf upon it,
which, to the west of the Gallego, overhangs the Ebro. Indeed, even the
man who travels by train down that valley gets some sharp impression
of strangeness as he looks across the flat and sees mile after mile of
leprous marl which looks not like something of nature, but like something
dumped in a gigantic engineering feat, reminding one of those glaring
heaps above the Cornish clay mines; but here the glare is a day’s march
long and hundreds of feet high, and dead and burned ash-white under the
sun.
A man so proceeding also sees, what is characteristic of this land, the
cornfields, painfully recovered patch by patch amid so much barrenness.
He has come from France, where, save in the mountains, all is vineyard,
pasture, plough, orchard, or cool, damp woods, with watercourses
everywhere, and large, slow, clear rivers, humanising all. But he has
passed a barrier like none other in the world, and he is now in quite
new land, where a man ploughs what he can under a vengeful sky—sometimes
an open stretch of fertile plain, but, for the most part, pockets and
exceptions in the stretch of dusty rock.
I have walked all day, on my way southward to the Ebro, and seen not
a score of habitations nor one clear mile of tillage. It is not so,
indeed, along the river itself; but in the lands to the west, if one
has the curiosity to make that turn, the traveller will see such savage
loneliness as he could not think to exist in Europe, not even in the
_causses_ of the Tarn basin south of Auvergne.
In such a landscape the works of man are the more marvellous. You come
towards evening upon what seems to be but a brown lump of the same earth,
somewhat raised above the brown dust of the way. You come nearer, and you
see that it is the grouping of a village. But nothing tells you (till
you are within the street) how much the Mind of Man will here appear
displayed and triumphant. The church you discover to be of the most
solemn and most calculated darkness within; all its woodwork carved with
innumerable details, rich, fantastic, foisoning; its ancient windows
calculated to subdue the light; its stones gloriously diverse with deep,
personal ornament, and the whole coming from one national soul heavy
with dignity and incapable of lapse. One could almost say that every
large village had not only such a monument peculiar to itself, expressive
of its inmost being, but also in the shields carven above the lintels,
in the ironwork of the gates and balconies, in the house-balustrades
of stone, a similar wealth of creative power. Such a village of Aragon
is like an island in the sea, or an oasis. A special spot crammed with
vigour and time.
Then, beyond again, the rock and the dust continue, and you look back in
the mid-morning of your next day’s journey, under the glaring sun, and
all that hidden treasure is turned once more into a brown lump, hardly
distinguishable from the burned stones of the plain.
The last long day’s ride of the knights southward to the river, the
last two long days of marching for the men afoot, took generations to
recover. Christendom held Huesca while the shrill Mohammedan cry was
still calling to prayer from the minarets of Saragossa. That Emirate
stood out by cunning and by arms long after all to the south and to the
east had fallen. But the King of Aragon at last rode in; and where the
chief mosque had been they began to build the Seo, the central shrine,
the greatest glory of the city to-day.
Saragossa, of all the famous cities of Europe, makes the least appeal to
one coming by its main approach. It had so much history and had suffered
so many famous things that already the men beyond the Pyrenees a thousand
years ago thought of it as standing upon a high hill, conspicuous and
fantastic. That is the vision of it in the _Song of Roland_. But the real
Saragossa is nothing of the kind. This square mile, into which there
push back roots of two thousand years, which still bears distorted the
Imperial Name (Cæsarea Augusta), which became the capital of the proudest
of the conquerors in the full tide of the Christian advance and crusade,
and which in our modern time set an example of heroism higher than that
of any other city in its furnace of resistance to Napoleon’s generals,
gives no proof to the eye of its greatness.
You see, as you come in, the broad trench of the Ebro, sometimes rolling
a mass of muddy water between its eaten, soft banks; more often trickling
a parched, thin stream. Nothing is conspicuous but the domes of Our Lady
of the Pillar, the very large church to the west of the bridge; on the
cupolas of which Goya’s frescoes have cracked, in the very entrance to
which is that very ancient tradition of the West, the small statue of
The Pillar, older perhaps than Glastonbury. Save for those domes and for
the high tower of the cathedral to the left, there is nothing to make you
consider Saragossa as you take your weary way in, parched and choked with
Aragon.
But when you come within the cool of the cathedral, then you perceive the
externals, and, if you are fortunate, you feel something of the soul also
which stood to arms for nine hundred years until the great fatigue of
the seventeenth century came upon it and it fell half-asleep; a sleep in
which it is now stirring.
It is wearisome to repeat the repetitive impression which these great
churches of the Spaniard leave; yet each is of its own place and has
its own individual manner. Saragossa, less dark than most, less awful,
is more uplifted. And this effect comes from a high lantern tower which
reveals with light the main altar and the north end of the Coro.
When last I stood there it was the feast of Corpus Christi, and there was
some gathering of people—not very many. The music was of that strange
sort with which Spain had long rendered me familiar. Still more familiar
were the words of the ritual: all of these were what I had seen and
heard, I know not how often, up and down the provinces of this land.
But what was peculiar to the heart of the realm was the light coming down
from above, from the height of the tower. On the inner walls of it the
last of the Middle Ages had nobly placed in woven carving the arms, the
names, the titles, the dates of the building: a memorial: the bishops and
the kings of Aragon.
It was not yet noon. The heat outside was an oven already; but I was here
within, sheltered, and permitted a recollection.
And it seemed to me, while I sat there so musing, that there is a double
strength in tradition. First, the strength which we all know, the
strength of continued names and forms which, though they become archaic
and grotesque, bind the sons to the fathers, and are, therefore, most
religiously to be preserved. But the second, stranger and more powerful,
more full of body, is that strength in tradition which has a resurrection
about it assuring a continuance of life.
There is a sort of tradition which is not a form, nor a ritual, nor a
name, but a surviving influence; and this (said I to myself) is the
abiding strength, promise, and earnest of the future of Spain. The vital
memory; the things _quæ olim promisisti ad Abraham et patres nostros_. To
have such things within one, that indeed is to be alive.
So I mused in the cathedral of Saragossa the last time I was there. As it
seems to me the past develops, continuous, and is alive in Spain; like
a seed still promising good things, whereas in so much of the West the
seeds have perished.
I can pay no attention at all to those who regard the cherishing of the
past as an arresting, or a cramping; a check. Upon the contrary, it seems
to me the privilege of a lively mind. For you may notice among men of
middle age how most of them have grown intent upon the anxieties of the
moment, or the base appetites of the moment, and have so become degraded
with the passage of time. But here and there one man remembers not only
his boyhood but his youth; not only his youth but his manhood, and is
continuous with all he ever was. Such is the privilege of the Spaniards
among the men of other nations. Such reserves have they for their next
advance and for their rehabilitation.
CHAPTER III
SEGOVIA
All Europe is hungry for kingship: for the restoration of responsible
power: for the recovery of a government which can not be bribed and which
is stronger than secret finance on the one hand and its ally, demagogy,
on the other.
Now there is in Spain one town where, above all others, this spirit of
kingship remains as a sort of inhabiting soul, always alive, built into
the very stones of the place and haunting the mind of one who dwells in
it and surveys the past and the future. That town is Segovia.
Madrid, hard by, only one long day’s ride away over the mountains, has
been the capital for centuries. All around, at the Granja and in the
sombre glory of the Escurial, you might say that kingship had far more
powerful memorials; while further beyond, above the trench of the Tagus,
in the very centre of Spain, the hill of Toledo carries the ancient
root of authority and was the central support of all this people for
generation upon generation: Roman, Christian, Monarchical. And in Leon
town are older origins of kingship, and even in the hills of Cavadonga
or in Saragossa, of which I have spoken, or in that last ancient rough
cloister of Jaca, where the first chieftains gathered under one lord,
or at Huesca of Aragon a man might be expected to feel the thing more
strongly. But I feel it most when I see from nearby, peering above the
dust of the parched and rolling plain, the high belfry of Segovia. Then
I know that I am coming, not only to the memory of kingship, but to the
promise of its resurrection.
For Segovia must be seen thus, by a man coming in on foot from the
north-west, if its character is to be fully seized. It stands on a great
isolated island of rock, which it crowns, and the lines of which it
gathers up into the lines of its cathedral and great soaring tower. But
it does not dominate the treeless, waterless, grassless, brown plateau of
Castille. Though it is itself 3000 feet above the sea, yet is it somewhat
lower than the immense empty billows of land to the north and west of
it, and the citadel lifts up out of a hollow, dominating its own narrow,
sunken valley, but not rising above the high plains beyond.
You come upon Segovia suddenly enough, if you approach thus and see, all
in one view, the town close at hand; not quite upon a level with the edge
of the steppe which you have so long been tramping across alone.
It is an astonishing vision. There thrusts out towards you, compared by
a hundred tongues and pens to the prow of a ship, the graceful strength
of the palace and fortress, the Alcazar, which was the very heart of the
kingship of Castille. To the left, the line of wall runs away along the
edge of the rock, the town huddled within upon the uneven summit, and, at
its highest point, the splendid mass of the cathedral. The two torrents
of the two ravines which bound that rock meet just below the stronghold
of the Alcazar, which overhangs them—the Eresma to the north, to the
south the well-named Clamores: a torrent which, when the snows of the
Guadarrama are melting, fills all the gorge with its noise. It is wise
not to descend at once into the hollow, nor to approach the town by the
nearer gate facing one from this west side, but to go round painfully
towards the south of the city, where the bare land lifts upwards to the
first distant slopes of the mountains, and to contemplate from that point
the packed mass of the city, built of rock on its rock foundation. There
the abrupt island of granite is united with the high land to the east by
the finest Roman aqueduct in Europe, which they say that Trajan made.
It still brings the clear water of the Rio Frio—the cold stream—from
the mountains into the town. The Mohammedans left it to ruin, as they
left everything, they who destroyed the forests and left such permanent
scars on all the countries of the Mediterranean; but at the end of the
Middle Ages it was restored, and stands now complete, an immense series
of arches, three stages high, huge blocks laid without mortar. The only
thing I have seen to which it may be compared is the Pont du Gard.
Not this stamp and seal of Rome, which was built to stand for ever; nor
the cathedral, which was the last movement of the Gothic before the
Renaissance, the last expression of the Middle Ages—but the Alcazar
holds the soul of Segovia; and _there_ is kingship. While Aragon to the
east was pushing back Islam and thrusting at the outpost of Saragossa,
Castille swept in great rides over the burned upland, finding in the
Guadarrama a sort of barrier which it could not finally force for many
years. Halted on the hither side of that barrier, Castille dug itself in
at Segovia, and that advanced post was the fortress of its kings. The
walls of Segovia when Alphonso VI. rebuilt them (in the generation which
saw Hastings and which was full of a tide of movement in Christendom
already quick with the Crusades) were the crown of Castille.
It is again typical of monarchy, its perils and resurrections, that the
Alcazar has been destroyed again and again.
At the time of year in which I am writing, in the heat of August, in
the mid-thirteenth century, when the kings of Castille had had their
establishment here for more than two hundred years, Alphonso the Wise
sat in his great hall, with his nobles and his bishops about him, and,
musing, said aloud, ‘Had the Creator but consulted me, the world would
have been made better.’ Whereupon it grew dark and a flash of lightning
fell and struck the Alcazar and destroyed half of it with flames.
That was but the first destruction. Others have followed throughout the
centuries. The last was in memory of men now living, and it is symbolic
of the spirit of monarchy that even in its last resurrection, even in
our own degraded time, the majesty and dignity of that building have
re-arisen. Indeed, Spain can boast what no other European country can
boast to-day, that its modern building is continuous with that of its
fathers. Therefore, the Alcazar, though nearly all the stones are new,
and though only the great façade remains of the original palace, is
still the shrine of monarchy. It is still the place where the populace
rose, under the minority of Alphonso XI. (a little after Bannockburn),
and where, five years later, when the child had become a man, such awful
vengeance was taken against the rebels. It is still the place where,
young and great, Isabella, the last heiress of Castille, was proclaimed
queen: she who by her marriage with Aragon was at last to unite all
Spain and to open the great century in which Spain made the New World.
It is still the same place from which that young, proud woman, only two
years after her crowning, rode out alone and dominated the mob with her
single presence. It is still the place where (again, how symbolic of the
Crown!) he who was to be Charles I. of England, in that Spanish adventure
which failed, Charles, the last to be possessed in his own country of
full kingship, sat at meat and looked out of the high windows upon the
tumbling of the Clamores far below.
Segovia was, and remains, the last of those intensely national kingly
centres of the Reconquista, whence the final charge was made which swept
all Spain into the Christian net; leaving only Andalusia to Mahomet as a
vassal remnant. For it was hence, as from a base, that Alphonso VI. went
out to seize Toledo, and to ride south as far as the Morena, and to plant
the seed which three lifetimes later flowered in the final victory of
Navas.
All this is in Segovia, and Segovia, as I have said, is kingship. Any
one who would get into himself the spirit of kingship and revive the
mood of that institution which was a necessity to our fathers, will do
well to pass a lonely week in Segovia, thinking upon all these things.
For Spain is now beginning the restoration of the kings. That with
which Italy first startled the world not many years ago Spain has now
undertaken: the re-erection of Monarchy. We are watching, with very
little news of it and allowed very little comprehension of it here in the
north, the most significant and the most profound of experiments. If the
example shall spread to France, the victory will be won: the professional
politician and his financial masters will pass from Europe and a moral
anarchy will have ended.
Indeed, the new Spanish experiment is much fuller of meaning than
Europe of the north and west has as yet grasped. In one form or another
one nation after another falls back, from sheer necessity of living,
upon this old stable model of personal rule, of real and responsible
authority; popular, not yet traditional, but already welcomed. Elsewhere
than in Spain it is either masked by an electoral process, as in the
United States; or it is a dictatorship, as in Italy, with no provision
as yet for its own continuance; or it is a military organisation, as
in Germany to-day—an act of police not fully developed there yet and
certainly not yet fixed. But in Spain the riddance of the professional
politician, the establishment of responsible and real authority is
avowedly and openly a preliminary to the full establishment of monarchy:
traditional, hereditary, popular, permanent.
Whether this good thing will succeed or no, none can prophesy. The
chances are in its favour so far as public support is concerned; one
can be very sure of that, for there is not a nation in Europe but is
disgusted with the falsehood, hypocrisy, and weakness of parliamentary
oligarchy and the sham catch-words of ‘suffrage’ and ‘deputy’ which
confused the nineteenth century. But two great perils, among many lesser
ones, threaten the final success of the experiment. One is what was the
running sore, and is still the scar, of Morocco. The other is the problem
of Catalonia.
It is not for a foreigner to judge either of these; but it is for all
observers interested in this critical experiment to note them and to
watch their effect. For the rest, the main forces are in kingship’s
favour. The blood is there. The dictatorship is courageous, among
people who worship courage; it is devoid of hypocrisy, among a people
contemptuous of hypocrisy; and when the time shall come for the full
restoration of monarchical power, there is a monarch present who can
use it. Would that other nations to-day, after so long an atrophy of
kingship, could say that!
Perhaps when I am an old man I shall return and stop again in my little
inn at Segovia, and hear of some kingly act done, some kingly order given
to a new Spain from the Alcazar of Segovia. I hope so; for the place
should bring luck: and that one hardly feels of Madrid.
CHAPTER IV
LARAICHE AND CADIZ
There are one or two physical factors in the making up of Europe and
Barbary which have quite definitely and clearly moulded history: we can
talk of them as real factors in the story of our civilisation, not after
the fashion of the popular modern guess-work, but with certitude. For
instance, there is the wide area of marsh to which the town of Pinsk
gives its name, and which, more than anything else except the human
factor of the Mongol invasion, has separated the Russian from the Western
culture. Here, in the South, is the Riff.
To the south of Spain, beyond the sea, over against the Andalusian
coasts, stands the Riff; such a tangle of mountains, such difficult
ground for fighting over, as is not to be found anywhere else in North
Africa or upon our continent. It extends in a forbidding, impossible
band, cutting off the interior of Morocco from the Mediterranean,
inhabited from the beginning by tribes unsubdued. The Roman organisation
which was able to hold all the tangle of the Eastern Alps and the
labyrinth of Albania, failed, or rather did not attempt, the control of
that belt. No one has ever held the Riff, not even the Sultan seated in
Marrakesh; or in Fez close at hand.
To the south of it runs that easy trench by which the fertile Barbary
of the east—Algiers and Tunis—communicates with the fertile Barbary of
the west, of the Atlantic coast; it is the trench Oudja—Taza—Fez, which
has always been the road from the Mediterranean to the ocean, and which
to-day the French have linked up again with a railway and with a wide
military road.
As you go along this famous highway (which was also that of the first
Mohammedan cavalry when they came in to destroy the relics of Rome), you
have on either side great lifting mountains and the broad depression
which forms a natural channel for traffic in between. The mountains to
your left, to the south, are the first ramparts of the Atlas. Those to
the north are the first foothills of the Riff. It has been the fate of
modern Spain that this worst of all territories has fallen within her
zone of government in the partition of Morocco, and therein lies the
truth of that expression I have used, the ‘running sore’ of Morocco; that
is, what long seemed the perpetual, and apparently fruitless, drain of
the ceaseless Moroccan war.
No other country in Europe lay under a handicap of this kind; nor will
the foreign observer understand the first elements of it if he thinks
this war a piece of purposeless aggression, a painting of the map. There
was nothing of that in the debated and anxious Moroccan policy of Spain.
If the Riff could be left alone (as it has been British policy to leave
alone, as a rule, the tangle of Afghan mountains), the Moroccan problem
would not exist. But there stand upon the Mediterranean coast, below
those mountains, the very ancient Spanish towns of Ceuta and Melilla.
They are not only an integral part of Spain and of her civilisation, they
are of standing and importance in themselves. For Ceuta there was perhaps
little direct peril; for Melilla more. But all that coast was involved,
and Tetuan as well.
They are not only of importance in themselves, they are also of
importance to the whole European position in Barbary; and their
neighbourhood is always open to peril as things stand to-day. That is the
heart of the Moroccan problem.
There is much else, of course; there is the tradition of twelve hundred
years, all one conflict between the Spanish people and Moors. The modern
reader smiles when he hears that the keys of Seville and of Toledo and
of Cordova are still treasured in certain Moroccan houses, but the thing
is a symbol; nor is it without significance that the Tower of Hassan
outside Rabat answers to the Giralda of Seville in pattern, in character,
in spirit. There is further that element which enters into all such
problems: the difficulty of retirement; the sound principle applicable
not to all, but to nearly all, national tasks—that to abandon them would
prove a worse evil than to continue the strain of them. There are these
and many other considerations; but the chief one still remains what I
have said: a defensive problem connected with the ancient Spanish towns
of that coast.
If proof were needed that Spain had here a task of quite especial
difficulty, it would be afforded by the content and prosperity of all
that part of her zone which lies in the plain westward, beyond the
mountains: that open country through which runs the communication
from Tangier to the interior: which will also carry the main road and
the railway from north to south whenever, or if ever, the conflict of
interests which meet at the Straits is resolved.
In this sea-plain, where also one of the last great battles between the
Christians and the Mohammedans was fought out at the end of the Middle
Ages (to the disaster of the Crown of Portugal), all now goes well; and
you will not find along that coast any more well-appointed, cleanly
little town than Laraiche, its port. As a port it is hampered by a very
shallow bar, the mouth of the River Kus; but its good government shows
itself in its external aspect, which is everywhere orderly. A man coming
into Morocco by this entry might well wonder why the occupation had
become a by-word for anxiety and strain, for here all is at peace and
all is flourishing. It seems also to have a natural bond with the coast
of Cadiz, which lies opposite, at a distance comparable to the crossings
of the English Channel, a matter of some hundred miles, most of which is
coastwise running.
It was from this little port that I sailed over to Cadiz, which hitherto
I had not known. It was a long, slow passage over the enormous Atlantic
rollers, the last effects of a strong on-shore gale which had died down
the day before. We crossed the bar with the afternoon high tide, and,
after anchoring outside for a little while, the vessel steered north,
and, as darkness fell, one could see, long spaces apart, the rare lights
of habitation upon the African shore.
Our course took us gradually further and further from that coast on a
line slowly diverging, but as we came abreast of the Straits, the great
light on Spartel, the corner headland of Africa, shone brightly, and even
seemed close at hand through the clear air. We caught soon afterwards
the flash of the lighthouse at Trafalgar, and, with the last of a short
night, we slipped in through the tortuous passage of the outer roads by
which one turns round eastward into the sheltered Bay of Cadiz.
I know not what the roots may be of that strong emotion which a man
feels when he knows that he is touching the actual soil, seeing the
very earth, on which very ancient things have been done. It is, in my
experience at least, a combined emotion of travel and of history separate
from all others; a particular and special affection.
As we threaded into Cadiz Haven between the coloured lights of the
channel buoys, I felt this strong emotion more than I have felt it before
anywhere; it was heightened, I suppose, by the night and the long vigil,
and that first turn of the dawn which changes all things. Thus did I
come in to the inner shelter of Cadiz, and they let go the anchor, and
the ship swung to the slight flood tide. That same tide did the first
inquirers from the inland tideless sea come to study curiously in the
days when the outer ocean had no further shore and was a sort of eternity
surrounding this world.
This place where I lay was the first of all the outer ports of the West
to be known and used by civilised men. And throughout certainly three
thousand years, and as much longer as you will, it has kept its name
and even its form. Its name, which, they say (it is but a guess), may
have meant something in the Phœnician tongue like a ‘stronghold,’ has
come down unchanged in Latin, Spanish, and Arabic, through all these
generations. The form of Cadiz has not changed either, because, by a
happy accident, Cadiz cannot grow. It wholly fills that almost insular
site at the end of the long, exceedingly narrow spit of land which forms
the natural breakwater of the harbour. Its walls, so often ruined, stand
where they stood when Hercules first traced them, and the land gate
is, and must always be, on one unchanging site. Cadiz is always of its
nature a city on an island, and also a city more entirely of the sea in
its traditions and changing fates than any other—more even than Venice.
Though it was the last refuge of national government in the resistance
to Napoleon it never attempted to govern the mainland. It has ever lived
wholly by its harbour. Its alternate wealth and decline have gone with
nothing but the alternate growth and lessening of its ships.
It is not without irony that this, the very oldest site in Spain, has,
of all ancient Spanish cities, the least remains of antiquity. That
is partly due to its later activity and partly to its being a sort
of maritime outpost, vulnerable from the sea, filled with commercial
activity and peril. At the end of the sixteenth century an English
expedition sacked and burned it, and a further fire necessitated its
rebuilding. It was rebuilt in regular fashion, as all towns are when they
are planned of one piece, in whatever age—unless we except the rebuilding
of London, in the next century; and even there very regular plans were
laid out by Wren and by Temple. But vested interests were too strong for
them, and the old London labyrinth (let us rejoice!) was restored.
Cadiz was rebuilt after a fashion which it is difficult to judge either
as insipid or as interesting or as curious: it has been called all these
things. It is insipid compared with the intense vitality of the Spanish
continuous work, alive with all the past, in city after city of Spanish
pride. It is of curious interest compared with any town not Spanish
because of the very tall houses, the narrow lanes—narrow for protection
from the sun and narrow because the space was so naturally limited—the
little turret-like ornaments at the cornets of the houses, the swelling
of the whole thing up from its walls. All these are curious. Yet I will
maintain that the profound interest of Cadiz is not in its whiteness upon
the sea wherein, from some way off, you see it reflected very vividly
during dead calms; still less is it in the town’s rather meaningless
eighteenth-century additions; nor even in the immemorial oval of its
league of wall; nor in the great legend of Hercules; but the profound
interest of Cadiz lies rather in that secure Bay, the first of the
Atlantic harbours.
In a sense you may say that Spain, here in Cadiz, was the mother of all
our modern things and of all our looking westward. Cadiz was the first
great tidal harbour, filled with the ebb and the flow of the Atlantic and
linking us up with the New World.
I have often wished that, in order to make the story complete, Columbus
had sailed from Cadiz instead of that little anchorage of Saltes,
just down the coast, which has filched from Cadiz an immortal memory.
Yet Cadiz reaped the fruits of that journey, and Cadiz rose and fell
thenceforward with the monopoly or the loss, the productivity or the
slackness, of the American trade. This it was which made it the victim
of foreign attack. This it was which gave it its vast wealth in the
last period of its power. This it was which let it sink again in the
mid-nineteenth century. This it is which in part has restored it to-day.
Only in part; for the trade of the world in our great modern ships now
seeks Barcelona. But Cadiz is the natural entry from the western sea. It
has not the same pride of arms as you will find in the battling cities of
the north. It fell naturally to the Reconquest after the middle of the
thirteenth century. It has few legends of resistance to the Mohammedan
power, and, although you will find Hercules and the two lions carven
above its gates, it is commercial rather than knightly. But it is the
gate from the broad ocean and from the West, and, alone of the Spanish
cities, it looks directly, uninterruptedly, over its western horizon at
the New Spain beyond.
CHAPTER V
TARRAGONA AND THE CATALANS
I think if a man would feel Catalonia he should travel on foot in the
northern mountains, hearing the Catalan speech and seeing the Catalan
customs upon both sides of the border. Next he should visit for some days
one of those smaller towns in which the modern industry of the province,
which distinguishes it so sharply from the rest of Spain, has taken root.
Lastly, he should steep himself in the spirit of Tarragona.
For Tarragona has that quality which you will everywhere find to be the
best preservation of a local genius—the quality of tradition undisturbed
by recent activity and expansion. Though it lies in the southernmost part
of the province, yet it is intensely Catalan, and sums up in its serene
antiquity the traditions of that land.
I have said that the problem of Catalonia and that of Morocco are the two
perils of Spain to-day; one might almost say there were no other perils
in the path of a continued prosperity, moral and physical. But these two
are serious, and there are moments when they seem overwhelming. How
serious is that of Morocco, the daily telegrams arriving for years were
sufficient to prove. Catalonia is quite another matter. It is not an
immediate physical peril, but it is a challenge to the Spanish unity.
The Catalan province, through an accident of history, received a
different stamp from that of the rest of the peninsula at a moment
when the final characters of our European countrysides were decided
during the crystallising process of the Dark Ages. There has resulted
not only a very different language—language is a poor test of national
definition—but a sharp different corporate spirit and informing local
habit.
All the rest of Spain—and Portugal as well for that matter—was moulded
and informed by the lengthy, the annealing, the slowly victorious
hammering back of Asia from European soil. But Catalonia was the March of
the Ebro which Charlemagne kept as a bastion thrown out into Mohammedan
land. From the very root of the Dark Ages it remained attached to the
Gauls; and there was a Count of Barcelona to defend the Ebro frontiers
of the empire here, just as the Counts and the Margraves upon the Elbe
and Danube defended it against the pagan Slavs and Mongols. The broad,
open pass of the Cerdagne, the easy passages of the last low eastern
hills wherein the Pyrenees fall to the Mediterranean, were gateways
into Catalonia at all times; and the coast country from just south of
Narbonne right to the mouths of the Ebro, became one thing.
This separate Catalan idea has never failed. You find it far on in the
seventeenth century, when the Catalan Assembly elected Louis XIII. of
France to be Count of Barcelona, as a challenge to Madrid (hence the loss
to Spain of Perpignan). You find it to-day in the Catalan acceptation of
modern industry, and, what is much more important, in the acceptation of
those transmontane French ideas, good and evil, which are abhorrent to
Aragon and Castille.
Nearly every country of the modern world (with its strong,
highly-centralised governments, its rapid communications, its unifying
processes of education and law) has some such problem of local resistance
to unity. It is not for a foreigner to judge either the moral issues
involved or the strength of the forces upon either side, but no view of
modern Spain can neglect that anomaly of the Catalonian demand. There is
no symptom of decline in it—the local separate spirit is still strong
and strengthening; to judge it, I say, one must not stand in the turmoil
and cross-currents of a huge centre like Barcelona, where to some extent
the religious quarrel and much more the violent industrial conflict of
our time between rich and poor confuse the issue. One must take the
Catalonian spirit where it is normal, traditional and native; and you
will find it so most in Tarragona.
The town is the most orderly, the most compact, one might say, of all
the more living cities of Spain. It is set on the slopes of a high hill,
which it exactly covers, and the steep escarpment of which to the east
overhangs a vast expanse of sea, over to the unseen Balearics, more than
a hundred miles away.
The place has nothing about it of decay, although, like all seats of a
peaceful antiquity, it has shrunk greatly from its ancient boundaries.
They say that at the height of the Roman power it held, with its slaves
and its travellers, a million souls. It has now, with its suburbs, not a
twentieth of that number. Yet there does not stand about it that shadow
of ancient amplitude which you find round other such cities—Ravenna, or
Rome itself—detached relics of ancient use, ruins, the enclosed gardens
run wild of palaces long disappeared.
The vineyards and the highly cultivated market ground and the pastures
come right up to the limits of its continuous building and to the base
of its hill. There seems to have happened here in part what happened
wholly to Hippo in Africa; that is, the removal of all the stones, of
every trace of building, from the area over which an ancient city shrank;
and Tarragona, which gave its name to all these coasts of Spain when the
Roman imperial power was at its height, stands now still marked with
all the impress of a capital—but not too large; exact, dignified, and
with no touch of mourning, of death, or even of decay. The port, which
seems so small to our modern eyes, and which was yet the making of this
centre over against the coasts of Italy, lies at its foot with a modern
quarter around it. From this flat arises the hill of the city, which you
mount by a main street, or better, by a fine flight of steps upon the
seaward side, which climb right up to the broad parapet-way and garden,
overhanging the Mediterranean upon the height; and there it is, upon the
very summit of the hill, that you find the heart of the city and its
memories. There you will see, built by chance into the walls of private
houses, the stones of fifteen hundred and two thousand years.
I came upon one most curious window in a wall of no pretensions. Its
two sides were supported by two red slabs, memorials or tombs, still
inscribed with Latin letters. The lintel above was of a different colour,
a greyish white, which looked much older, but was, in fact, more recent,
and may, in fact, have counted not more than a thousand years. It had
been taken, I suppose, from some ruined synagogue, for it bore, deeply
cut into the hard, rough substance of it, a run of Hebrew letters.
Such things meet you, I had almost said, at every turn in these very
steep, turning ways of the upper city; and you see, side by side with
them, the good and sober modern buildings, still rich with tradition, in
which the Spaniards everywhere excel.
Upon the very height of the summit, where once the citadel stood
(closely surrounded by the immense blocks, older than history, of the
cyclopean wall), stands the cathedral; and though every town of the
Peninsula centres on its church, and therefore makes every mention of
each particular shrine something of a repetition, no one can write of, or
remember, Tarragona save in terms of that astonishing thing.
It stands more lonely than the main churches of most of the other towns,
for it is at the extremity and on the height of the whole city. A wide
space before its approach, flooded with an intense light and commonly
empty of men, is your introduction to something exceptional in your
travels. For as you pass the doors you come suddenly out of the glare
into a very cold, black void. At first you can see nothing. You are in
what seems to be the complete darkness of a vast cavern, very wide and as
icy as might be some subterranean refuge; violently contrasting in its
sudden cold and empty depth of night with the torrid splendour outside.
Then, very gradually, the eye perceives a glimmering shaft, an altar
cloth under the gleam of a small taper; a broad vault lost above. But
nothing more. The mediæval architects of Catalonia delighted in the two
effects of gloom and breadth: a breadth which seems beyond the capacity
of stone; an arch which seems, in the gloaming, almost too flat for so
great a span. It is here at Tarragona only an extreme degree of what you
also have in the chief parish church, and still more in the cathedral,
of Barcelona. That degree of breadth is indeed so extreme that this
strange, cubic nave of Tarragona, ebony night when you come into it out
of the sunlight, stands by itself, and has no true parallel elsewhere in
Europe. They who built it desired a place wherein the soul of man should
enter at once into a profound contemplation, and be wholly cut off from
the consideration of external things. They desired to put over and around
the soul of man, roofing him and guarding him all about, a mystery of
silence and of immensity. Certainly they achieved what they desired.
I could imagine some man, over-experienced in the noisy unmeaning of
the world—its ambitions bought at ten times their worth, and lost in a
moment, its futile, torturing friction, and its fruitless, wasted fevers
of energy—coming many hundred miles to find this place again, and to
rest. It is the very heart of final repose.
When the eye has slowly grown used to the dim details of this huge cave
and has begun to see its sublime proportion and design, it has another
fulness of experience before it in the cloisters through the northern
door, close on the gospel side of the great altar.
Passing through this northern door you come to what is the most charming,
the most blessed, of all the wild gardens of the world, framed in a
quadrilateral of delicate arches all around. I know them all, the
cloisters of the Middle Ages. Here in England, every one, and I think
every one in France; and here, in Spain, I know Barcelona, Seville,
Oviedo and the strange double tier of Ripoll; and Leon, where I thought I
had found, fifteen years ago, the loveliest of all such seclusions. But
the cloister of Tarragona far surpasses them all. Upon its walls stand
Roman tombs and, of course, the memories of the Middle Ages, and in one
place, an exquisite small Moorish window, chiselled to an infinity of
detail; and in another, a small rough monstrous head, from the ends of
our darkness, when sculpture was almost lost. All the centuries are about
you, but all asleep; and the only life of the place is in the graceful
solemnity of the few trees, the grass and flowers of the court, the birds
shooting to and fro, high round the warm golden stones of the tower.
That sky, that air you breathe, that slight wind coming over those
ancient roofs are all of the sea. You know as you sit there, in the shade
of the northern cloister, looking at that very mellow tower, kindly
against the intense noon sky, and as your eye finds nothing but that
sky, with the tiles of the garth and the chancel roof against it, that
behind you, unseen, is a great regiment of mountains, guarding the plain
and looking on this abrupt lonely hill, which is your station; and you
know that just beyond, down below the giant walls, at the foot of the
steeply-falling slope, is the splendour of the Mediterranean. All the
while there is no sound but the very slight murmur of the sea wind in the
leaves of the lonely little garden and, at long spaces, the sharp note of
a darting bird.
It sounds an odd thing to say of eager Catalonia—but it is true—that
here, if anywhere in the world, there is peace. That word, which the
young cannot understand, but which represents, after a certain age, all
the hunger of the heart, has here taken on flesh, as it were—a flesh of
stone—and is with us: peace incarnate.
CHAPTER VI
SALAMANCA
Of the towns in Europe which, by the sound of their names and by the
connotation of them, coupled with their remoteness, carry influence,
Salamanca is one.
Such a glamour is commonly disappointing in experience. Either the place
was once worthy of the verbal symbol which stands for it in a foreign
ear but has been destroyed by modern travel, or it has been swallowed
up (like Barcelona) by the modern industrial development and has but a
nucleus of strong things, standing small and half forgotten in a flood of
modern worthlessness. Now Salamanca is different from these, for it is
worthy of its name.
I had always desired to see it, but I never had. In the days when I
wandered on foot over northern Spain as a younger man I never pushed so
far west. Later the main line to Madrid (which all follow) held me, as it
does the elderly. I have found that most of those who go under the walls
of the city upon their way to Lisbon pass it unseen; the International
Express runs by it, but does not leave visitors. Like so many of the
finest things in Europe, it is seen from the railway at its worst. When I
did come to visit Salamanca the other day for the first time in my life I
found it, as I say, worthy of all that it had promised. But to judge it
as it should be judged, one must not come in by the common road or rail
from the direction of north or east. One must come in across the river
from the south.
The great University of the Middle Ages, the rival of Oxford and of
Paris, the dominating towers, the characteristic saffron stone of the
hill—all these stand out before you on the journey northward from the
Guadarrama mountains.
I had not myself the good fortune to approach it in this fashion, but I
shall take that road next time I come to the city, for it is from the end
of that road, coming to the River Tormes and its ancient bridge, that you
see Salamanca as it was meant to be seen—a pyramid of great buildings
culminating in the towering mass of the cathedral.
Here, as in a hundred other cases, it is from the Roman approach that one
sees the European meaning. The road, thus coming upon Salamanca northward
from the mountains, was, and is, Roman. The bridge over which that road
reaches the city (coming in at the foot of its low cliff) is the bridge
over which the Roman armies marched—which the Roman armies made. Its
stones are still Roman, and the strength of them.
[Illustration: CATHEDRAL AND ROMAN BRIDGE, SALAMANCA.
To face page 50.]
You may say that all the central and northern famous towns of Spain, the
towns of the upland, of the plateau (especially of Old and New Castille),
have a note of isolation. They stand on great wind-swept open places,
with only here and there a tree, and only here and there, miles apart,
each from each, little groups of houses. But Salamanca has this character
more strongly impressed upon it than has any other town—this quality of
loneliness and the surprising imprint of a special life in the midst of
things unlike itself.
You come upon Salamanca as you might come upon a human traveller in a
place where you expected no man. It stands in the midst of what in autumn
might be thought a desert—what, even when the crops are green in spring,
has a fine desolation about it; and that desolation is made the more
striking by the line of snow-tipped, rocky heights to the south, which
horizon the plains along the sky. One would think those plains waterless
as one goes the miles across them, but one comes not infrequently upon
their rivers running in broad trenches scooped out of the loose soil, or
breaking through reefs of barren limestone; rivers which vary in volume
from great tumbles of water when the snow is melting, or after storm, to
mere runnels between sand banks in the late summer heat or in the depth
of the exceedingly cold winters of that tableland. All such rivers lend
their value to the towns upon them. For, different as such rivers are
from our northern broad and equal streams, with their green meadows, and
different as they are even from the mountain streams of Italy, yet are
the Spanish towns upon them river towns. Toledo is the town of the Tagus,
Saragossa of the Ebro, Salamanca of the Tormes.
Wherever great wealth has been centred in the past upon some restricted
site, if there has accompanied its expenditure a civilisation of high
spiritual value and of a fixed, exalted sense of beauty, you have the
works of man in a profusion of creative power fixed for ever. You will
see that effect in the neglected square half-mile of Santiago, crammed
with magnificence, and you see it here in Salamanca.
The University Buildings have what all the ancient universities of Europe
have—a vitality bequeathed to them by generations of youth. In the
private houses of Salamanca you see before you, in stone, endeavour and
accumulated effort, an expenditure of carving without limit, an attempt
everywhere to leave a record, and that attempt successful.
But it is the cathedral, more than any other building, which gives its
soul to the place. And in it you may note what is the characteristic of
Spain—that the decay of the Middle Ages did not affect (as one might
think it should have done) the skill of men’s hands nor the justice of
their vision.
[Illustration: SALAMANCA AND THE GUADARRAMA.
To face page 53.]
The ornament is late; the piling on of detail is of a sort which tourists
in the Ruskin tradition will call excessive. There are experiments in
structure which are manifestly exaggerated. Yet the whole is a marvel.
I think it especially characteristic of the place that in the frieze
which runs round the nave for a total distance of perhaps three hundred
yards (a crowd of little figures, animals and foliage and men, one
creation from first to last) each detail is an individual; just as in
real creation each living unit has its own life. It is not enough to
say there is no repetition; it is rather true to say there is infinite
variety in unity.
Also have I seen in the church of Salamanca, better than elsewhere,
success in the attaining of _height_ and its effect in the noble
ironwork. The soaring gates of the chapels are as tall as the masts of
a full-rigged ship. The pilasters, coloured and even (what may seem
excessive, but on the spot is sober enough) _gilt_, have almost the
effect of Beauvais in their ceaseless uplifting of line. Moreover, less
than in any other Spanish cathedral I know does the Coro break the effect
of height.
The cathedral of Salamanca is a splendid edifice from within and from
without. It has that power of using the features in its landscape
which the men of its time gave to every great building. It is the true
completion of the height on which it stands, leading up into its tower
the lines of the hill which is its foundation.
Lastly there is this to be said about my old city of Salamanca—something
which lends a peculiar pleasure to the visiting of it—that it is not
mournful in its decay; it is not abandoned; it is properly alive.
Its schools, which were one of the four great groups of the Western World
hold not a quarter of the youth they once held. It does not radiate, as
once it radiated, its intelligence and learning through the West. But it
is not dead nor even diminished in life; it is still the great university
town, it is still a national glory, and, what is more important, it is
still itself, its function is not warped. Its value is permanent, its
essential activity unimpaired, and all this is crowned with permanent
beauty, like a garment, not new at all, but never to fade.
[Illustration: CASA DA CONCHA, SALAMANCA.
To face page 54.]
_Part II_
_Portugal_
CHAPTER VII
VIZEU
It has been said of England that if a foreign traveller, having but a few
days in which to see the place, were to travel through the South from
Dover through Salisbury to Devon, he would have seen a certain country.
If he were to land in the Humber, and travel through the Yorkshire
industrial towns and the Lancashire ones to Liverpool, he would have seen
one so different that he could hardly believe himself to have been in the
same State as that of which the first was a part.
The contrast in Portugal between the sea plain and the hills is nothing
like so strong, for in England we have our world sharply divided between
that old traditional aspect, dating back at least to the fifteenth
century, and the monstrous ash and black ruin of the nineteenth-century
industrialism.
Nevertheless, of Portugal it may be said that if a man only knows the sea
plain he cannot judge the country. If he only knew the hills he might
hardly suspect the towns and the sea plain. Of the hills it would seem
(from what those who have long known the country tell me) Vizeu is the
typical, small, dignified market town, bishopric, and the rest. I suppose
that if a man had but one place to visit in which he should desire to see
what the hill country of Portugal and its people were like, he could not
do better than choose this one example of Vizeu for his experiment.
Whether it be climate, or some preservation of race through difficulty
of access, the hill country of Portugal far more resembles in people and
habit (and somewhat even in natural exterior) certain parts of France
and England, than that belt along the Atlantic upon which was poured in
the past the sudden new wealth of the country during its great adventure
of the late Middle Ages. There is in Vizeu (that typical town of the
Portuguese hills) a calm and a recollection, a sober way of living,
a neatness and an evidence of active toil which we of the North do
not connect with the culture of the South. I came into Vizeu through
Mondalgue, and there were moments on the road when one might have thought
oneself in the Parisis: moments of old walls and close villages and tall
trees, thick grass, all of which made one think of Northern homes rather
than of the South.
[Illustration: VIZEU: PORTUGAL: COLONNADE OF GRAO-VASCO MUSEUM.
To face page 58.]
And, indeed, this approach to Portugal clearly explains to the traveller
how the country came to be separate in its modern history from the rest
of the Peninsula, and why an intense national feeling arose which defied
the artificial union with Spain three hundred years ago, and welcomed
the restoration of a national dynasty as strongly as any of the far more
recalcitrant nationalities of the North have welcomed their freedom.
For one drops off from the hot arid plateaux of Castille (steppes
stretching for two or three days’ journey before the eye, beneath the
distant and barren ridges of their Sierras), on to the well-watered,
fertile, tree-clad slopes of the Portuguese hills, through a distinct
belt of something very like stony desert.
The main road, the railway, each goes through more than a day’s
journey—more than thirty miles, indeed more than fifty—of huge granite
boulders and sparse cracked oak groves—such groves getting rarer and
rarer, with little or no water, rare scrubby tufts of grass, few huts, no
fields.
This belt of quasi-desert forms, as it were, the edge of the tableland,
and is carried on over the edge to the beginning of the Atlantic slope.
Then one comes, quite rapidly, on a change. Vineyards appear. The woods
cascade, one wave below the other, down the hillsides, and there is
flowing water at their feet. You see below you ridge upon ridge of dense
forest-land falling far and steeply towards the ocean, and you begin to
pass into places of wealth and security, and the well-founded habitations
of men.
It is a very striking contrast. Every borderland in Europe explains
itself and has its geographical meaning (the borderland between England
and Scotland always seems to me when I cross it to explain the different
historical directions of the two countries); but the marshes of Portugal,
as you enter them from the high plains of old Castille, the desert of
rock boulders on the edge of that two thousand foot tableland as you fall
rapidly from it into the warm and damp Atlantic belt below, are a more
visible natural frontier than you may find elsewhere, save in the great
mountain ranges.
Of that foot-hill country Vizeu, as I have said, is a natural, though
small, capital. It seems to have come into existence as a fortress on
a tiny scale. Even the modern town (of the humble size of one of our
smaller cathedral towns), stretches far beyond the quadrilateral of huge
primitive stones which was the original stronghold. It got its name
perhaps as a ‘look-out,’ for to the north it covers a wide landscape. It
got its use undoubtedly from its possibilities for defence.
Of this past, the remaining stamp here, as in most of the older towns
of Europe, is the cathedral. It is on the scale of all the rest of the
place, quite small; built, one would say, for a township of not five
hundred families, but having about it in its overlooking of the steeps to
the north and east, in the thickness of its walls, in the airy height of
its upper cloister walk, the marks of a mountain citadel.
[Illustration: VIZEU: THE CLOISTER BETWEEN CATHEDRAL AND MUSEUM.
To face page 60.]
On that building a man might spend ten days, examining its spirit. Here,
as in the great sister far away, Narbonne, the choir sings from a stage
high above the people; not a choir of special singers, but the choir of
the Chapter itself, the Canons. Here, as in certain other towns of the
South, strong wood is married with stone, and the wood impresses upon the
stone itself a certain quality. For instance, the ornaments to the roof,
though stone, are carved with the freedom of wood, and ropes (in stone)
are carried everywhere throughout the vaults, carved into knots.
The people of the place have gathered into the cloisters and the rooms
adjoining curiosities, a few treasures which the bishopric retained.
One very fine _Tu es Petrus_ of the early Flemish Renaissance and half
a dozen others—good pictures which nobody knows; a mass of earthenware
statuary and the more remarkable carved wooden statuary. Indeed, the
glory of Portugal is its mass of luxuriant wood carving, and nowhere will
you see this better, though on a small scale, than at Vizeu.
More than the town itself is the land about it, deep forest valleys and
their streams; and any one wishing to find the true life of Portugal,
apart from the coast (which does not sufficiently represent the country),
should seek it here, in the hills.
CHAPTER VIII
OPORTO
I fancy that every strange town, coming to the traveller’s eyes for the
first time, creates within him some effect for which he was not at all
prepared by any part of his reading. There is always something about it
(to him, at least, an overwhelming characteristic) which had not been
expressed in any one of the general descriptions. This is not, I suppose,
because the various places too well known in European travel do not
affect others as they affect oneself, but rather that print creates a
habit of ceaseless repetition upon one model.
Now Oporto has in my eyes, since I have seen it, such a characteristic
which I had not noticed in any description of the many I had come across;
a characteristic which struck me with violence the first time I set eyes
on it. It is this: that it lies in the depths of a chasm.
[Illustration: VIEW UP THE DOURO. A BRUNEL BRIDGE AND WELLINGTON’S FORD
BEYOND THE BEND.
To face page 62.]
The port is on a mountain river, deep down between two banks which fall
towards it so steeply as to make a gorge rather than a valley. I know of
only one other place where a port of some size has such a situation, and
that is Newcastle-upon-Tyne: but though Newcastle also gives this effect
of a gorge or trench (and the height of its bridge above the river has
thus impressed every etcher and painter of it), the effect is nothing
like so strong as it is at Oporto. One wonders, as one comes in from the
south, how such a confined waterway ever came to be used from the outer
sea, and it is only when one gets down towards the level of it that one
appreciates its width.
Oporto is only one more example of those land gates from the sea which,
having struck root under older and simpler conditions of smaller ships
and of lesser human gatherings, continue, by the necessity of their
inheritance, a rôle which they would not fulfil had they to begin their
service to-day. Oporto must have begun in the old Roman times, or even
before then, as some small cluster of little warehouses and shippers’
exchanges upon the narrow shelf of its river bank; not yet climbing up
the very steep bank behind, and dealing only with few vessels of small
draught and of light burden.
It could have had no great trade before the discovery of land in and
beyond the Atlantic. It had no highly specialised function to support
before the development of the English wine trade during the last two and
a half centuries. The modern world has compelled its partial abandonment.
The larger ships have to make land at Leixões, an artificial harbour
built out upon the Atlantic coast, north of the river mouth, and exposed
to the south-westerly winds. Yet the ancient function of the town
itself as a port has survived: just as London, made by London Bridge,
has to accommodate its main shipping far down the river, but keeps its
commercial centre on the old sites north of the Pool.
The Douro valley carries this character of a gorge or trench eastward for
some days’ journey inland: as men see who go up on foot, or in a boat
against the stream, until they come to the Spanish frontier.
Of all the great Spanish rivers, which fall from the high tablelands
on to the sea plain, this one, the Douro, is the most rapid, turbulent
and mountainous; and the soil through which it cuts, the earth which
nourishes those famous vineyards (a small and narrow patch of golden
land), is friable, sawn away by the violence of the water, as is soft
wood by steel. Hence the ravine before the mouth of which, and upon the
steep banks of which, the town stands.
Oporto has grown out to surmount two hills with something of a subsidiary
valley between. It is marked everywhere by the activity which the English
trade has given it. From this has it derived its wealth. This is its
meaning in the political geography of Europe.
Everywhere the impress of England is discoverable. The memorable ford
where Wellington crossed; the famous ‘Factory,’ which is the noble old
stone house of the English wine merchants; the great English names of the
trade—all these are marks of Oporto.
[Illustration: FOUNTAIN ON THE RAMPED PATHWAY TO THE CATHEDRAL, OPORTO.
To face page 64]
There is about this strong link between England and a distant foreign
town something exceptional which you will not find anywhere else in
Europe; yet there is no impress of English art or English thought upon
the place such as you may discover in French districts where, during the
later Middle Ages, the English crown had direct rule. There are pieces
of church architecture in Bordeaux which are distinctively English. Here
and there in Normandy you will find characteristics of fifteenth-century
England left by the passage of Henry V., and by the minority of his son.
Bayonne cathedral might be known for a relic of the old Plantagenet
connection even though we had lost all record of its building. But
Oporto, save for the factory, which is strong eighteenth-century English,
has not such architectural marks: and it is singular that this should be
so.
They told me in the course of my visit that in the old records of the
place, and in diaries and letters of Englishmen before the days of
steamships, there is perpetual reference to the ‘Bar’—and no wonder! The
Bar of the Douro is one of the most remarkable things I have seen. It is
not merely silted up with a great expanse of sand which almost forbids
entry—that is common to scores and hundreds of rivers. It is not merely
that this great bar shifts, as do such bars in such places, exposed to
great storms from the Atlantic. It is rather that immediately _within_
the fairway, just after a boat has made good its entry into quiet water,
you still find unexpected rocks menacing the way, and considerable
patches of shifting sand.
The site of the place (two thousand yards below the wharves of the town)
emphasises that truth about Oporto which the eyes grasp from the first
moment of seeing its profound valley—that it was originally a little
dangerous haven, hardly to be entered from the sea, uncertain, not to be
used on a large scale, yet turned at last by the activity of man into a
place far beyond its powers. Oporto is an excellent proof of the truth
that if physical geography moulds history on its largest lines, yet, in
all the passing developments of history, it is man that turns nature to
his use rather than nature controls man. The huge iron bridge (of English
design and construction) spanning the whole gorge at so vast a height,
the unnatural climbing up of the houses from height to height, the
exiguous stream, its violence, its difficult entry, the necessity for a
new modern port wholly of man’s provision, are all witnesses to that same
dominance of man’s will over earth.
[Illustration: THE BISHOPS’ PALACE, OPORTO.
To face page 66.]
When the Northerners began fighting their way down, pushing the
Mohammedans southwards, this little Roman place being called essentially
‘The Port’ (its name is Porto, and it is an error that we should have
called it ‘Oporto,’ _the_ Port) gave its name to all that followed. It
was the ‘Porto Calle’; it created the general name of ‘Portugal.’
_Part III_
_The Recovered Country_
CHAPTER IX
ISLAM AND CHRISTENDOM
There is a section of Western Europe, of the Western Roman Empire, which
suffered a peculiar fate. It was deeply wounded by Asia, and but slowly
recovered from the wound. The period of Asia’s dominance is already
half forgotten among the Northern peoples—it is a story of so long ago;
and it seems done with. Yet indirectly the great struggle between Islam
and Christendom is still moulding all our lives. Half the wealth and
half the classical tradition of the Mediterranean were swamped by the
enemies of our culture and of our European soul; half our civilisation
was drowned under a Mohammedan deluge. The land of St. Augustine, the
land of Meleager, the land of the Iliad, and the land of the Incarnation.
The surge overran the islands of the sea—Sicily, the Balearics, and the
rest; it roared up to the very foothills of the Pyrenees, its furthest
foam passed Poitiers, and it looked for some hundreds of years as though
the old and strong foundation which Greece and Rome had laid, and our
Christendom which is their flower and fruit, would be destroyed.
The assault was sudden, and immensely successful; the counter-attack
abominably painful, strenuous, uncertain, only most gradually making
good. The Asiatics charged in one long lifetime over all the marble of
the ancient world in North Africa, in Spain; cut off the great roads and
the secure Roman law, and the landed system, and everything else that
had made Europe Europe. But to reconquer even part of that land, to beat
Islam back to the desert again upon even one sector has taken a thousand
years.
Spain was recovered, in countless fluctuating cavalry charges, advances
and checks, sieges, and raids: the islands, in daring sea adventures;
Barbary—what to-day we call Tunis, Algiers and Morocco—only in our own
time. To-day we look on the result of these struggles much as a man looks
upon the wreckage revealed at low water upon a seashore flooded and
wrecked at high tide under a storm.
In that enormous conflict the Europe we know was born. Out of the
discipline of that conflict arose our military spirit, our loyalties, and
our ballads. This beating back of the Mohammedan was the training ground
of all our peoples Northern as well as Southern—for the recruits poured
in from every side. It was in the heat of such a furnace, in the press of
the Crusades, that we found our characteristic architecture, which has
stamped all Europe with the pointed arch, our representative system (now
in decay)—for parliaments are from the Pyrenees—our national monarchies,
and that common loyalty to Europe which is to-day half forgotten, but
which any menace immediately revives.
Any one who looks at the history of Christendom sees this armed debate
with Islam as the fundamental and determining thing. We beat off the
Pagan of the North and of the East—Mongol, Scandinavian and the rest—in
the Dark Ages. We assured ourselves on that side, and we had raised the
siege against those barbaric besiegers before the year 1000. We had
beaten them to their knees in battle; tamed them and baptised them;
brought them to heel and to school. But Islam was another matter. It was
not pagan; it was a perversion of our own creed. It was not barbaric; it
had more learning and better arts than we. It enjoyed our scholarship
through its Greek subjects, and lived by a strange, warped adaptation of
our own culture. Its fierce appeal to human equality and to justice, the
simplicity of its doctrine, had captured great masses of our own people
who continued to work for it and to support it.
The recovery of provinces lost to so powerful an enemy occupied the
energies of Christian men for thirty generations; nor is their task yet
accomplished.
In this struggle the combatants upon both sides of the Mediterranean
were for a time exhausted. The extreme north, which had taken but little
part in the tremendous affair, had the advantages of a half-neutral; it
lost less blood, and could boast on that account greater reserves of
energy, which it still enjoys. But those who had been on the fighting
line of the struggle achieved that by which we live. The men who
recovered Spain and Sicily and the Balearics, who perpetually challenged
the pirate ports of Barbary, who stood to arms, century after century,
upon the fluctuating frontier between the Mass and the Koran—these were
the men who not only permitted Europe to survive, but who gave it its
permanent character.
The belt which they recovered, which they reconquered, bears everywhere
stamped upon it the signs of this millenary battle. Thus, there has been
a destruction of trees in all that zone. Islam was the enemy of the tree.
Where the Mohammedan conquest remained there was no re-afforesting; the
wood was cut down and not replaced. A sort of bareness, which is like a
phantasm of the desert, stretches to this day over all those lands which
the great Mohammedan tide submerged; and it is now with difficulty and
most painfully, tardily, insufficiently that Europe is attempting to
re-afforest those lands which were so shaded and full of pasture in the
great classic times.
You may stand on the mountain walls of Castro Giovanni in Sicily and
look down, half a mile below, upon the fields where the King of the Dark
Places surprised Persephone. Those fields were famous for their groves
and their flowers in the old time; to-day you have nothing before you and
below you but the burned and naked earth.
The tide of alien conquest makes a sort of high-water mark all along the
Mediterranean lands; a line to be traced by the ruin of the greenery and
by the incursion everywhere up to its limits of the blasting, southern,
desert air.
But there is much more than this to mark the battlefield. Throughout that
world you may discover, in a myriad details of human effort, the three
great strata remaining.
First comes that of the old Mediterranean civilisation from which we all
descend, the Roman and Greek world. The columns of its temples, the tiers
of its amphitheatres, the great flags of its roads, the Roman-Greek town
with its forum, the Roman or Greek name degraded and transformed: all are
there.
Next above come the centuries of Islam; the Mosque and the minaret, the
bulging dome, the waisted horseshoe arch, all that Islam adapted from
the later Greek world and touched with its own spirit; the perpetual
intricacy of pattern, the vivid delicacy of colour, the worship of
seclusion and silence.
Then you get the last, superimposed, layer of Europe returning. Our
Gothic in the place of their horseshoe arch, our Roman script in the
place of their Arabic script, which is but debased Greek, our masterful
stonework in the place of their weak plaster, our permanence in the place
of their ephemeral though burning moods. You get the cathedral of Palma
in Majorca, standing out like a fortress into the sea; or the cathedral
of Seville, perhaps the noblest of human achievements, still overlooking
that Moorish court which was the entry to the Mosque the Christian church
has replaced.
Indeed, the Giralda, the Bell Tower of Seville, is the very symbol of the
combat and victory. The main shaft was of Islam. I have already written
of its counterpart which still stands over the sea in Morocco by Rabat,
called there ‘the Tower of Hassan.’ But the Giralda bears a Christian
top, and is the belfry of that cathedral which is the greatest monument
we have in Christendom, of Christendom, to-day.
From the victory of Lepanto onwards you get the recovery of the Roman
and the Greek spirit in the lines of stone impressed upon the Mohammedan
detail beneath, and at last, all our modern grandeurs and folly of
ironwork, of great ports thrusting long arms into the sea, of solid,
dull, official buildings; our machines, our roads, our commerce, out
vices and our triumphs, are now imposed upon that which once had so
nearly defeated us. Rome has taken root again from Carthage to the
Atlantic.
[Illustration: THE TOWER OF THE GIRALDA, SEVILLE.
To face page 76.]
Therein lies the profound appeal of all the recovered country and its
towns. In Palermo, in Palma, in the ruined Roman towns of Timgad,
Lamboesis, Volubilis, Leptis and a score of others; in the still
continuing towns such as Constantine; in the transformed old centres such
as Sousse, you see before your eyes in a vividly apparent pattern the
interweaving of those three great epochs of our race. You have present
to the sight that antiquity wherein the Christian church was founded;
then the new, thin, piercing spirit of the Mohammedan horseman; then the
re-entry of Europe.
It is in the buildings, the dress, the very animals, the landscape, is
that triple contrast, that triple stratification. Nowhere else in the
world, I think, does history still remain alive, so tangible, visible:
two thousand years of it.
You stand on the huge stones of a coliseum at sunrise, seeing nothing but
the mass of an enormous Roman theatre, and between you and the sky only
distant, burning, white mountains and the flats of the sea. You turn, and
at your side is the costume of Islam; you walk into the evening and find
yourself in the modern French streets of Tunis.
In succeeding chapters I will discuss this land that Islam has
dominated, picking out particular points where a man may see, side by
side, the three eras of our race; its founding, its peril, and its
triumph.
So strong still is the subtle remaining influence of Islam, that you find
it far up north, in a wall of Tarragona, in the gateway of a Saragossan
building, in a popular word of the Pyrenees. So enduring is the older
Roman foundation which we, its descendants, have restored, that you may
watch the Mohammedan peasant in his market bargaining in the Arabic
words of the old invasion, but using in his talk the terms of the French
currency and of French weights and measures of to-day; and that market is
held in the forum of a Roman town, with the pillars of the temples of the
gods overlooking the Berber as he moves. He drives his cattle to market
by great roads which modern Europe has made, he registers his purchase in
the European offices of the new governors. If he is well-to-do he drives
off home in one of those new horseless machines of ours. But at sunset,
he lifts up his hands in prayer from his fields, a ritual of Islam.
In those towns where the religion of Islam has at last died—the Spanish,
the Sicilian, the Balearic towns—yet is the spirit of Islam chiselled and
carved in everywhere, marking the whole.
[Illustration: THE TOMB OF THE ALCAZAR, SEVILLE.
To face page 78.]
In the countrysides where the Mohammedan conquest was complete, the
majestic ruins of the Roman World stand clearest. There is nothing of
classic antiquity more living than these still remaining colonnades,
triumphal arches, aqueducts, theatres; Segovia, Cherchell, El Djem. It is
more arresting to see these survivals of Rome on the African and Spanish
soil than in northern Italy or Provence, in Verona, or in Pola, or in
Nîmes; for in Africa and Spain the Roman ruins were not cherished by a
continuous culture. They survive as heroic veterans which stood the storm
and outlived it until the descendants of their builders returned.
CHAPTER X
CEFALU
On the northern shore of Sicily, well westward of its midmost point,
stands a rock and a town which may be taken for the type of the
reconquered lands. These are the rock and the town of Cefalu.
All that coast is a procession of enormous headlands, Gibraltars of
their kind thrown out against the seas, Corfano, Pellegrino and a score
of others. But among them the rock of Cefalu is pre-eminent in its
savage isolation, its defence, its bold challenge and the antiquity of
its appeal to man. On the crags of its summit—I know not how high above
the harbour, perhaps a thousand feet, perhaps twelve hundred—the first
most ancient city, far older than any record, held its secure state;
inexpugnable; looking down from its walls upon precipice every way. A few
blocks of its enormous monuments remain and a trace of its wall. A little
hook of reef, a narrow strand, provided a sufficient refuge and approach
from the sea, thence a made path and steps of stone led up the sheer to
the inhabited summit.
[Illustration: THE ROCK AND TOWN OF CEFALU.
To face page 80]
This, the first destiny of Cefalu and cause of its settlement, its place
as a fortress, was renewed time and again all down its incalculable
history, it certainly will reappear when the next phase of confusion
and decline shall fall upon civilisation. But with the Roman peace
the high town was abandoned and the city stretched along the belt of
shore, the sloping foot of the huge crag. The town left the summit and
gathered round its little harbour, strung upon either side of the coast
track which leads from the Straits of Messina to the last eastern cape
of the island by Trapani. There has it since remained, clinging to the
sea-fringe of its towering cube of stone, forgetting its first cyclopean
foundation above.
All the ebb and flow of the East and the West have passed over it. Greece
gave it its headland name. Carthage ruled it: Rome wrested it away. In
the height of the Dark Ages—perhaps before the death of Charlemagne—Islam
had planted a garrison here and made it an outpost in that sweeping
of the Mediterranean whereby the Mohammedan and his Asia so nearly
overwhelmed us. The Saracen chieftains, quarrelling among themselves, let
in the Norman adventurers, the men from the Cotentin, who had set out
to seize these lands a lifetime before the Crusades. It was with them
that the recovery of Cefalu by the Christian West began, and from them
that Cefalu received the great building and the shrine which is its mark
to-day and has dignified it during nearly eight hundred years For it was
here that Roger of Sicily, the Norman King, driving landward in a storm,
ordered to be set up in his name the church which he had vowed to build
in whatever place should harbour him, if he should save his life and
come to land. He devoted revenue largely to his vow, and thus it is that
there stands in Sicily to-day a cathedral of the North, one of the very
earliest to depend upon the pointed arch, large, of one kind: with superb
mosaic looking not a lifetime old, but set into its cement before Richard
of England sailed by with his square crimson sails to conquer Cyprus and
to fail before Jerusalem.
That mosaic is as vivid a witness to history as you could find in all the
South, or in any part of the recovered lands. Here is an art that was the
glory of the later Empire before the generals revolted and began those
disorders of the last Roman armies in which Rome was sacked, Britain
lost, Africa cut off for a time and Gaul left derelict under a local
commander of auxiliaries. The mosaic, with its eternal quality, remained,
the characteristic of those church walls on which the Christian Emperor
impressed permanent record. It is the art of Justinian as of Theodosius.
It is the sign manual of that restoration of our culture which the genius
of Belisarius effected in the West and which Islam came so near to
destroying.
[Illustration: CEFALU: EAST END OF THE CATHEDRAL.
To face page 82.]
Islam swept over Sicily. Its chaos ruled. It began the massacre of the
forests, the desiccation of the soil. The towns decayed, and their
crafts. The Norman order and Christendom brought back a spirit not of
that climate, but of the North. Yet here, in the most typically Norman
of all Sicilian things, the not-Norman, the Byzantine mosaic returns,
appearing again above the retreat of the Saracenic flood and set in the
frame of that Ogive which means for us rather Chartres, Canterbury and
Notre Dame than anything of Byzantium or of Ravenna.
All the apse is filled with it: sombre purples, a few deep reds, and
innumerable squares in a sheet of glittering gold. The great subject is
Christ in Judgment, the Heroic Face that dominates all the nave from
above. He holds in His right hand the Open Book of record, His left is
raised for acquittal or sentence. Below this head, with its not mortal
proportions, are fixed upon the square space, above the altar, the lesser
figures of the twelve apostles; and the whole, I say, seems to be of
yesterday, or of our fathers’ time at the most, so living is the surface.
Yet it has looked down upon Christian men for more than seven centuries.
May the evils of a coming time spare it!
Around that Head and Face, upon either side, following the border of
the pointed arch of the roof (the true equilateral of the first Gothic)
runs in legible, large, square script, lighter against a darker ground,
the noblest motto yet found for the Judge and Redeemer and Brother
of mankind. It was the sight of this motto which inspired Sargent to
what is, undoubtedly, the highest, by far the highest, monument of his
genius—the work in the public library of Boston, showing the fall of the
old gods and centred upon such a treatment of the Crucifixion as one
would have thought no modern man had it in him to create. But Sargent
created it, thus inspired from Cefalu. The motto runs thus:
‘_Factus homo factor hominis factique redemptor_
_Judico corporeus corpora corda Deus._’
An hexameter and a pentameter, with the characteristic internal rhyme of
the second. And it means ‘I, having been made Man, and being the Maker of
Man, and the Redeemer of what I made, judge in bodily form the bodies and
the hearts of man: for I am God.’
But Sargent in his masterpiece changed one word for the sake of his
subject—this being not the Christ in Judgment, but the Christ crucified.
He changed ‘Judico’ to ‘Redimo’—writing ‘I redeem’ for ‘I judge.’ A
transposition was necessary, also, for the sake of the metre, so that the
motto to Sargent’s Christ on the Cross at Boston reads:
‘_Factus homo factor hominis factique redemptor_
_Corporeus redimo corpora corda Deus._’
I think his genius to discover, and to be inspired by, such lines was as
great as that which produced his painting.
[Illustration: CEFALU: THE MOSAIC OF THE APSE.
To face page 84]
Such, then, is Cefalu, crammed with the ages. It may be asked whether
nothing is left here to mark their passage except this effect of the
Norman married with the Imperial mosaic of Constantinople: nothing
Saracenic or Greek and Roman?
I saw nothing—save fragments, on a shoulder of the hill, of a castle
built there in the Middle Ages and on the bare summit against the sky a
few huge boulders of the town before history.
There was not here in Cefalu that desire to fill every bare space with
detail, nor that occasional hint at a pinched curve which reveals an
Arabian spirit in Palermo, nor any of that perspective of crowded arches
round a small, cool court which, in the Benedictine cloister of that
town, reminds one oddly of the African palaces oversea. There was no
delight in that excessive involution of line, that chipping of surface
into fret and cusp which workmen once occupied on Saracenic walls and
domes with difficulty forgot when they dealt later with the Christian
shrines. In the outer lines of the cathedral, in the body of the building
there is only the Northern spirit, with squat towers that might have
come from Lisieux or Coutances; and within, there is that tradition
of tessellated wall-picturing, a Christ that might have come from the
Bosphorous.
It was very strange to observe, against the dark of the choir, a transept
capital which, at a distance, seemed Corinthian, but which, close at
hand, was a cluster of grotesques: monsters and monkeys. It was strange,
under the eyes of such a Face as that which looked down upon us from the
eastern roof, to see a baptismal font supported by the fierce leopards of
the Dark Ages, the mythology of Anjou and Maine, the things men imagined
during the long wars against the heathens of the North Sea, before Europe
awoke to the noise and splendour of the Crusades.
Such is Cefalu: the weight of its nave and apse is prodigious above the
town and against the Mediterranean. It had, before it left fame and drew
apart from the story of Europe, one great memory more. It was here, I am
told, that they brought the body of Frederic II., the _Stupor Mundi_, to
lie in a place he would have chosen: the man who so nearly made himself
an Anti-Christian master of his world: the last of the Emperors to hold,
or attempt to hold, the South.
Later they took him on to Palermo, and he lies there now in his porphyry
tomb. But Cefalu was nearer to his spirit.
CHAPTER XI
PALMA OF MAJORCA
The reconquered towns are of two kinds.
There are those in which the Mohammedan swept over the Roman fabric,
submerged it, and either destroyed it or transformed it into an Arabian
thing; using, indeed, the stones of Rome and preserving a barbaric memory
of Roman forms, but wholly changing the spirit of Roman building and
leaving its constructions steeped in the Oriental air; degraded, also,
and much lessened; with plaster, chipped, taking the place of carven
marble; hovels, the place of houses; a few Eastern and secret palaces,
the place of great public buildings; innumerable coloured detail, the
place of simplicity and grandeur. Of this sort are Sousse, and all the
ancient towns yet surviving between Tunis and the Atlantic.
The other half of them are the ruined skeletons of Roman things like
Timgad or Volubilis.
[Illustration: THE PORT AND CATHEDRAL: PALMA.
To face page 87.]
These, the African cities, a modern conquest has violently affected.
Some it has turned into French cities like Algiers; some, like Tunis, it
has half changed; but everywhere the influence of Islam has strongly
survived. The second sort is made up of those forms of which the recovery
came quite early, during the Dark, or very early Middle Ages, before the
Saracen had had time to take root fully, and while the conflict between
the great Arabian heresy and Western Christendom was still a war of life
and death—as it may be again. Of this kind is Cefalu, in Sicily, of which
I have just written, and of this kind are Leon and Huesca and Burgos and
in general the towns of northern Spain; if we exclude Saragossa, which
stood out much longer than the rest, through the skilful alliances and
concessions of its Emirs. In these towns Christendom came back with
violence; all, or nearly all, the relics of the Eastern alien were wiped
out, and everything was remade in Western fashion.
Palma of Majorca is a bridge between these two kinds. It was recovered
long after the tide had turned, and in a generation long familiar with
Eastern things. Toledo had been firmly held for two long lifetimes.
The whole epic of the three first Crusades had been worked out, and
Jerusalem taken and lost again, after a hundred years. The crisis of
the Albigensian peril—in which the northern French expelled an Asiatic
horror from the south—had passed; the decisive battle of Navas de Tolosa
had already given back the great bulk of the Peninsula to our culture;
the decisive battle of Muret had already saved our religion. The high
medieval civilisation (of which that thirteenth century was the flower)
was in its full vigour—when the fleet sailed out from Catalonia in 1229
for the reconquest of the Balearic Islands.
[Illustration: PALMA OF MAJORCA: TOWER SHOWING ISLAMIC INFLUENCE.
To face page 88.]
A very young man, James of Aragon, a King in his twentieth year, led
them; a crowd of vessels, with 20,000 armed men aboard, 4000 of them
knights. On the last day of the year, Palma was stormed, and within
twelve months the last Moorish remnant in the mountains had surrendered.
The restoration of an European city in the place of a Mohammedan pirate
port began at once. The emir’s great house became the king’s palace: on
its garden terrace, boldly above and against the shore which looks to
Africa, was immediately founded that astonishing cathedral of which, as
one comes in from the south overseas, one can not say at first whether it
is a church or a fortress; which is, and was built for, a challenge. On
the western hill which dominates the harbour, the city and the bay, the
castle of Bellver rose—feudal: a cousin to all the others of France and
Spain and the Holy Land: to Château Gaillard as to Kerak, or Conway. In
the streets of the town the mosques disappeared, stone Christian houses
replaced the packed, whitewashed hives of Barbary, and open markets the
strange dark tunnels of Eastern merchandise.
Yet something of that long Islamic past remained. You will not find that
past in a skyline or in a horseshoe arch, nor even in details—save in
one place, the little Moorish baths which still stand, half ruinous in
a lovely garden. But an effect of Barbary is on the place. The tower of
St. Cean is modern enough—of the last few centuries, I suppose; yet at no
great distance you might take it for a minaret. The main houses have the
great inner courtyard which the Mohammedans had themselves inherited from
Rome, and they turn their life inwards after the Eastern fashion, not
outwards to the street.
These open inner courts of the houses of Palma are a special mark of the
town: they have a character of their own, quite distinct, which does
not recall Cordova or Seville, though there, also, this influence of
North Africa is present. The line which stamps them is that of the very
broad and flattened arch supported on short pillars, simple in capital
and base. Everywhere you find that same form, and nowhere is it more
striking than when it is combined, in the greatest of the old merchant
palaces, with broad, noble staircases behind, half open to the court and
covered by great roofs of dark wood, carved over all their surface and
supported upon figured beams. Their number is as remarkable as is their
individuality. I know not how many there may be, but scores, certainly,
and perhaps, small and great, more than a hundred of these _patios_, all
in the same spirit of grandeur and fulness, all recalling the merchant
wealth of so central a point in the western Mediterranean, and all
indefinably touched with something of the eastern past, far less than
Africa, but more than Sicily.
Only the cathedral shows nothing of this slight, permanent Moorish
tradition, though it stands side by side with the Islamic Palace, the
old court of the Emirate. It is wholly of Europe; even more northern
than its peers in the other great Sees of Spain. For though it is cubic
and of great breadth for its height—which is the Iberian tradition in
shrines—yet it is not a cavern of darkness like Barcelona or Tarragona,
and it even lacks that enclosed choir, blocking the centre of the nave,
which, in continental Spain, is universal; the high altar is in full view
of every part, and what is chanted there is heard resonant, but without
echo, everywhere.
The fortress-character of the cathedral, of which I have spoken, is most
evident from the sea. It is on the seaward, southern side of the large
building that enormous stone buttresses arise, so plain, so wide, so
square-hewn that they suggest a high castle wall of prodigious thickness
rather than a temple. They were intended to give that effect. They were
set up as a symbol against the corsairs from the coast beyond, only a
day’s fair sail away, who continued right into our own time—till the
twenties of the nineteenth century—to harry those seas; coming chiefly
from Algiers. In connection with which cutthroats, how many people know
that as late as Charles II.’s reign the Algerine sea-robbers ran up north
as far as the mouth of the channel, showed the lateen sails and the long
banks of rowers in the Irish seas, and gave the call to prayer over Cork
harbour?
A modern restoration, ill-conceived and modelled on Burgos, has spoiled
the west end of this great church; but the rest is triumphant. It is
the building in which can best be seized the struggle for the recapture
of the Mediterranean. Looking at its northern wall from the sea (as
the Algerian pirates saw it when they hovered round the coasts their
people had lost) one might wonder what light, or if any light, reached
to the nave within. It looks like one mass of unbroken stone, flanked
with square towers in which no solution is apparent. It is all strength.
There is only one other thing to compare with it, and that is the solid
fragment of Narbonne which reproduces the same effect of sheer (and
blank) mass, resisting attack and immovable under it.
The Moorish bath, in its tiny scale, its darkness, its imperfection and
weakness of execution, its use of old Roman material, its isolation—all
it has—is characteristic of the thing which the young Conqueror who
re-established us in the Balearics set out to destroy.
The tiny arches are supported upon shafts which the Roman order had
left behind it, but these columns had been picked up in the ruins, for
they are set up at random, without choice—one of them upside down! Upon
the summit of each the Oriental has attempted some faint memory of the
Corinthian capital. He has rudely carved half-a-score of rough knobs,
which barely hint at the old acanthus-leaves, and he had some memory of
the central moulding in the abacus—but he only hinted at it. The arch
of small brick above—Roman also in tradition—he pinched at the base
into that re-entering curve which is, in our eyes, the special mark of
Mohammedan building, but which will, I think, like the dome and the
minaret, be found to derive from Byzantium. For Islam creates nothing.
And now, what will another lifetime do to Palma? It is not a century
since George Sand brought Chopin here to Majorca, and killed him by the
experiment. The island was unknown; it was a daring journey. Steam and
still more the modern chaos in things of the mind began, twenty years
later, to destroy what they could of proportion, personality and beauty
here as everywhere. I have heard for these thirty years past that the
special soul of Palma can not survive, that it is with every day more
visited and becoming from a thing, a name. I expected when I revisited
it to find it half ruined. It was not so. Twenty-one years and more had
passed since I had last sailed into that bay from the Barbary coast, and
seen the square rock of the cathedral under the dusk of a winter dawn. In
that long space of time Palma has lost less than any other of the towns I
know.
I think it will endure. It has the Catalonian tenacity and vigour in its
blood, and it should resist decay. It is to be hoped that it will, and
it is even to be prayed for; there are not many cities left in which
tradition is alive and beauty preserved without effort, without archaism,
without affectation; but as part of a continued life.
CHAPTER XII
SOUSSE, WHICH IS HADRUMETUM
A hundred miles or so south of Carthage Bay, on the now bare and scorched
shore which faces the Levanter, stands Sousse.
If Cefalu is the type of an antique town, prehistoric, then Punic,
then Greek, then under Roman rule, then swamped by Islam, but so early
recovered by our race that the whole trace of the Orient has been wiped
out of it, Sousse is the best type of the other extreme: prehistoric,
then Punic, then Græco-Roman—but so changed by Islam that it has lost its
ancient body and soul, and is wholly turned Mohammedan to the eye and
mind. Palma of Majorca, as I have said, is the link between the two types
of the recovered towns.
Sousse has lost everything, down to its very name; yet it was a port;
Punic in origin, and Tyrian, therefore, for centuries—perhaps for nearly
a thousand years. It was next Græco-Roman, and after the brief Vandal
misrule continued to be Græco-Roman until the Arab cavalcade overwhelmed
it more than twelve centuries ago. But once that shock had been delivered
its transformation and degradation began, and, so far as it is possible
to destroy the strong things of Pagan and Christian antiquity, here they
were destroyed.
The Crusades failed to affect the town; Europe never recovered its
foothold until our own time, quite lately; and when Europe came back
two-thirds of the town area and the great old port of the ancients, the
chief haven of all that coast after Carthage, had disappeared. Nothing
remained but a miserable square of Saracenic tunnel markets, low, rough,
whitewashed domes, and little cubes of huts or houses, with here and
there the rough, lime-splashed tower of a minaret, and round it all
the patched, degraded walls of what had once been a Roman City. The
surrounding country lost its impress of Rome. The marble was looted and
broken, the columns fell. In the place of temple and statue and arch you
have the Eastern village suburb in its groves.
For Sousse was _Hadrumetum_, and in its harbour and outside its triple
line of defence was played the first act of a great drama among the
stories of the world; the final triumph of Cæsar. No one to-day could
guess that ever Sousse had had such dignity of name and function; so
thoroughly does Islam ruin what it has occupied.
[Illustration: THE WALLS OF SOUSSE.
To face page 96]
But Hadrumetum had played a great part long before Cæsar. Hannibal, at
the end of the second Punic War, fighting that last despairing fight upon
the soil of his own country, made it his base. In the third Punic War it
deserted Carthage, and was rewarded by its new Roman masters with a local
freedom. They loaded it with wealth and made it greater than ever it had
been before, building three great ports with a breakwater of half-a-mile
to shelter them, crowding it with Grecian art and noble, ponderous stone.
It became (after Utica, and while Carthage was still in ruins) the second
town of Africa. And now it is what you may see, a whitewashed collection
of small, barbarous things, shrunk to a third of its old size, or less,
and having for a memory of its past nothing but a few stones here and
there; hardly any of them in the city.
All about it, ten miles one way, twenty another, forty another, a hundred
another, stand the monumental ruins which still bear witness to the
ravaging evil of the Mohammedan tide. But in Sousse nothing. Even those
great works of the harbour disappeared, and the French, when they brought
Europe back forty years ago to begin the recovery, had to build up a new
port from first to last.
I have said that it was here that was played out the first scene in that
great drama, the final triumph of Cæsar.
After Pharsalia, the republican leaders had taken refuge in Africa. They
had twenty legions. Cæsar from Sicily proposed to take the initiative
and to attack. He had with him but one legion, which grew to no more
than five: six hundred Gallic horsemen, who increased to no more than
two thousand. His opponents had behind them, in alliance with them and
almost in command over them, all the forces of the native kingdom which
lay inland behind the coast towns. Even this small force of his Cæsar
failed to concentrate, and the story of what followed is very good proof
that fortune has more to do with the greatness of soldiers even than
character. It was on the twenty-seventh of December, in the year 707 of
the city, that Cæsar left Sicilian land; a storm dispersed his convoys,
and when he saw Cape Bon on the morning of the third day he had with him
not more than two thousand men and a squadron of his French cavalry.
Nevertheless, in the same temper which had made him march north in Gaul,
eight years before, after suffering defeat in Auvergne—the temper of
audacity which had always hitherto befriended him—he determined to land
that small force and risk all upon the throw, trusting to some favour
of heaven (which he mocked) for the return and concentration of his
remaining ships.
He went on all that day, until, in mid-afternoon, he stood opposite the
triple harbour of Hadrumetum, and could see from his decks the large town
reaching gently upward inland more than a mile every way, and its suburb,
almost as great as itself, lying off along the shore to the south;
beyond the centuries-old wall the new Roman additions and the great
ditch which bounded all. Within were two legions under Considius. It must
have been the superiority of his human material which permitted Cæsar’s
landing in the face of such a threat, and although to his few score of
French horsemen there were opposed within the walls of the city, large
bodies of the irregular native cavalry.
He spent the morrow, the last day of the year, in recognising every
part of the defence. He saw that assault was out of the question with
his small numbers, and on the first of January he marched off south
to Monastir, fighting (as he broke contact with the enemy garrison of
Hadrumetum) small rear-guard actions, in which the Northern riders had
overwhelmingly the better of opponents more than ten times as numerous.
This safe escape of Cæsar, this bold landing in the face of odds, and
unwounded retirement, was the inception of the campaign which ended in
Thapsus.
You would never guess it to-day. To see Sousse as it stands now you would
think it had never known the great hour or the nobility of our blood.
Two long days’ march to the south there still stands that huge relic and
proof of what the ancient civilisation was, the ruined amphitheatre,
which the Mohammedans called, and call, El Djem: like a ruined coliseum
in the midst of the sand. In the hill country to the north still stand
the noble temple of Sbitla, the columns of Djebba and fifty other
remaining proofs of what we lost by that catastrophe of Asiatic invasion.
But in Sousse all I could find of the past were the huge Punic stones
at the base of the wall, a fragment of a figure, a fragment or two of a
column and one small building from the depths of the Dark Ages, an old
fossil of the ninth century, in which one can still see how dependent the
invader was for stone and for all permanent work upon the Roman order
which he had destroyed.
For in that little building the pillars supporting Moorish arches are
the last pillars of Grecian art, and the very lintel of the door is made
of a fragment of column set flat. Just as in those Arab baths of Palma,
the new men could not build even their little dwarf things without the
material of the world which they ruined.
Nevertheless, Sousse-Hadrumetum did remain; the town was not allowed
to die—and why that was I have often wondered. Perhaps the presence of
some great treasure, well kept in some strong building of the Acropolis
which became the Kasbah and is to-day the seat of the French garrison,
pinned the Arabs to the place; or perhaps that noble harbour, which
their negligence and incapacity allowed to decay into nothingness,
still maintained a trade which Carthage had lost. But, at any rate,
these enemies of the Roman name who so thoroughly depopulated Carthage
continued to inhabit Sousse, and it has thus held a life uninterrupted
for three thousand years; three great and almost equal periods: Punic
(with Greek models and influences), Roman, Islamic.
[Illustration: SOUSSE: THE ROUGH TOWER OF THE MINARET.
To face page 100.]
If it were possible to call up the past visibly and to see the
successive fates of landscape under those successive waves of religion
(which are the determinants of all changes in culture) the roadstead
of Sousse assuredly would be the best standpoint to take up in all the
Mediterranean area.
First you would see, before the beginning of recorded history, some
little group of native Berber huts grouped round a small rocky elbow
of the beach which gave a tiny refuge from the Levanter. Next a fleet
of merchant vessels from the east coming to trade and settle, and a
Phœnician city rising before you, girdled by a wall of great rough stone,
its citadel crowned by the temple of some vile Tyrian god, its colour
that vivid yellow with which the Semitic culture of all this coast marked
its erections. You would see the first little natural refuge expanding
into the old and mighty port of Hadrumetum, and from the groves all about
it, the very fertile fields, the grey sweeps of olive and the mile-wide
stretches of corn, wealth pouring on to those quays for export to other
lands; wealth springing up everywhere from that famous plain to the very
roots of the mountains rising miles away inland: a land still watered and
with many trees.
Then you would see a slow transformation in colour and in form as the
centuries drew on toward the moment of the Incarnation and of the chief
revolution in human affairs: the yellow turning to marble-white; statues,
by the quays, of a newer and more perfect kind; the Corinthian column
everywhere and the flat triangle of the Grecian temple front. It was from
such a city that the last reserves of Hannibal poured out, and it was
such a city that increased for four hundred years and more, under the
universality of the Empire.
With the misrule of the Vandal Federates you might have marked some
touch of ruin—but not much: a burned building here and there unrestored;
a column fallen and not raised again. But still that same wealth all
around; trees and the human climate which trees bring and dense growth
for human sustenance in corn and olive all over the plain to the rocky
hills on the horizon.
That was what Belisarius found and took when Justinian restored the
Empire in Africa and gave his own name to the city; that was still what
the first Arab horsemen saw who came swarming in like locusts from their
over-running of Cyrene and their mastery of Egypt—many squadrons, clad
in large white cloaks and sitting the small, nervous, desert horses.
They conquered, and the evil transformation began. Century after
century you would have seen the trees grow less and less, the plain
lying baked and naked, more and more burned under the sun, the harbour
works crumbling, all the high and noble buildings of the town falling
to a baser level, and its area shrinking at the same time, and all the
monuments of the days of its greatness ruined and at last forgotten.
[Illustration: KALAA SERHIRA, JUST NORTH OF SOUSSE: A ROMAN SUBURBAN
TOWN, TRANSFORMED AND TURNED MOHAMMEDAN.
To face page 102]
Now Europe has come back, but with what chance of permanence here? And
what new town, if any, will Europe build, worthy of the old and proud
widespread Roman city which has disappeared?
CHAPTER XIII
GUELMA
If one were looking for the most typical example of what European
civilisation has done upon its return to Africa, one would choose Guelma.
I do not mean by the words ‘typical example’ the most remarkable, still
less the most admirable, whether in government or in architecture and
other externals. I mean: the place where the new effort shows all its
various qualities, good and bad, at their average. There in the little
town among the mountains you have the strong memories of the Roman time,
the mixture in almost equal proportions of the European and the native,
the astonishing agricultural development with which French energy has
renewed the fertile land of North Africa, the visible relics of the
conquest, and all this set in one of the finest and most characteristic
landscapes of Barbary. For Guelma stands upon a rise of land central to a
great cup in the mountains, a sort of half-way house between the sea and
the ancient capital, Constantine.
[Illustration: GUELMA.
To face page 104.]
As you approach the little place, you have the full illusion of Europe;
especially if you come upon it in the spring. The beginning of the desert
is not three long days’ walk away, not half a day in a motor: at least,
what I should call the beginning of the desert, which is the foot of
Aurès and the famous cleft in the hills which is called in Arabic ‘the
Mouth of the Sahara.’ Yet here, all around Guelma, are nothing but rich
crops, green mountain sides, running water, and even, what is rare in
Africa, large groups of timber.
What aids the illusion is the great French road running between rows
of trees on either side, now mature; a road which might be in the
Bourbonnais; which might have been transported bodily across the
Mediterranean! And as one walks along it up the hill, one cannot but
expect at the end of it an old French town.
It is when one comes near enough to distinguish detail that the African
character is first apparent, for the walls still stand which were built
when the whole country was full of fighting, and when the occupation
had just begun. And these walls are everywhere loop-holed for defence
against attack. In the same view you see, standing up among the group of
small provincial houses, essentially French in character, standing up in
the neighbourhood of a very French parish church and a typically French
market-place (with the unfailing foliage of the _Mail_), the minaret
of a mosque and the huge semicircle of the Roman theatre; a pendant to
which, upon the other side of the town, is the large ruins of the baths.
It stands after two thousand years in the midst of the barracks where the
garrison is quartered.
There has been a deliberate effort to restore the memory of Rome, and
to impress its greatness upon the men who came in upon its decline, and
pillaged its ruins. The portrait statues set up by antiquity, found
buried or cast aside, have been raised again upon their pedestals in the
public street, and, quite lately, the theatre has been made to look once
more as much as possible what it was when Cyprian was the head of the
struggling African church, or earlier when the Antonines still ruled the
world.
I am not sure whether the French have done well or ill in this
restoration. Politically their object was just, and has, perhaps, been
obtained; but to the eye, a thing half of which is modern, and which is
yet exactly modelled upon the antique, has something strange about it.
Perhaps it is only the effect of the onlooker’s age.
[Illustration: GUELMA: ROMAN THEATRE.
To face page 106.]
When I first saw this mighty thing I was a young man in my thirty-fourth
year. It stood then, a huge hollow of very large worn stones, rising
in tiers of seats one above the other, with grass growing between, and
shrubs, and, perhaps, the half of it in ruins. Where the stage had been
was then nothing but a level sward; the ground fell abruptly away
beyond, and the great cup looked solemnly out towards the mountains north
and west. I drew a picture of it in pencil to illustrate the book _Esto
Perpetua_ which I wrote to describe Africa.
Now, visiting the place after twenty years, I cannot wholly approve the
change. Every old stone that could still serve was kept, but all that had
fallen into ruin was replaced. An exact scholarship looked after every
detail, and has even been at the pains of setting round the half-circle
of high exterior wall those sockets in which were placed, so many
centuries ago, the masts to support the awning that shaded the audience
from the African sun. Indeed, the great theatre of Guelma is actually in
use again, and on its new stone stage has been acted the drama of the
Ancients and of the Moderns. ‘Great’ I have called it. Yet, somehow, it
seems smaller with its modern reparations and close copying of the past.
It seemed more vast and more noble in its abandonment, as it had remained
for so many centuries, and as I first saw it all those years ago.
Guelma is typical not only in its unison of the modern French, the
Mohammedan and the Antique, nor only in its chief character of an African
market town, serving the new agricultural wealth of the province; it is
typical also of that domesticity and lack of magnificence which, so far,
has marked the return of Europe to this land. Algiers and Oran are great
French cities, and Tunis and the lesser places bear the same stamp. But
the ancients raised monuments everywhere, even in the smaller towns, of
a character and endurance, of a nobility to the eye, and of a permanence
in intention, which our modern civilisation fails to reach. There has
been, perhaps, but one modern moment comparable to the many centuries of
the pagan civilisation in the magnificence of its building, and that was
the time of Louis XIV. The spirit did not last; it fell from grandeur to
prettiness, and after that, save for the brief classical interlude of the
end of the First Republic and of the Empire, nothing worthy has appeared.
And Guelma shows all this. There is nothing further that Europe has done,
even on a small scale, to compare with the baths in their ruin, or the
theatre—let alone with what the whole place must have been when those
buildings were alive. The Guelma of antiquity was no larger than the
Guelma of to-day. It served the same social purpose, a market town for
the farmers in the highlands and of the rich seaward valleys of the Tell.
But even in a place upon so small a scale Rome and Greece were able to
impose the stamp of nobility. We to-day neither desire to impose such a
mark nor are we able to do so.
But with this lack of magnificence goes that pleasant stability of
small fortune that you find even better rooted here in Africa than in
the mother country, and it applies not only to the colonists, but to
the native people. The new civilisation has not only created a new
agriculture for its own people, it has multiplied—I know not by how much,
but very largely—the wealth of the original Mohammedan farmers. Yet even
to-day it is curious to note how the native African race clings to its
traditional culture of the soil; with what suspicion or indifference it
looks upon agricultural machinery; and what a contrast it continues to
make with the increasing area of European tilling.
Yet change is taking place. The occasion of my last passing through
Guelma was a sort of little local exhibition or fair of agricultural
machinery. And of the many buyers a large minority was native. It was
strange to note the big American advertisements attracting a crowd of
turbaned men mixed with European farmers, and to see pictures of a reaper
and binder on the lands of the Middle West stuck up here in the African
hills for an advertisement in that half-Eastern, half-European scene.
Africa is full of such things—I mean full of such odd contrasts and
mixtures, and I, for my part, find therein the chief pleasure of African
travel. But nowhere did I see contrasts more numerous and balanced than
in Guelma that day of the fair. American industry, Islam, the eternal
Gallic peasant—and the majesty of Rome, a visible ghost, a background for
it all.
CHAPTER XIV
CONSTANTINE
Constantine is, perhaps, the most deeply stamped city of the West. It is
certainly the one which, in site and relief, stands out most strongly of
all those that I have seen between the Russian plains and the Atlantic.
Many towns have one great hill or rock to mark them, for most towns
have risen round the nucleus of a stronghold; and an isolated rock, if
only it has water, is the best choice for early defence. Many towns are
peninsular in shape; built on a loop of river and only to be approached
by a narrow neck of land. Such are Angoulême, Luxemburg, Poitiers; and
many of these peninsular towns have something of a cliff or steep bank
defending them for some part of their circuit.
But Constantine is like nothing else on earth that ever I saw. And from
the first moment that I saw it, it has stood vividly fixed in my mind,
as, I suppose, it will stand in the mind of any man who comes upon it
from any side.
[Illustration: CONSTANTINE: MOUTH OF THE RUMMEL GORGE.
To face page 111.]
For the note of Constantine is this: that it is a considerable city,
standing quite alone, upon a platform wholly isolated save for the
narrowest isthmus-neck of approach. On every side beyond that very narrow
neck of approach there fall away from its walls not steep or common
cliffs, but tremendous precipices. It is, as it were, one rock as big
as a mountain; but a mountain sufficiently levelled upon its upper side
against the sky to give foundation for a large town. Fifty or sixty
thousand human beings may have lived crowded upon that strange table.
Upon the one side the prodigious overhanging rocks look down on a broad
valley, I know not how many hundred feet below; upon the other, they
plunge into, and equally overhang, a gorge so deep that when you look
down into it you think you have seen the river bed at the bottom, when
really you have only caught sight of a ledge and a track running half-way
between the height and the stream. That stream is the tumbling, yellow
torrent which has been called since the Mohammedan conquest ‘El Rhummel,’
that is, ‘The Tawny’; and I think it will give some conception of the
gorge and of its depth when I say that the noise of its waters, even in
spate, are hardly heard in the night by a man upon the city walls so high
above them.
Segovia is of this character—a town on a rock, and so is Castro Giovanni.
But neither of them can compare for magnitude of impression with
Constantine.
[Illustration: THE FONDUK OR STABLE, WITH MOSQUE BEYOND THE GORGE.
To face page 112.]
The neck, or isthmus, by which the plateau of Constantine is reached,
is much narrower than in the parallel instances of the other, similar
towns. The rocks which bound Constantine’s almost isolated plateau are
everywhere mote precipitous and the plunge to the water-level more
profound; and the approach also rises steeply, and the keep of the
stronghold, the Kasbah, the Castle, is on the frontier point of it. The
prow of that ship rises in a high forecastle, the poop is low.
Enemies storming Constantine have not only had for so many centuries to
approach by a very narrow pass; but having once mastered that unique neck
of land, they had the task imposed upon them of still fighting uphill
all the way, till they came to the last fortification—the heart of the
place—at the very extreme of the lifting plateau.
Nevertheless, Constantine (like nearly all these seemingly impregnable
places) has been stormed time after time. Indeed, the cities that
have boasted many centuries of immunity, or even complete immunity,
from conquest, have never been cities apparently inexpugnable. Cities
which seem made for eternal defence, these, by the very fact of their
challenge, lure armies on: and Constantine, which still looks to the eye
all but impregnable, has fallen with every new conquest of Barbary; the
last not a century ago; the next to be we know not when.
The city was originally called Cirta—a word which some men think means
‘the Rock’ in a Punic dialect. And Cirta it remained up to the conversion
of the West from paganism 1600 years ago, and in popular speech long
after that. But the official name was changed by the great Constantine
when he had conquered the world with his French and English forces
against the Southern and Levantine troops of his pagan rivals; and the
new name had so far taken root when the Mohammedan desert men came
swarming over all this land that they kept it in a corrupted form, and
that its inhabitants call it ‘Ksantina’ to this day. Nevertheless, I
know not why, it is always as Cirta that it returns to my mind; perhaps
because one sees the word so often in modern works upon ancient North
Africa; perhaps because that which most profoundly moved me when I first
saw the place, the old tombs, have that name upon them—coming as they do
long before the final revolution which established the Catholic faith
upon the ruins of the Roman world. Of those old inscriptions above the
dead, one still haunts me. I put it into my writing upon North Africa
many years ago. It is upon the tomb of a woodland priestess who died
young, and for whom her friends thus wrote upon the stone: ‘The Dryads
wept.’
[Illustration: CONSTANTINE: THE NATIVE QUARTER.
To face page 114.]
It will never be Cirta again officially, for the Punic language is dead.
And even the Berber language, from which, perhaps, the name derived,
still older than the Syrian merchants of Carthage, only carries on a
painful life, and will not here oust again (one may surely say) the
Semitic or the Latin speech. But it was to Cirta that the Kings of the
Berbers returned from before the beginning of history to triumph after
victory, or to stand a siege after defeat. It was in Cirta that the great
tragedy of Jugurtha was accomplished. It was back to Cirta that the
host of native cavalry retired, when Cæsar threatened to achieve, and
achieved, his final victory, near the Tunisian shore.
If there is one place in which I could regret the recovery to Roman
land and the return of Europe to North Africa (which is justly but a
province to Europe) that place is Cirta: Constantine. For it seems to
have a sort of savage right to independence, and its tremendous cliffs
challenge order and the domination of universal government. It is a great
chieftain’s town.
The birds of the air are not yet accustomed to think that Constantine
is a human capital, though it has been so now for longer than any man
can remember. The vultures love to poise in mid-heaven above the abysses
around the city, flying on a level with its highest roofs; and I have
known days when, the mist covering the lower ground of the broad valleys
to the left and of the gorge to the right, all Constantine seemed like a
thing of the air; a city setting out to navigate between earth and sky.
The French have done with such a site what might be predicted of their
energy, their bureaucracy, their order; also their itch for change. Upon
that narrow neck of approach which the Roman, the Arab, the Turk, the
Vandal, the Byzantine generals had forced in turn, they have put up their
monument to the great Lamoricière—but I very much prefer his noble tomb
in Nantes, although it be but a translation from the Italian. Upon the
pedestal of this statue they have the words of the trooper who shouted
to his general through the dusk after the first repulse, on the eve of
victory: ‘To-morrow the town will be yours, or I shall be dead.’ The
French have also put up a statue of Constantine himself, the August, the
Victorious. He is just outside the railway station on the far side of the
town, on the edge of the gorge whence you look across the deep to the
ramparts of the city. But the most characteristic thing they have done
is to emphasise this unique isolation and dominance and height in two
ways: first by building flying bridges which span the gulf and show its
dizziness, next by driving a road of the most fantastic sort all round
the circuit of those unclimbable rocks. It should not be so, perhaps, but
so it is, that this new highway, cut into the precipice (in some places
driven in tunnels and arches through huge boulders, and in other places
so poised that from its parapet you look sheer down into the gorge) does
not detract from the fearfulness of the place, not even from its majesty.
It enhances both.
[Illustration: CONSTANTINE: CORBELLED AND TUNNELLED ROAD.
To face page 116.]
I have, in speaking of other parts of Barbary, asked the question: What
will happen? Can it endure? But of Constantine, on the rock of Cirta, I
have little doubt. These things are greater than man, and even should man
abandon them, it will stand as mighty as ever. What a stone!
CHAPTER XV
CHERCHELL, WHICH IS CÆSAREA
I have heard all my life that if you find a good thing you should keep
it to yourself, and I have heard that piece of advice particularly
emphasised in the matter of places. I have found it to be false. Other
people do not believe you when you sing the praises of a place, or
if they believe you they do not take the trouble to follow in your
footsteps. Or if they do, they ate of that kind which is worthy of the
place and does not spoil it. At any rate, I will praise Cherchell. I did
not know that in this strange land of Africa, with its meeting of burning
desert and snow, its high lands and its too biting sun, there could be so
charming, so secluded, so recollected a corner of foliage and sea.
From the first time I saw it years ago (and I did not on that occasion
go into the town itself) until my visit of the other day, the memory
of that coast has remained with me. When you get out of the suburbs of
Algiers (less sordid on this eastern side than are commonly the suburbs
of a great town) you follow the road along the coast, having upon your
left the hills of the coast range and upon your right the shining of the
Mediterranean.
[Illustration: THE TREES AND ROMAN HARBOUR OF CHERCHELL.
To face page 118]
It is a belt of great wealth; its habitations dotted here and there,
few villages and no towns; the road excellent and well served. Some
half-way along it there rises upon your left on one of the hills that
huge mausoleum of which no man knows the origin, but which may well
be the tomb of the Numidian kings before the Romans came. The Arabs
call it by a strange name: ‘The Tomb of the Christian Woman.’ As you
reach its neighbourhood there rises up before you, projecting into the
sea, a mountain which had upon either side of it two very ancient and
famous towns, Tipasa and Cæsarea, both of them great merchant towns,
with harbours built by the Romans, each of them playing its great part
in history; each of them wholly extinguished through the irruption of
the Mohammedan conquest; each of them re-erected as modern, carefully
laid-out, large villages rather than towns, after the re-entry of Europe
during the last eighty years.
Of the two Cæsarea (the name of which has changed into Cherchell) is the
more remarkable. It is here that the last of the half-Nubian kings built
his court, with that queen of his who was called ‘The Moon,’ Selene. She
was the daughter of Antony and Cleopatra.
In its great days the town covered a mile on every side. Its walls ran
up almost to the summit of the hills and down to the sea-coast, to the
east and west of the great haven; it was a white mass of porticoes and
noble courts, temples, colonnades, statues and palaces of marble; the
chief town of Africa, and loaded with all that the revenue of a nation
could purchase from the artists of the Eastern Sea, from the Greeks of
the Islands and of Egypt. One cannot approach a site of that kind without
some movement of the heart.
The last of the way lies through a broad and very fertile valley, with
that high seaward mountain looking down upon it from the east, and with
another high line of peaks enclosing it upon the west. The valley floor
is a garden of vines and wheat and olive, and the great French road goes
through it, ruled straight after the French fashion, and with its avenue
of trees on either side. But until one is quite close to Cherchell there
is no sign of the place, for it lies hidden behind a lesser promontory
round which the road turns, immediately before entering the western gate
of the place.
[Illustration: CHERCHELL: ROMAN THEATRE, MOORISH BATHS AND CHRISTIAN
CHURCH.
To face page 120.]
[Illustration: CHERCHELL: THE AQUEDUCT.
To face page 120.]
The first sign that one is coming to what was the capital of all that
wealthy land is the high ruin of a gateway which a man with the same name
as my own (I was pleased to see!) had put up, something less than two
thousand years ago, to be the monument of his wealth and an introduction
to his country house. The villa has gone for ever and its mansion; but
this gateway remains with its inscription. Next, as one comes still
nearer Cherchell there appear upon the left of the hills the ruined
arches of the great aqueduct which nourished the town. Lastly, one turns
sharply round the corner of a low promontory and one sees the simple
modern houses of the place and some trees in the field outside the walls.
The natural charm of it lies in that marriage of trees with salt water,
which is so rare in landscape, and which, when one can find it, has an
effect like nothing else; perhaps from its strangeness. Everywhere in
and near Cherchell you look down upon the sea through a vista of trees.
The _Mail_, or French Central place, of the village is a deep grove of
trees which look astonishingly old, seeing that the French could not have
planted them more than a long lifetime ago. They are gnarled thick trunks
of the Bellombra, and you look through, under their branches, at the sea
beyond—as you might look through the columns of a temple with doors wide
open at the end. When you go through this grove and come at the end to
the edge of the steep overlooking the harbour—where everything is neat,
orderly and clean (for Cherchell is a little model of what such places
should be)—and when you look down on the transparent water below, you see
sundry stones drowned therein, outside the port; in the shape of one of
these, at least, I thought to recognise a column rolled down from some
temple or portico. But what was more remarkable was a long, darkish line
standing out from the shore, and this when I had carefully noted it, I
found to be the foundation of the great breakwater which antiquity had
built for the harbour of so packed and wealthy a city. The modern harbour
is but a fraction of what that great haven was, and it is strange to
consider how completely so much greatness has disappeared, and to note
the hint of it in that dark line—out seawards.
Here, as everywhere, the French have set themselves to impress upon
Africa the memory of its high Roman past and to call back the dead to
life.
The ruins of the theatre they have not, indeed, restored as they have
restored those of Guelma; but they have disembarrassed the ruins of the
rubbish which covered them, and they have displayed the monument to the
passer-by. There can one stand, upon the square stones of the highest
circle, and comprise in the same glance Rome and Islam. Right opposite
the line of the stage the Arab baths mark their violent contrast with the
Corinthian columns.
[Illustration: CHERCHELL: THE SINGLE COLUMN AGAINST THE SEA.
To face page 122.]
It is so throughout the little town. The columns have been set up again
upon their base (the chief of them in the midst of the market-place), and
a whole wealth of portrait busts, inscriptions, trophies, statues of the
gods, has been collected and is being added to yearly from the fields
around.
What most moved me in this was the fine mutilated, headless statue of
some Emperor, still standing one-legged to rebuke the decay of the world
which he had ruled. But, indeed, Cherchell is so full of the past that a
man might spend a month there learning more and more of that silent doom
whereby states far nobler and greater than our own must go to sleep at
last, and die in their sleep.
I trust that I may return to Cherchell and fulfil that mood, looking from
its vineyards, through its groves, down to its unchanging sea.
CHAPTER XVI
TIMGAD AND VOLUBILIS: THE OUTPOSTS OF THE DESERT
The dead cities of the Roman Empire are few in number compared with the
survivals; and the base of all our civilisation was the city, the town,
walled, jealous of its private life, having its own gods and its own
traditions. The Roman Empire left each city singularly free, subject only
to very general laws; able to preserve what language it had inherited or
acquired, to levy its own local taxes, to make its own legal regulations.
The modern conception of a great state enforcing uniformity upon all its
citizens was abhorrent to the Roman idea, and that is why that great
reservoir from which all our streams descend was universally accepted
and formed a happy and united world-state. Nearly all its towns have
survived. There are few English towns prior to the industrial revolution
which had not a Roman ancestry; very many of those which seem to be
separate from the old Roman site in England grew up naturally on its
suburbs, where the land was cheaper and where long habitation had not
brought congestion and disease.
But here and there, from various causes, a town died out. Palmyra was
swamped by Islam and the desert; even in England where Roman continuity
is so marked, Wroxeter and Silchester decayed, we know not how or
why—perhaps because the line of travel left them. In Gaul, Alesia has
gone, and some half-a-dozen others; Pompeii and Herculaneum are the two
most famous which perished in a natural catastrophe, and when one was dug
out from its ashes, Pompeii, it retained so many monuments of domestic
life that attention has ever since been fixed upon them.
But of the dead Roman towns, two have a special place in my memories of
travel, because they were outposts, holding the cause of civilisation
against the desert, and casting a challenge, as it were, against the
forces which bit into the frontiers of the Empire and at last broke them
down.
These two towns which fell into the void, in part through the gaining
of the sand, but more through the gaining of the barbarian, are Timgad
and Volubilis, the one in Algiers, the other in Morocco. Each stands at
the southernmost edge of what the civilised men thought it possible to
hold permanently as a city; each overlooks wide spaces of what is now to
our Northern eyes desert, and even to the eyes of men native to those
climates, burning and arid soil. Each has wholly perished. Each is
being restored to the modern eye; the one—Timgad—has reappeared almost
in its entirety; the other—Volubilis—is in process of excavation, and we
shall shortly have there, as at Timgad, the columns set up again upon
their bases, some restoration of the ways, the plan of the whole affair
expressed, and its skeleton, so to speak, reconstructed sufficiently for
us to imagine what the living thing must have been.
The French, who control both these sites, have been blamed for restoring
so much. They have been blamed for exercising this vice or virtue in
many other things: in the restoration of their cathedrals and of the
pagan remains of antiquity in France itself. Thus I suppose that half
the outer stones of Laon are new. Carcassonne is a modern reconstruction
of an ancient thing. The rediscovered lower courses of the amphitheatre
of Paris are nearly all faced with new stone—and so on. The excuse of
the French in so acting is that but for restoration all would fall into
ruin. The criticism of their action lies in this: that the restoration
masks the original and deceives the looker-on. Upon the whole, I
think the French have the best of the argument; it is better to have
a restored, and, therefore, a permanent, witness to tradition, than a
meaningless heap of stones; it is better to have the front of Notre Dame
in Paris, to which Viollet-le-Duc added all those imitated statues of
the Middle Ages, and gargoyles not of the thirteenth century, but from
his nineteenth-century workshop, than to have shapeless things. At any
rate, the French have restored Timgad, and they are beginning to restore
Volubilis.
The first of these—Timgad—lies on the northern slope of that great
mountain of Aurès, from the southern shoulder of which one gazes out
towards the endlessness of the Sahara. The second stands on an upland
shelf within a mile or two of the hill town of the Moors, Mulay Idris,
north of Meknez, and gazes also southwards over wastes only a little
less desolate under a burning sun, and having, far away to the south,
the huge, dull, unbroken line, the monstrous Hogback, of the greater
Atlas. Because it is nearer to the sea winds of the Atlantic, the plain
over which Volubilis looks is more habitable than that of Timgad.
Even far away to the south upon the Atlas there are trees. But to our
Northern eyes, although the French are now colonising it, it seems a
most inhospitable land, parched and irredeemable. The people of the
place think otherwise. It has a civilisation of its own for many a day’s
journey southward. The famous fountains and shady courts of Fez are not
so far away. Within an hour or two by motor you have the very large
modern port of Casablanca. But the Romans rightly thought that upon
placing their town here they had an outpost and would go no further, for
the life lived further south is not natural to our race.
Timgad impresses me more powerfully with the past than any other place I
know, much more than Pompeii, more, even, than Silchester, which I visit
once a year also to recover in its crumbling city wall and its earthen
amphitheatre the roots of our life. In Silchester nothing shows except
the broken city wall and that earthen mound. Timgad is all exposed;
there is the theatre, there are the tall columns standing as in the
forum of Rome itself; there are the dolphin-carved marble arms of the
seats in the market-place; there is the Triumphal Arch—a great city, and
all quite silent. This silence, which has the effect of a living death
haunted by the past, the French have enhanced by conducting water again
to its fountain, and you hear the plashing of the stream emphasising
that emptiness of silence all about. If a man will wander in Timgad long
enough of a spring morning, especially if he come late in the season,
when the rare visitors no longer reach the place, he will feel arising
in himself two lives, the life of his own time which he knows and which
has made him, and the life of that immemorial past. It is a terrible, a
dangerous, but a fascinating experience.
In Volubilis the experience is other. You have no feeling of haunting, of
death, or of isolation; there are olive groves about you; there is scanty
grass; the lovely little Moorish town of Mulay Idris lies just beyond
the dip close at hand; a mountain not wholly barren, clothed with scrub,
stands up behind it against the east. Here the impression is rather one
of history and of contrast. Here you see how completely the new religion
of Islam flooded and drowned the classical and Christian tradition.
The contrast between the few stones still unearthed at Volubilis and
Mohammedan Mulay Idris, close at hand, is the contrast between a Poussin
or a David and an arabesque of Toledo. It is the contrast between the
superbly simple replica of Inigo Jones which forms the façade of the
English School at Rome and the Mosque of Cordova—two worlds wholly
distinct; the one that pagan and late Christian world of which we are
the children: we live by our return to its noble classic lines; the
other, the fantasy which the Mohammedan developed from the Byzantine.
Both these places also have about them a character which I love in many
a spot I have visited, I mean the character of isolation. The very power
of modern civilisation to carry men too rapidly from place to place in
a mechanical fashion has left more isolated than ever any place just
off the main lines. Of all those who go down to Biskra by the railway
from Constantine, or who motor down to that desert oasis by the great
French military road, how many have turned those short twenty miles
aside to steep themselves in Timgad? And of such few as are beginning to
visit Morocco and are grown familiar with Meknez, fewer still make the
day’s journey northward to Mulay Idris. How many even of these cross the
narrow valley to look at what may be to them the meaningless stones of
Volubilis? It is a good thing that it should be so. In all my many visits
to Silchester I have never found another man gazing at those stones or
climbing up the earth of the amphitheatre; and Europe and Barbary are
full of such silences. I am glad of it.
CHAPTER XVII
THE HILL OF CARTHAGE
On a day while spring was still calm upon the Mediterranean and before
the great heats had come, I sat in a small simple restaurant, French in
management and cooking, half-way up a slope that overlooked the Tunisian
Sea. Save for the modest house attached to the place, for one or two
villas surrounded by deep gardens, for a small halt (rather than a
station) upon a local tramway, there was little habitation around me. One
great French road went up the hill behind. No vehicle moved upon it.
In the spring sunlight of that noon the Angelus bell from a church upon
the height broke the silence, but for the rest it was an empty place
enough, with no hint of the past; a hillside like any other, not even
covered by a village; a little stopping-place upon a suburban tram line,
ten miles from the neighbouring capital.
That hill, that bay, were the Hill and the Bay of Carthage.
Over the ground where I sat at meat the Roman Army roared up in the last
moments of the final siege. This quiet, empty slope of deserted ground
had been filled with fire and carnage. On the summit where now a private
house or two and one new church barely break the empty, rounded height,
a vast glory of colonnade and portico massed upward to the dominating
chief Temple of Moloch, where the nobility of Carthage made their last
resistance and died of their own wills. Before that dreadful day,
for half a millennium, the greatest and proudest of human cities had
overlooked its ports and stood white and enormous above its wide bay,
drawing into itself the fleets of the East and sending out its merchants
and its adventurers and its Governors of Empire throughout its world.
Nothing remains. The round inner harbours of the city in which those
men-of-war were ranked have dwindled to sleepy ponds. The quays and the
wharves and the warehouses of a million men have disappeared. There is no
noise at all, except the little lap of water upon sand.
Fragments of the great aqueduct are to be found upon the plain, also
fragments of the cisterns, fragments of the walls here and there, but
nothing apparent. The immense affair has gone for ever, and in its place
is nothingness.
There are very many places in the world, no doubt, where something of
this emotion is called up and something of the wonder that such great
human things can utterly vanish; but nowhere do I find that lesson
impressed as it is impressed upon the site of Carthage; upon that
hillside above the sea where Carthage once was.
Hippo, the town of St. Augustine, is striking enough with its poor
fragments of ruin remaining alone to testify to its greatness, and its
site turned into a mile of vineyard; the bulk of the Numidian Cæsarea of
which I have just written, the capital where the daughter of Antony and
Cleopatra kept her court, is turned to gardens; and in our own country
Silchester of which I have written and Wroxeter fill me deeply with the
same sense of mortality, arousing in me the same question as to how the
traces of man can so finally leave the earth. But here in Carthage the
example is more complete and on a far greater scale.
Here was the second city of the world; a city that was at one time not
second, but first. Here lived that great merchant aristocracy which
has been compared with our own and with that of Venice. Here stood and
functioned that famous polity which Aristotle admired as the best he
knew; solid, square, free from turmoil; contemptuously certain of mastery
by sea, apparently immune from disaster, and taking its own good fortune
for granted.
It has gone altogether. No man to-day can even muse within its ruins as
he can muse within the ruins of Timgad or Volubilis. There has been a
complete clearance, an uprooting, a visible death. It is amazing.
I have read somewhere that negative things cannot impress the mind; that
mere absence, a mere void leaves no stamp upon the memory. I may have
thought so before I first stood (so many years ago!) upon the lift of the
Byrsa, on the slight slope of what had been the citadel of so famous a
state. But since that date I have always known that the death of things
can be impressive as the death of men. The other day when I came back to
Carthage after so long a space my earlier feeling was redoubled.
This then is the end of what men do upon the surface of the earth during
their little passage through the daylight!
The mighty city, I suppose, had its great musicians, and its poets. It
bred its great soldiers. One of them ranks with the greatest captains of
time. It felt itself necessarily eternal. It has vanished altogether.
I have marvelled often enough how the thing could physically be done. Is
it the perpetual work of the earth covering old stones, or the quarrying
of men, or what, that obliterates such mighty cities? At any rate they
disappear.
I concluded as I returned that night from Carthage through the evening
that our ignorance of the past is an abyss.
We do not know how human culture began; for the fullest expression of
it in the most enduring material may, it would seem, be dissipated like
smoke. We know, of course, that all the argument upon prehistory and the
rest is guess-work and all the violent assertion made by popular writers
upon it is merely charlatan. But there is more than that. There arises
from the contemplation of Carthage hill a conviction that any state may
be lost with all its records. We know not what or how many may not have
sunk in the profundity of time and perished altogether. We know not how
far back stretch the gorgeous cities and the full pageant of culture.
It is with the race as with the individual member of the race. We come
out of a darkness which we cannot pierce. We are for a moment in the
light. And of what is to come we know nothing.
_Part IV_
_France_
CHAPTER XVIII
THE MONUMENTS OF THE RHONE
I will not leave the Recovered Cities without a word upon that other
shore which the Mohammedan raided but never held. For it is a corner of
Europe where the public monuments of antiquity bear witness more than in
any other place to the Roman foundations of Europe. I mean the triangle
including either side of the lower Rhone between Avignon and the Delta,
within which triangle lie the great Roman towns of Nîmes, Avignon and
the most ancient town of Arles, and the great Roman viaduct over the
Gard River which brought the water to Nîmes, and is one of the noblest
structures in Europe. The particular character of this small district of
the world, its strong, permanent impress of antiquity and its ‘carrying
on’ (that is, its continuity almost unmixed with the disturbance of outer
things), are due to several causes combined.
First, this district was fertile and sheltered. There is a ring of
mountains east, north and west which make a wall for it. Next, it was the
first expansion of Italy in her Roman experiment of Empire: the large
accumulated capital and the strong social habits of Roman society at its
height struck roots here as they did elsewhere outside Italy in the West;
but, unlike Italy, the country was not ravaged by the perpetual marching
and counter-marching of armies.
It had its share of wars at the end of the Empire and the beginning of
the Dark Ages, but much less than had Italy. On the other hand, it did
not present that vast accumulation of movable wealth which the Italian
towns did, from Rome downwards, so that there was less temptation for
loot and destruction. Lastly, it was not so perpetually modelled and
remodelled by the ceaseless travel and pilgrimage, administration,
missionary effort and legal appeal, such as made all the great roads upon
either side of the Apennines, over the passes of the Alps, a stream of
men going back and forth for more than one thousand years. Here in this
more or less sheltered corner, the old civilisation, based upon the olive
and the vine and wheat, found all three, as in Italy. To the north, the
olive was lacking. In Italy, perpetual war and perpetual travel confused
the record. But here in the Rhone valley and to the east of it, antiquity
could establish its memorial. That is why you are more in touch with the
end of the Empire and its transformation during the Dark and the Middle
Ages, at Arles, at Avignon, at Nîmes than you can be anywhere else in the
world.
[Illustration: AVIGNON: THE BRIDGE.
To face page 140.]
Of this character Arles bears the deepest imprint. It was, I suppose,
the earliest harbour of the Rhone, far away beyond history, before the
silting up of the mouth had forbidden the use of the haven. To-day all
that activity has transferred to distant Marseilles. But Arles seems to
have been the original port, for here you have, in the last stratum,
the barbaric implements of men who could not yet use metal, then, in
succeeding layers, the proof of habitation by an increasing culture
which never dies. Here you have the great theatre of the Imperial time,
and the walls of the Dark Ages, and here you see the round Roman arch
changed into the pointed, with the advent of the Middle Ages, and here
you can follow the column very slowly transformed from its classic to its
mediæval form.
Avignon makes a different appeal. Its greatness is late and political.
Men certainly held that strong, isolated rock, which is now crowned
by the modern pillar and statue of Our Lady and with the careful
little garden at her feet, since first these lands were inhabited. It
was an obvious stronghold, obviously supplied by the river; but what
made Avignon the great example of the Middle Ages in stone was the
transference thither of the seat of the Papacy under the armed force of
the French, six hundred years ago; one of those violent, not permanent,
experiments in imposing their power which the French love to attempt and
have not ceased to play with since they were a nation. The transference
of the Papacy to Avignon came just at the moment when the Papal court
was widely extending its functions, and, therefore, its revenue, and you
had packed into this little area within the city walls that yet stand
(astonished at their restored neatness), more wealth than was to be found
even in the City of London or in the Island of Paris or in St. James
of Compostella. As I said of Salamanca, there are no more interesting
places in the world than those in which wealth has been concentrated in
the past, having since abandoned them. For there you may see the highest
effort in stone of some past time, crystallised and made permanent, with
no modern effort to disturb it. Of this concentration of money, which
went on for a good long lifetime, the monument is the Palace of the
Popes. Nothing can convey the effect of that mountain of masonry, save a
physical presence under its cliffs of sawn free-stone.
We all know that the effect of height or distance is one not of scale
but of proportion: that Beauvais, for instance, soars higher to the eye
than the Eiffel tower and that Old St. Paul’s looked much longer than
St. Peter’s; but nowhere will you find this effect of mass better than
you will find it in the Palace of the Popes at Avignon, though I suppose
the actual height is not greater than that of many office buildings
of to-day, nor the ground plan larger than that of some average great
railway station.
[Illustration: AVIGNON: PALAIS DES PAPES.
To face page 142.]
At Nîmes, unlike Arles and still more unlike Avignon, the effect is
one of antiquity, exactly preserved. There is there little effect of
transition. The town is of modern times, with some additional dignity
of the eighteenth century, but there stand embedded in it, sharply
contrasting with all around, and challenging every lesser later thing,
the scale and proportion of classical effort; the proportion, in that
lovely little temple which they call the ‘Maison Carrée’; the scale, in
the amphitheatre. I suppose all the remaining great amphitheatres of
the Empire, seeing that they were built upon one plan, should by rights
produce one effect upon the mind, or at any rate effects proportionate
to the size of each: El Djem in the sands of Tunis, Verona, Pola, the
Coliseum. But it is not so. Each has its own spirit—an illusion, no
doubt, but very vivid, and this of Nîmes dominates the town more than
does that of Verona or of Pola, and far more, also, than does the far
larger Coliseum affect the immensity of the city of Rome.
But of all the monuments which antiquity has left to mark this particular
countryside of Europe, the most impressive, the most permanently enormous
in the memory of those who have seen it is the Pont du Gard. It was late
in my life that I first came upon this giant thing, round the corner of
the road in the gorge of that lonely valley, spanning the ravine from
escarpment to escarpment above the trees. I have often heard of the
effect it produced. I could not believe it; for, after all, it was but
a specimen of the round arch, of the regular Roman courses: a simple
process of building in tiers from side to side of a ravine. But when one
sees the thing, all that is said of it comes true. Its isolation, its
dignity, its weight, are all three awful. It looks as though it had been
built long before all record by beings greater than ourselves, and were
intended to stand long after the dissolution of our petty race. One can
repose in it. I confess to a great reluctance to praise what has been
praised too much; but so it is. A man, suffering from the unrest of our
time, might do worse than camp out for three days, fishing and bathing
under the shadow of the Pont du Gard.
CHAPTER XIX
ROCAMADOUR
Of all that strange limestone country which forms the southern part
of the central French mountain group I suppose the best known point
is Rocamadour, yet travel does not reach it very largely even now,
and probably such travellers as do go to it carry away with them the
impression that it is unique. For the railway or the car takes them for
the most part to other lands immediately, and few of them indeed go
northward and eastward up into that high, half-desert country with its
deep cañons and ancient mountain towns.
[Illustration: ROCAMADOUR.
To face page 145.]
Yet Rocamadour is only one of perhaps half-a-hundred examples of the
way in which man, for innumerable centuries, has used the physical
character of the upper Dordogne basin; and if you wander about that part
of the world on foot—which is much the best way—you will carry away the
impression of one village and castle and shrine after another, clinging
to precipitous crags which overhang the waters in every valley.
To go down the Dordogne itself and make any excursion to right or left
is a sufficient experience, and from such a position Rocamadour is only
a few miles up a lateral valley to the south; but, as I shall say, it is
not the best way. Originally Rocamadour—in historical times at least—was
not a fortress but a shrine. As a fortress it would have had no very
great value, for, sheerly precipitous as it is on the western side, the
approach from the east is over an open plain without defensive value.
In other words, Rocamadour is nothing but the jutting cape of a cliff;
but the fact that it began as a shrine has made it what it is. The fact
that the shrine was half-way up the precipice, beginning presumably
as a hermitage, roughly sheltered by the overhanging rock, compelled
the building of inns for pilgrims, and the establishment of shops for
providing their necessities, and all that goes with them. They were
compelled to choose the very boulders of the cliff face, clinging to them
precariously, having steep steps for their village ways, and for their
only street one very narrow levelled edge of mountain road, perhaps a
third of the way up the steep.
It is this display of miniature miracles in construction and primitive
engineering on a cliff face which lends all its character to the famous
village—for village it now is, though in the Middle Ages it must rather
have been a small town during the height of its fame.
[Illustration: ROCAMADOUR: ROLAND’S SWORD AND ST. ANTHONY’S CHEST (BY
TRADITION), ON THE TERRACED PLATFORM OF THE SHRINE.
To face page 146.]
The shrine is dedicated to Our Lady and has been so as far back as we can
go; but a legend, historically unsupported, gives it an origin either
earlier or later than the true one. As the legend runs, the Zaccheus
of the Gospels wandered here after persecution in Palestine and built
his hermitage half-way up the sheer side of the rock. The certain truth
is, that you find a shrine widely visited, and with the name of St.
Amadour attached to it, just as the Dark Ages break into the light of
the Middle Ages at the time of the Crusades, and that its origin is then
already lost in an immense antiquity. It is possible that this antiquity
stretches back for years beyond the beginnings of our civilisation—or
that of Rome. The heart of the shrine is a subterranean chapel—as at
Chartres, and as at the Souterraine, some days away to the north; and we
know how, all over Europe, the shrines of pagan antiquity were taken on
by Christendom. Although we have the name, Amadour, it tells us nothing.
A vague guess has been made that it corresponds with a real historical
personage, St. Amator, but of this there is no proof. It is to me half
the fascination of Rocamadour that it goes back to the beginning of
things—and beyond.
It is one of the places in Europe whose name has been revived, and such
a thing is always pleasant to discover. An endless stream of pilgrims,
kings, saints—among them was St. Dominic, came to give thanks long
after for the victory of Muret—and populace passed through it during
the vigour of the Middle Ages. It dried up with the final corruption of
mediæval civilisation. The site became deserted and half forgotten. But
in our own time, just within living memory, a Bishop of Cahors revived
it, and his efforts had a more far-reaching result than he had hoped
for. It was as though a lamp, in which the oil was believed exhausted,
being relighted, should burn with a brilliant flame. Nothing pictorial,
certainly nothing descriptive in writing, can give fully the individual
effect of the place. The platform in front of the three superimposed
chapels, the tall building of the monastery above, plastered to the rock,
the castle well towards the summit, the narrow town hanging far below,
the whole thing resembling a ladder on a natural outline of broken rock
against the sky rather than the work of man.
Since the first effect of that vision is one of the most remarkable in
Europe, I advise everyone who visits it to approach it in the particular
manner which has been made most feasible through the advent of the
railway. The approach should be across the edge of the _causse_ or
plateau from the east, whether you journey on foot or by car, until you
come to the little hamlet called Hospitalet at the edge of the cliff.
There halt a moment, and instead of going forward to the edge (as yet you
see nothing) turn somewhat to the left above the highroad which runs down
to its tunnel through the rock. There, before you get to the tunnel,
or just above it, the valley opens before you and the precipice of
Rocamadour rises against the green distant hills: a cascade of building,
or a clambering of stones, one upon the shoulders of another, mingling
with and fretting the sheer rock, as the details of a Gothic ruin against
the sky fret the main perpendicular line of it: a sight that no one who
has seen it will forget, and which no one will feel so keenly who has
come upon Rocamadour from the west or north. Most of the great shrines in
Europe have this natural appeal of landscape—as you may test at Chartres
if, again, you come in the right way from the Beauce by the William
Gate—and perhaps it is only in our own age that this appeal has been
overlooked. Perhaps in some future day it will be recaptured.
CHAPTER XX
PÉRIGUEUX
Périgueux is a town the quality of which lies in its possession of two
kinds of monuments: one of a sort which you may find scattered up and
down throughout western Europe, and particularly throughout France; the
other unique, peculiar to the place itself.
What Périgueux has in common with so many other towns is a Roman
foundation, or nucleus, and a considerable body of mediæval remains to
which one must add one or two very fine bits of the Renaissance. What it
has quite peculiar to itself and unlike any other monument I know in the
West, is the Church of St. Front, which one does not know whether to call
an invasion of the Orient into the heart of France, with no forerunners
and no trace of the way by which it came, or a characteristic creation
of the Western mind inspired by some vague memory or some fleeting
suggestion which that mind had recorded from the architecture of the East.
[Illustration: PÉRIGUEUX.
To face page 150.]
Périgueux was Vesona, the capital of a countryside in the hills standing
on the bend of a river in the middle of fruitful but wooded country—the
great roads pass to the east or to the west of this central tumbled land
and not through it. Why it should have been so considerable a centre,
first, probably, in independent Gaul, later, certainly, in Roman Gaul,
we cannot tell. But the town still bears all the marks of its Roman
foundation. It is a true Roman provincial capital, and has rightly given
its name to the whole district of the Périgord. The Roman amphitheatre,
used as a quarry for so many generations, has still some of the lower
courses of its oval wall remaining, though in ruin; one or two arches
stand, and the foundations of its ellipse are completely marked out. The
trace of the Roman city is still everywhere apparent, and one may say,
I think, that only one element of such origin is lacking; one cannot
clearly see what it was that made the citadel; there is no defined
stronghold site in the whole place. But the Roman air and the Roman
tradition remain.
Of the Middle Ages you find examples at every turn, unexpected and
striking enough. The late mediæval corner tower of the outer wall stands
intact; the houses, which still bear their pointed turrets here and
there, the names of the narrower streets, with ogives of the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, built into the mass of many older buildings;
while the Renaissance has one particularly fine example: some wealthy
burgher’s house standing upon the riverside by the end of the chief
bridge—as perfect in its miniature way as the things of the Loire.
For Périgueux was that which the Revolution has everywhere marred and
crippled, a vivid centre of local life; nor would any social reform be
of greater advantage to the French to-day than the reorganisation of
local freedoms which should give to these provincial capitals a new and
vigorous life such as they possessed for so many centuries until the
change of a hundred and thirty years ago, clinched as it was by the
mathematical genius of Napoleon, centralised and newly ordered all things.
You will find in Périgueux a statue erected to the memory of Montaigne,
upon the pedestal of which is a citation from his pen, which citation
exactly expresses the pride of the old provincial capitals in their local
life:
I would rather be the first man in Périgueux than the second or
the third in Paris.
No man feels that to-day!
[Illustration: PÉRIGUEUX: A TYPICAL FEATURE ON THE ASCENT TO THE
CATHEDRAL.
To face page 152.]
I have said that the peculiar and unique thing about Périgueux was the
Church of St. Front; and to discover how special a case it is, how much
a thing of its own kind, not to be paralleled anywhere else in the West,
consider this: that wherever else you go throughout Gaul, you find the
regular plan of the old Roman Church changing with the early Middle
Ages into the pointed Gothic and later into the quite new type of the
Renaissance. But here the domes are not of Gaul at all, but of the
Orient; the domes and the campanile are such as you might never find
farther west than Padua or Venice. You say as you first see them that
they came thither from the eastern Mediterranean, and that Byzantium was
their origin; and you are right. But in the great Church of St. Front
you have this second consideration, that the character of the Orient
has disappeared. In detail, in spirit, even in main effect, it is not
at all from beyond the Adriatic; it is rather as though some one had
seen the things of the eastern Mediterranean once vividly in youth, and
had come back with a mere memory of them in his mind, and setting out
under that influence to build, had built that which he could not help
making a Western thing. Nowhere is there the least trace of a re-entrant
curve: nowhere is there that characteristic of all things Oriental, an
attempt at lightness. The huge church, in its modern restoration as much
as in its original decayed stones, has about it the characteristics of
our Western race and culture—strength, density, and the ponderous stuff
which is determined upon eternity. It does not lift, it imposes. The five
great domes are of massive stones. The high, square bell tower dominating
them is of huge square blocks. The ornamentation is insignificant and
conventional. The keynote everywhere is the round arch and nothing
but the round arch, from which endless combinations are formed merely
by imposing variations upon this seemingly monotonous and essentially
austere theme.
There is within the church a modern mosaic, not very distinguishable, in
front of one of the altars, the picture of an elephant, and under the
mosaic in stone letters, ‘_Fortitudo_.’ That is St. Front: a magnificent
animal of great purpose, planted for ever upon this slope above the
river. As you look up to it from the waterside, it gives something of the
effect of a cluster of rocks in its immensity and strength; and, at any
rate, there is nothing of its kind elsewhere. It stirs me strangely to
sit in that nave and consider the weight that here reposes upon the rock.
Here is no facing of marble upon brick, no encrustation, no filling in of
parallel walls with rubble, no thin curtain, no drawn-out pilasters. Here
is one simple pile of titanic masonry square shafts yards thick, plain
semicircular ridges, the width of a palace vault across. All the large
semicircular arches are of thick stone, and all the mighty domes as well.
Everywhere one scheme of line, the perpendicular, the horizontal, and the
semicircular, worked into imposingly symmetrical designs, and everywhere
one material and one only.
There has been plenty of blame offered to those who thus decided to renew
the old church and to make it weatherproof again after its hundreds of
years—so that now you can hardly tell where an old stone is to be found,
at any rate, in its outer structure—but, for my part, I am glad that they
have acted so. Give it another thousand years, and St. Front will be a
witness to a thousand years ago, for it was built before the Crusades.
Give it another thousand years after this modern restoration—perhaps
our civilisation will not be capable of much more work upon this scale,
for we are already in peril of decline—give it another thousand years,
and men, forgetting that it was ever restored, will say to themselves,
‘Here is a thing of twenty centuries, stark with the spirit of the Dark
Ages, unornamented, enormous, proclaiming certitude, and therefore a just
emblem of the spirits which designed it.’
I say men will speak thus. But I am not so sure that all these
generations hence there will be enough left of our culture to allow them
to use any such language. There is so much of mediæval lore and culture
of which we of to-day have been able to understand but a little, that
it is only reasonable to expect the next thousand years to obscure the
vistas of the past as callously as have the two centuries just ended.
It is more likely that those men of the future will speak of such
things as the ‘work of the ancients’ and will worship them without any
recollections of their origins.
CHAPTER XXI
THE GREAT HOUSE OF DURTAL
I know not why it is, but there are many places which, through the
mechanical accidents of our time, become overknown, and others which one
might call underknown. Too many people know Assisi; not nearly enough
people know Loretto. Too many people know Rabat and Fez, even to-day. Too
many people know Montserrat, and not enough know the Chimneys of Riglos,
which are among the wonders of the world.
Durtal, the Great House of Durtal, is one of the lesser known things.
Perhaps I ought to be glad of that, for I can easily imagine it ruined by
crowds. But, at any rate, if it has pride in itself, or if its ghostly
owners could feel human pride in whatever place they now may be, it
seems unfair that such a thing should not be as famous to-day as it most
assuredly is splendid.
[Illustration: THE HOUSE OF DURTAL.
To face page 156.]
The Great House of Durtal is a lesser example of the spirit which,
when it had all the wealth of the kingship behind it, set up those
neighbouring castles of the Loire which are certainly among the much too
well-known things. Durtal had no such wealth behind it; it was the great
house of a big private gentleman. But Lord, what an effect he got for
his money! You will look in vain, I think, for any other private house
in Europe, in the countrysides, at least—for I do not know whether one
should call the Barberini House a palace or not—which gives you such an
impression of nobility, of magnificence; in the old sense of the term
magnificence: ‘A great doing—a making of something worthy.’
The builder played every trick—and legitimately—to give this effect of
magnificence. When first the place had been set up as a stronghold, in
the Dark Ages when all such strongholds were founded, a knoll above the
quiet river had been castellated. It was the castle of Durtal; but when
greater wealth and less power came to the descendants of that house, the
falling ground was fronted with a projecting three sides of Renaissance
work which makes to-day the Great House of Durtal, three piled up stories
high above the low-lying ground to the south; but on the north, at the
top of the steep hill the ground on a level with its second storey. The
builder spread out the stone basement of that cliff of a façade at an
angle, after the fashion of the Egyptians, to give a look of support and
strength to the weight above; and in the eastern corner he married the
high Renaissance roof to the last battlements of the Middle Ages, just as
the builders of the Medicean Louvre in Paris joined the Middle Ages to
sixteenth-century Italy.
One would have thought that Durtal would have been famous if through
Rabelais alone, for all the glorious episode of Picrochole turns upon
Durtal; he was Lord of Durtal, if you remember, when he was struck
with that sudden burst of imperialism of his and determined to conquer
the whole world ‘without fear of being turned upon his flank by the
Muscovites.’
But Rabelais has brought no fame to this, and for a hundred who see
the master in bronze upon the public place of Chinon, scarcely one, I
suppose, has ever seen Durtal.
[Illustration: THE HOUSE OF DURTAL: A COURTYARD ABOVE THE VAULTED CELLARS.
To face page 158.]
Perhaps the choice of travellers is wise, for Durtal is dead, in
spite of all its beauty and strength. These things were intended for
human habitations and for lordships. They went with personal powers
and personal prides. They have now no functions to fulfil, because
the builders of them have departed and their descendants inhabit them
no more. You may go through the halls of that old place and find no
ornament; the promise of the great façade is not fulfilled within; one
wing at the back which closed the courtyard has disappeared; and as
for using the place, it has been turned into a hospital. Durtal is no
longer Durtal, because it is no longer alive. But it is worth seeing,
all the same, and if a man wants a series in which the history of all
our vivid developments between the Crusades and the Reformation may
stand before him, let him visit Durtal after Angers—an hour in the local
train and less in a motor. He will see at Angers—and he will be wise
to approach from the river—a castle of stark bastions, wholly devoid
of any grace at all, a great quadrilateral of half-round towers, not
very high, gigantically thick and strong, with hardly a slit for light
or for arrows round the wall, built, too early for battlements, of a
dark and forbidding stone which you can hardly distinguish from the
rock out of which it springs and into which it is dovetailed. Angers,
though it is the Plantagenet castle in which first were heard the songs
of the Arthurian cycle, within the gaunt naked walls of which arose the
beginnings of the Middle Ages, is built wholly for use, and for one
use—the use of war; and of war when war meant the rumbling of mangonel
engines attempting to batter down walls almost as strong as the walls of
nature. Angers is sheerly for defence, the stronghold of a man who was
a king. Then came the great four hundred years of development, and at
the end of them, Durtal, no longer a castle in the old sense at all, not
built for defence nor suggesting it, yet still suggesting strength and,
above all, power of tradition.
I sometimes wonder, when I see the way in which the rich build nowadays,
failing nearly always to reach the effect they desire, that they do
not merely copy. Why has not some one of our modern rich set to work to
reproduce Durtal? He would certainly have a house better than anything
they have built in Europe for two hundred years. But I suppose when he
had done it some other revolution like that which has taken the soul out
of Durtal would nullify his efforts, and that the palace which he had
raised for the satisfaction of his vanity or of his legitimate pride in
blood would be debased to false uses in its turn.
At any rate, there is Durtal, as good a thing in death as I know. Perhaps
some rich man with a kind heart will buy it back from the governors of
the hospital, destroy in it the devices of the religious who tend the
sick, turn its chapel into a dancing hall, re-erect the fallen north
wing, complete the courtyard again, and fill Durtal once more with a
false life. And if that happens I know not whether I shall be glad or
sorry.
CHAPTER XXII
CHALUS
There are places in Europe of great interest to English history, of which
most of us have read in the text-books, and which not many Englishmen
know. Either they are too small or too remote or they lie off the great
line of steam travel—from which modern petrol has not yet learned to
go—or they are taken for granted as names and no more; but for whatever
reason, such they are, and numerous. The battlefield of Crécy is but a
mile or two off the track of everyone who motors down into France from
Boulogne, every yard of which is known. It is to-day what it was when the
battle was fought nearly six hundred years ago. But it is almost unknown;
and the same is true of Taillebourg and the same of Agincourt.
[Illustration: CHALUS.
To face page 161]
Now there is one spot which I had always desired to visit, and yet I had
only managed to gratify that desire this year: that spot is Chalus, where
Richard the Lion-Heart was killed. It was a death which was in keeping
with his life. The kind of death which a contemporary might have been
certain he would have died, for with all his ill health and continuous
travel, he could hardly have died save under arms. It was in the Limousin
just where the hills of that province sink into the western plain. There
had been treasure-trove. The Viscount of Limoges claimed it; King Richard
as his overlord counter-claimed. The vassal shut up the treasure in his
castle of Chalus, there to defend it and defy his lord. Richard came
against it with his small, trained mercenary force and laid siege. A
plain arrow with a square iron tip—what was called in the French of his
day a _quarrel_—struck him down from the walls as he was riding around
inspecting those defences. He did not die immediately. He died because
the wound was ill dressed and only after a few days. He lived to see the
place fall, and the man who had shot him down captured. But although
pardoned, after the king’s death the bowman was flayed alive by the
family.
[Illustration: CHALUS: THE OUTER WARD.
To face page 163.]
The place where the greatest man of his time in Europe fell is to-day a
small, half-neglected little country town—for it has a market—yet half
village; and what is left of that stronghold, in the capture of which
Richard met his death, is still exceedingly impressive. One sees upon
visiting it why Limoges had made it the test of his power and gave his
challenge there to the man who controlled all the resources of England
and half those of France. Not that it was very large. It was the better
for being restricted in space and needing no great garrison to feed. Nor
was it so very difficult of general approach, but it was exactly suited
for a fortress of that day, chosen as were all Richard’s fortified sites
(Château Gaillard is the best known) with the skill of the master. Unlike
Château Gaillard, however, there is no height nearby from which it can
be dominated by the eye, nor is the mount of Chalus connected, as is
Château Gaillard, by a neck or isthmus with higher land—as of necessity
were the greater part of these keeps. It stood upon a low, conical hill,
steep enough to break the attack, yet spread out enough to allow sallies
to some distance from the walls. At its foot runs a stream which was
something of an obstacle, and beyond that stream, as a sort of bastion,
those who planned the castle had built an outer ward covering the only
bridge. The bridge still stands, or rather, after much patching and
changing, the bridge of to-day is still on the site of the old one. Of
the outer walls, the main tower still dominates the village; and within
the remains of its walls, some few houses are huddled. The gateway into
the outer yard under this main tower is intact. The outline of the
main stronghold upon the hill over the river can everywhere be traced,
though it has lost its height. A farm-house of perhaps the fifteenth or
sixteenth century has been built, backed against its walls. The old keep
tower on the summit reaches to its full height, but is half ruined; at
the side next it a gateway and perhaps a chapel, of a much later date
toward the end of the Middle Ages, retain an arch or two and half a roof.
The rest is without habitation and is a ruin.
Nevertheless, the aspect of the place is still in the highest degree
impressive, and its purpose as a fortress is insistent to the eye when
one stands in the meadows to the west, looking toward the distant
foothills of the Limousin. Those two towers, the lower one of the outer
ward, and the higher hill of the main keep on the far side of the stream,
stand up at the main outlines of the place. Even the spire of the church
is subservient to them, and the lines of the roofs of the little market
towns have all the effect of something created by the original strength
of a stronghold, something which existed under the protection of that
lordship and which had been created by it.
Whether as tradition, or because some one had wandered there and spoken
of the story of the place, I found the memory of the king alive. In that
remote inn which pretends to nothing, and is therefore comfortable and
good, they knew so much. But there was no full tradition with which to
compare, for instance, the tradition of Falaise, where the Conqueror
colours the whole town, or with the tradition of Mauperthuis Farm and
the Battle of Poitiers. All they knew was that Richard the Lion-Heart,
whose name I suppose will always live in western Europe, had been killed
under their walls: but they thought of him as a foreigner. Yet when
he fell there under those walls, he fell as Duke of Aquitaine, he was
Angevin, a Plantagenet who spoke the language of their lords and could
even understand perhaps the southern dialect of the populace round about.
Happily enough, I found the memory of this most attractive son in the
great brood of Mélisande more remembered in Agen, far off on the Garonne,
than here in the place where he should be most famous. For at Agen I
found a street named after him, and at the end of the bridge over the
Garonne a tablet proudly inscribed with the legend that Richard, King of
England, Duke of Aquitaine, had been the first to span the river, and
that they owed their first bridge to him. Many wars have since destroyed
it, and in its place—of all things in the world—there is now a rickety
suspension bridge, built in the days when these hideous contrivances were
thought marvellous.
If I were mayor of Chalus, I would erect a monument to Richard. It is
not a small thing, the site where a great man dies; and yet, if you will
consider it, all up and down Europe, the places where men have achieved
this or that action are rather noted, but rarely the place where they
came by some great death: that which was chief in their own experience,
and the closing of that experience, posterity forgets. At Chinon they
remember Joan of Arc and Rabelais, but not Henry of Anjou, who died
within the walls above the town mourning that he was a conquered king.
There is nothing to mark, in the suburbs of Nancy, the place where
Charles the Bold was dragged from his horse. There is a stone in the New
Forest for the detestable Rufus, but nothing, I believe, in the rough
fields which mark the site of the Hall of Fotheringay. And so it is with
the place where Richard of England died. Yet I think he himself would
rather have a memorial here even than at Acre, or at Jaffa, or in that
village where he lay ill, despairing of seeing Jerusalem which lay not a
day’s march away.
Irony fills all history—and it has given the Lion-Heart a statue in
front of the Victorian House of Lords in London and made him look like
an English gentleman of the Albert period: but in Chalus there is not a
bronze or a stone.
CHAPTER XXIII
VIRE
I think the Norman towns, especially the smaller ones, lose half their
interest for the traveller if he does not know the peculiar history
of the duchy and the way in which it stood out as a separate thing in
European history for nearly five hundred years, and is something still
distinct among the French provinces. Even as it is, the lesser towns of
Normandy are singularly little known, considering how easy of access they
are, how hospitable, and how charming. And Vire, although it lies on one
of the main railway lines, is little visited.
[Illustration: VIRE.
To face page 167.]
Like nearly all Norman towns, you must understand it as a feudal
fortress. Roughly speaking, there are two types of towns in western
Europe—I mean towns with any tradition and antiquity. They are either
natural mercantile centres—for instance, the first bridge across a great
river with sea-borne commerce, such as is Rouen or even Caen (though
there the river is small)—or they are towns the sites of which were
chosen because, under the conditions of the time in which they arose,
they had good opportunity for defence.
The towns which were mercantile centres and early became large places
were fortified in spite of their position; the sea-ports, for instance,
Dieppe and Harfleur—now high and dry—and Honfleur opposite; and towns
like Bayeux were fortified in spite of the difficulties of defence in
order to protect their wealth; but nearly all the other Norman ones were
first chosen for their defensive position.
So you must begin at Vire, as you should begin in so many other places,
by taking what is left of the castle for your starting point in the
understanding of the town. Massive ruined walls still remain as the
relics of the keep which Henry of England, the son of the Conqueror,
first put up in this place. It stands on its granite rock, plumb over the
ravine of the River Vire below, and was the making of the place. Next you
will note here and there, remaining in isolated sections and half ruined,
individual towers built into later buildings, the ramparts, and the
gates. One famous gate still stands, called the Gate of the Tower. It was
on a height from which any approach to the little city could be spotted
by watchers for miles around. From the summit of it you saw to the south
the wide range above Sourdeval (Sourdeval was the lordship of the first
man to leap upon the wall of Jerusalem in the first Crusade); and to the
north, all the country of the Bocage—that district of lower Normandy
which, being hilly and densely wooded, kept its ancient customs longest.
It was the last place to witness a revolt against national taxation by
the king—as late as Louis XIV.
[Illustration: VIRE: THE TOWER GATE.
To face page 168.]
Of this tower gate the people of Vire are proud enough; they have
decorated it on numberless occasions; as late as the seventeenth century
they put up a statue of Our Lady above the arch, and it is to be prayed
that they will never pierce streets round it, as men have done with so
many other of the old narrow gateways of Europe—as for instance, at
Southampton. For its whole character and all its architectural effect lie
in the way it blocks the narrow street and forms a true defensible entry.
Vire has ventured, and not unsuccessfully, little manufactories, but
happily without hurting its soul in any way; and it has managed not to
deteriorate, in spite of any number of temptations; not even the motor
car has done it evil, and you can hardly say that of any other such town,
except perhaps its sister, Mortain, over the hills to the south beyond
Sourdeval.
Even if it had no history, all that district would still be a delight;
and anyone with leisure who wants to understand lower Normandy may take
Vire for his centre and learn more and more of what age and tradition
mean in things European. He is within a walk of Mortain and its cascade
and its old headship of a county, now half forgotten; within a walk of
Avranches, and the superb view over St. Michael’s Bay; within a walk
of the battlefield of Tinchebrai; and in Vire itself he has a whole
collection of mediæval and Renaissance heirlooms to please him—the
granite church with its vivid sculpture, the ruin of the second gate,
the famous little valley below, the half-dozen Renaissance or very late
mediæval private buildings testifying to the wealth of the place.
And it is still wealthy. It is one of the chief pleasures of these
small old Norman towns that they have not lost, as have towns in many
European countries, their quality of local residence. They are not the
tiny capitals they once were; it is no longer a necessity for the gentry
round about to make such places their centres of provision and their
meeting-place for neighbours; but the wealth, made in the town itself
and the surroundings, is still spent for the most part in Vire. And it
is this which gives life to the older places of Europe; lacking it, when
they fall under the industrial system of the new economic era, they must
inevitably forfeit their personality.
The way in which Vire keeps its soul and independence, in which Vire
lives on, feeling prouder than its little sister towns, is due to the
effect of eight hundred years of custom now forgotten—but during all
these centuries an essential of the place: it was royal; it had no local
lord. Vire was the ‘Duke’s Town,’ small as it was; and when Normandy
fell to the crown, it was the ‘King’s Town.’ Vire does not know to-day
why it is still proud. That is the reason. But even if it did know,
it would scarcely pay any heed, for its pride has become a thing of
interminable habit, self-sustaining, and self-augmenting as time goes
on. It has always been moved by an independence surpassed at last only
by patriotism. It has obeyed no master save the ruler of its peers. And
those who are alive to history feel that spirit in its streets to-day.
CHAPTER XXIV
LE MANS
Le mans is a name newly familiar. It was, if I am not mistaken, an
American base during the war. I know, at any rate, that the presence
of the American Army there is well remembered. Save for that episode,
however, it is not one of the better-known towns of northern France
to-day, though it, again, lies on one of the great lines of travel, and
on one of the chief railways connecting Paris with the Atlantic—the
railway to Brest. It is that which gave it the economic and (after a
fashion) strategic position which it held during the Great War. But,
normally, the communications of western Europe through the Atlantic
leave Le Mans by the way. Goods and men come off the ships at Cherbourg
or at Havre, and the lines thence to Paris leave Le Mans far to the
west. Meanwhile, the normal roads of travel from the north to the south
of Europe also neglect it. They converge on Paris from the ports of
Normandy and of Picardy; they radiate out from Paris to Bordeaux and to
Marseilles. Le Mans has enjoyed one advantage from this position: it
has retained its spirit; and though it has largely forgotten its own
history, one can—as one grasps the character of the old town, masked by
the extension of modern building—recall the original plan and the castle
rock which was the heart of Maine.
[Illustration: LE MANS.
To face page 172.]
Normandy, with its intense history, was the Roman Province of the Second
Lyonnaise. Brittany was the Celtic Province which, though it was and is
half Roman-speaking, preserved and preserves a life entirely its own.
Normandy ever attempted to master Brittany. The dukes of Normandy were
for ever desiring to obtain an acknowledgment of their supremacy from
the rulers of Brittany. The two provinces, which then were virtually
kingdoms, touched in the Bay of Saint-Michel; but the wilder western land
never submitted. It only played at submission to Rouen in order to avoid
submission to Paris.
Wedged in between the two, just below the sea-coast and not having access
to the sea; lozenge-shaped, not wholly of Anjou, not stretching to the
Loire; formed, we know not how, by the petty local lordships of the
darkness after Charlemagne, there rose up that countryside of Maine whose
function it was to be a march land between the Breton and the Norman
power. In all their history, until the final consolidation of the French
monarchy at the end of the Middle Ages, Maine was the makeweight and the
balance. William the Conqueror insisted upon ruling it, and took, by dint
of great effort, its capital, Le Mans. Four hundred years later, as the
Plantagenet line was failing, the cession of Maine was felt in England
to be the peril of Normandy, and the man who had sacrificed Maine as the
price of Henry VI.’s marriage paid for the sacrifice with his life. And
even to-day, when all these things are forgotten, Maine and Le Mans play
a neutral rôle. They are not Norman, and they are not Breton; and modern
travel which knows Normandy and Brittany by heart misses Maine and its
capital—to their good.
I have just called Le Mans a hill town. I suppose that most of my
contemporaries who visit it will think I am using some special term of my
own not corresponding to reality. The land rises slowly from the Huisne;
that there was ever here a citadel, a defensible place, one might not
guess, especially if one should come in from the railway station on the
flat, or by the road from Angers, or from the south. But to understand
what Le Mans means in history, do not, upon arriving there, go straight
into the centre of the city, but rather cross the Sarthe westward, and
thence, from the suburb on the right bank of the river, look up against
the steep hill—it is almost a cliff—on which the castle (what is left
of it) and the cathedral stand. Thence you will see what Le Mans meant
to our fathers. It was by river that trade came to the place; it was
by river that stores of war could be accumulated within it. Seen thus,
standing above the river, it is a splendid steep. Even on the far side
toward the east there was, in the first state of the countryside, before
any levelling or building up, an approach upon a slope, defensible by a
wall, and old Le Mans stood within a circle of walls which had that steep
rock fall upon the water for its highest point, and looked down from that
at the precipitous slopes. See how to-day the modern street cuts through
the rock citadel by a tunnel; and see how the castle, now reduced to a
governor’s residence of the later Middle Ages, its old strength quite
forgotten, still masters the stream, and how the cathedral towers above
the whole.
[Illustration: LE MANS: THE CATHEDRAL.
To face page 175.]
That building, the cathedral of Le Mans, is thought the most perfect of
the later Gothic churches in France. From within, looking toward the
choir, it is certainly that; and from without, looking at the great sheaf
of flying buttresses, it is that no less. But there is another feature
in the great pile which a wise man will note for himself if he will go
and stand in the little square of the bishopric above the steps which
lead to the old dominating rock that brought Le Mans into being; thence
he will see in one view the half-barbaric western front, grotesque with
the heavy and terrifying humour of the eleventh century or the early
twelfth, before the architecture of the West had caught the flame; and
in that same view he sees something older than any Christian church, the
great druidical stone, built right into the walls; and in that same view
he sees the superb south transept, the last achievement of the Gothic.
There is another thing in Le Mans, not commonly known, which always moves
me profoundly; that is the tomb of Berengaria, the woman whom Richard
the Lion-Heart loved, and for whom he broke with the house of France,
repudiating the sister of the King. Why she comes to lie there, while he
is at Fontevrault, I do not know; but there she lies, three weeks’ march
northward from her father’s land, the queen and the mate of the greatest
man of her time who had died so long before her by that blunt arrow under
Chalus, days and days away. If I knew nothing in Le Mans except her tomb,
I should think the place worth visiting for that alone.
_Part V_
_The Rhine March_
CHAPTER XXV
AIX-LA-CHAPELLE
The Rhine March, the broad belt of country lying to the left or west of
the middle and lower navigable Rhine, has been for centuries the very
heart of European political debate.
It is an accident of our generation that the debate should ever seem
settled. The sudden and complete victory won by Prussia and her allies
over France in 1870, and the consequent amalgamation of more than
two-thirds of the Germans under the leadership of Prussia, the creation
thereby of a state which has come to be called ‘Germany’ (though it does
not include anything like the totality of the German culture)—these
things between them seemed to have settled the debate for good.
[Illustration: AIX-LA-CHAPELLE: THE FISH MARKET AND CATHEDRAL.
To face page 179.]
The gradually weakening demands of the French for the restoration of Metz
and Strasbourg, with their provinces, were the only exception to this
apparently fixed settlement. It was always thought to be a particular
French grievance, little understood or sympathised with elsewhere, and,
as I have said, it was rapidly dying down.
But the Great War brought back vividly before Europe, as a whole, the
critical character of this belt of country. A modern man would speak of
that critical character as a quarrel between France and Germany—France
desiring a hold upon the Rhine to secure itself from invasion, and
Germany desiring complete control over it for the simple reason that,
with the exception of a very small district round Metz, the whole is
German-speaking; while even this district round Metz had been welded by
the impression and increasing wealth of nearly fifty years into the new
Prussianised Reich.
But this common, modern way of talking of the present debate is very
superficial and very provincial, confined to conditions of no long
standing, and not likely to have long endurance. It is something very
much deeper than the rivalry between a modern German state and a modern
French state, which is at work in all this countryside. Briefly, the
fate of the Rhineland has turned upon these two divergent conditions:
it is German; but it is of Roman foundation. An Englishman might note
with interest an almost exactly parallel case on the border and in the
southern lowlands of Scotland. They also were Romanised, and had their
foundation in the Roman Empire; but they were attached to a nation all
the farther part of which had never been administered by the civilisation
of antiquity. Hence the perpetual attempts of the English Government to
hold, or at least influence, this nearer part of Scotland, and hence its
‘Anglification’ during and after the eleventh century.
[Illustration: AIX-LA-CHAPELLE: THE SHRINE.
To face page 180.]
It is in the same way that the Rhine March, though essentially German in
language, culture, and, upon the whole, in race, has another spiritual
strain in it and another historical memory, and goes back to a very
different foundation from the Germany which stands round the Elbe.
All the innumerable results of this double-origin would take volumes to
discuss. I propose to do no more than what a chance traveller may do in
the description of certain of its typical cities, and especially of their
chief buildings; for in them one has presented to the eye the whole past
of the country, and its inward nature coming out in stone. I have chosen
six such towns—Aix, Metz and Treves, Bonn, Worms and Spires. I begin with
Aix and Metz because these two, lying right on the border of the Rhine
March, the one German-speaking from the beginning, the other Latin and
French-speaking for two thousand years, are typical of the March, the
border, towns.
I may add that I propose to follow the old custom of giving foreign towns
their English names, and not the modern (and, I hope, passing) habit of
spelling them as they are spelt by their inhabitants. I would as soon
talk of _Aachen_ as I would talk of _Paree_ or _Lyong_.
Aix is the town of Charlemagne. His presence overshadows the place;
he is buried in the heart of it; he is the influence, or the ghost, or
the god of the city. He was brought up, indeed, at his family’s place
in Aix and at another which they had at Metz, so that presumably the
servants about his childhood were German-speaking in the one case, and
spoke a low Latin dialect in the other. I verily believe that it is this
influence of the man in whom was summed up all that was left of antiquity
and all the beginnings of the Middle Ages, which gives Aix its singular
dignity. Nowhere else have I seen modern work so admirably fitted in with
the old except in certain architectural experiments of the two English
universities.
The shrine itself, the cathedral under which the great emperor lies, is
an exact and harmonious mixture of the oldest and the latest things.
There is not a jarring note; and all the accessories of that triumph in
stone and mosaic are the same. Nowhere have I heard music more solemnly
fulfilling its part in a Christian church, and nowhere has modern
restoration seemed, in my eyes, at least, more successful. The candle
ring of gilt bronze, a sort of crown dependent from the roof, goes back
to Barbarossa. The mosaics of the dome are of the other day—not forty
years old, from the hands, I believe, of Italian workmen. Of the pillars
supporting the roof and arches of the gallery most are original, some few
brought in in our time to complete the work. Yet they produce an effect
of complete unity. And in the midst of that gallery, facing the high
altar and the choir, on its arcade above the people, stands the throne of
Charlemagne; the plain, white marble chair, which brings the mind back at
once to the Chair of St. Peter in Rome. Authority seated.
[Illustration: AIX-LA-CHAPELLE: THE MARCH GATE.
To face page 182.]
[Illustration: AIX-LA-CHAPELLE: THE MARCH GATE.
To face page 183.]
In the externals of the place I find the same unity between what was
old and what is new. The eye can follow in the last courses of the
original octagonal church material which is Roman. It discovers in the
round windows of those walls the ancient unchanging spirit which ran
through the Dark Ages until the Gothic Renaissance. It is surprising that
a thirteenth- and fourteenth-century choir in the pure French-Gothic
attached to this Romanesque and much more modern thing in no way swears
with it, and seems a natural completion, and (what is, perhaps, more
remarkable) the odd seventeenth-century roof, with its eight separate
ridges like the sections of an open orange, makes no jarring effect. And
all the modern reconstruction of the open bridge from the western towers
to the dome, and the modern replacement of sculpture and other detail,
leaves the thing not only unspoiled, but the better. It is as though
the unchanging character of European unity underlying all our shifting
divisions, and summed up in the name of Charlemagne, had come forth and
expressed itself visibly upon the shrine where he is buried.
This singular dignity, and what I have called ‘success’ in the spirit
of Aix, you find not only in the way it has treated its great central
shrine, but in the restoration of its few remaining ancient buildings,
and in the completely modern mass of its Town Hall. The old March Gate
has been restored from a half-ruined state, completely in our own time,
yet fails in nothing. It simply reproduces what the building was when it
left the hands of its first builders.
The Town Hall is still more modern. When one considers what our time has
done with its attempts to revive or copy a spirit which it thinks long
dead, when one remembers the false Gothic of Châteauroux, for instance,
and a hundred things in England, which are too familiar to us all, I
marvel that this work at Aix should have been done as well as it has been.
[Illustration: AIX-LA-CHAPELLE: RATHAUS.
To face page 184.]
In this same town of Aix there is a railway station which will show you
what an attempt to be original and to break with tradition can achieve
in the way of abomination. That was because the railway station was
built for, by, and under the spirit of monstrous new doctrines from the
Prussian East—if doctrine it can be called, for it is rather chaos.
But here in the Town Hall, where Aix has its own spirit at work, you
have the real German soul in architecture, the delight in great roofs
and somewhat fantastic towers, in romantic outlines, and in a pleasing
extravagance making mystery of the whole. To use the same word again,
this architecture ‘succeeds.’ Of the various towns of the Rhine March
it is to Aix that I would always return for the sense of unfathomed
antiquity, continuity, government. Round the old city there has grown
up a vast new population, unhappily industrial, and created by the new
mechanical expansion of the last fifty years. That has happened to
many another old city, the whole point and meaning of which lay in its
antiquity. It has happened to Oxford. It has happened to Rouen. But here
in Aix it seemed to me, as I travelled through, not to have destroyed the
meaning of the old, and not to be at enmity with it or to threaten it for
the future. I may be wrong; the spirit of modern competitive commerce is
capable of anything in its lack of intelligence. So far it has spared
Aix; and may Aix be spared for ever.
CHAPTER XXVI
METZ
Metz is the pendant of Aix-la-Chapelle. They are the two typical
frontier towns of the Rhine March: Aix German-speaking, Metz originally
French-speaking, neither of them more than on the fringe of the German
culture, yet neither of them divorced from that long series of accidents
whereby the civilisation of the Roman Empire and its Faith penetrated
beyond the great river, created mediæval Germany, and left, oddly
attached in theory to the mediæval imperial crown, broad belts of
land—extending as far as Lyons—which had never had any neighbourhood or
connection with the German tongue.
Metz was one of the ‘Three Bishoprics,’ all of them French-speaking,
all of them fortified towns from the very beginnings of history, until
the Great War; all of them showing the changes of fortification, phase
after phase of that art, from the Roman wall of the later Empire to
the ring of detached forts—‘the entrenched camp,’ as the French called
it—which was the system of modern defence until the airplane (directing
new artillery) destroyed it and has replaced it for the moment by field
works.
[Illustration: METZ CATHEDRAL.
To face page 186.]
These three bishoprics are Verdun, Metz and Toul. The third (like
Montreuil) escaped regular siege and fame in war for centuries, and
the vast sums spent upon its use as a stronghold were thrown away, as
they have been thrown away upon those successive modern navies which
grow obsolete without engagement. But Verdun and Metz are of the first
place in military history. The first most recent in our ears; the second
equally famous to the generation before our own, through the battles and
siege of 1870.
I have visited Metz over and over again during the last thirty-five
years, ever since my boyhood: under the German occupation a score of
times, and, since the Armistice, perhaps half-a-dozen.
What has struck me most there has been the effect of modern, compulsory
education, a system universally applied in Western countries to the mass
of the people, and only escaped by the well-to-do. Here in Metz it is
possible to get an object lesson of what that crushing, uniform social
machine can accomplish. Every building in Metz, save a few—artificial,
deliberately intruded, to which I will allude in a moment—is as French
as Nancy, Paris or Nantes. The cathedral is a typical piece of French
Gothic, without a trace of other influence. You might find it in Amiens
or Beauvais. The private houses have exactly the same mark. The cooking
(that excellent test of popular culture) is, and has always been, French.
The methods of agriculture around the city are French. The script in
familiar writing is French—everything of men’s lives is French to the
marrow. Yet in the streets of Metz to-day you continually hear German.
The popular newspaper is printed in German, and I think it is true to say
that the mass of the people now _think_ in German. If you were merely
to count numbers and not influence, you might call Metz a half-German
town in its speech. I may be wrong here, and those who know the town
thoroughly can correct me if I am; but certainly the impression of a
frequent visitor is at least of a half-Germanisation of local language.
Now this has been brought about by the steam-roller effect of the
compulsory elementary school. I can remember Metz a French-speaking town.
To-day you have the unnatural picture of a town, perhaps mainly, or at
any rate half, German-speaking, though it remains in everything but
speech as French as ever. It has all come about in one generation. Of
course, the work will be undone by the reversing of the engine, and
French will again take the place of German. It is the work of exactly one
generation to effect either change. But what a lesson in the socialistic
powers of the modern state and the impotence of the private citizen under
a modern executive! Metz is as French as Canterbury is English. If you
came back to Canterbury after an interval of thirty years and found
it mainly French-speaking, yet still drinking English beer and eating
English eggs and bacon and playing English cricket—let alone showing in
nearly all its buildings the unmistakable English type—you would have
some parallel to what has happened at Metz; and the moral is not that a
language easily changes, but that the modern state can do pretty well
anything by compulsory education. We should do well to meditate upon that
novel, arbitrary and tyrannical power.
[Illustration: METZ: THE RIVERSIDE AND CATHEDRAL.
To face page 188.]
I have said that the cathedral of Metz is essentially French. It is also
one of the finest in the world. It was not ruined during the German
occupation—whether because the original official architect was kept on or
not I cannot tell—but, at any rate, though some few of its details were
badly coarsened by unintelligent restoration, the building as a whole
remains a magnificent and typical monument of the French Middle Ages. The
glass has been admirably preserved, and under the German administration
the interior, in its lesser decorations, was (in my judgment) improved.
What mars the whole effect is a new western front.
The old western front was incongruous—but it was historical—it was a
heavy, false Renaissance, French classical front, plastered on to the
Gothic of the rest; much as the front of St. Eustache in Paris was
plastered on to the fine earlier marriage of Renaissance and Gothic in
that Parish church. The addition was made to commemorate the voyage—which
was half a pilgrimage—made by Louis XV. to Metz in offering thanks for
his recovery from illness. The Germans thought the incongruity must be
removed, in spite of its historical meaning—or perhaps on account of that
historical meaning. At any rate, they replaced it by a Gothic west front
in the ordinary Gothic style, of which nothing need be said save that it
appears much worse in combination with the ancient Gothic than did its
utterly different predecessor: for the one was good in its own style and
the other is not.
But what is enormous, unforgivable, grotesque and all the same
exceedingly instructive in this new west front, and what ought to make
it famous throughout the world, is a certain detail the like of which
you will not see matched in Christendom. Of four figures of the Old
Testament prophets (figures of heroic size which decorate this front),
one, that of the Prophet Daniel, is the deliberately executed portrait
of the Emperor William II! There he is, with his ultra-modern face, his
curled-up moustache, all the signs of what would be normal enough in
a suit of dittos or the uniform of a Prussian general officer, but is
absolutely stupefying in the robes and hood of a major prophet, and in
the convention of the Middle Ages.
[Illustration: METZ: THE GERMAN GATE.
To face page 191.]
The German occupation made other less eccentric, but equally artificial,
things. It planted a garrison church in the island suburb on the river,
designed after a modern idea of the Rhenish roofs and towers. It put up
one or two big shops in the dreadful fashion of Berlin; a well-organised
and hideous railway station; and, opposite it, a huge post office in
that same fashion of a monstrous Aztec sort of carving which has been
affected throughout the German Empire, and which I have seen polluting
architecture in the heart of Switzerland, and even as far south as Pola
and Trieste.
One feature Metz has, and one only, which not only recalls the domestic
and military architects of the Middle Ages, but has been, upon the
whole, not so badly restored by the alien Government which held it for
so many years. It is the old gate of the ramparts to the east, known as
the _Porte d’Allemagne_, spanning an affluent of the Moselle and the
deep ditch which formerly defended the city. It is a fine piece of work
sufficiently preserved; the modern reinforcement, made with fresh stone,
has not really spoilt it, and (what is important) no new stone has been
added where the old stone would serve.
But Metz has a meaning and a lesson for the statesman other than that to
be drawn from its language, or from its external being. For it was the
policy adopted with regard to Metz after the war of 1870 which led to
the final disaster of Prussia and to that new arrangement of the German
peoples which is not yet concluded, and the formation of which we are now
witnessing.
[Illustration: METZ: THE GERMAN GATE.
To face page 192.]
For after the sudden and complete victories of the German armies under
Prussian leadership fifty-seven years ago, the military party clamoured
that, in the terms of peace, the annexation of Metz should be included.
It is as certain as anything in modern history can be (and perhaps that
is not saying much, seeing how secretly all things have been accomplished
in our time) that the genius of Bismarck foresaw the perils that would
result from this error. He threw all his weight into the scale against
such a policy, but without avail. That great man, whom we may call the
Prussian Richelieu, had grasped all the factors of the problem before
him for the creation of a new Reich under the mastership of Prussia. He
had luck, of course, as well; for without luck a great man cannot make
his mark in international politics. But he had even more talent than
good fortune. He grasped, before his time, the unifying effect upon the
modern mind of a common language. He knew the gradual use to which so
superficial a test of unity could be put. He would have made the new
frontier coincident with the language frontier, and that line runs a
few miles east of Metz. All the rest of Lorraine east of that line is
German in speech, and so is the whole of Alsace. After one lifetime the
welding would have been accomplished and the violent political partition
forgotten. Unfortunately for the Hohenzollerns, the soldiers prevailed
over the diplomat. A purely French town was included in the annexation,
and it was this nucleus of anomaly which weakened the whole structure of
German Alsace-Lorraine.
I know not how many morals may be drawn from that one incident, but
the greatest of them is this: One man’s work must be left to one man’s
brain and to one man’s decision; a single interference in his scheme may
destroy the whole.
CHAPTER XXVII
TREVES
The town whose native name is Trier, but which is called in English
Treves, is yet again, like Aix-la-Chapelle, one of the essential
historical points of Europe. It was the city in which the later Roman
Emperors set up their thrones in order to stand against the frontiers and
to watch the business of the barbarians.
Not that they, or anyone in the Roman Empire, regarded the barbarians as
capable of destroying the Empire (nor did they destroy it); not that they
or anybody else thought there would come barbarian conquests (nor did any
such barbarian conquests come—they are the figment of the imaginations
of dons, who, for some odd reason, love to exaggerate the barbarian),
but because the Roman army, of which they were the chiefs and which was
holding all Europe together, had become largely recruited from Slavs
and Germans, and because other Germans and Slavs continually raided.
The Emperors went to Treves because from Treves they could better watch
the loyalty of federate troops under their command, who had brethren
beyond the Rhine, and the barbarian raids which constantly threatened.
Rome, be it remembered, was pushing outwards in influence much more than
the barbarian was pushing in. The coasts from Calais up to the Elbe
had learned to build boats after the Roman fashion, which made them
formidable at sea, and already, under Julian the Apostate, the valley
of the Main beyond the Rhine had plenty of good stone houses, built in
the civilised fashion. It was this double movement, the influence of
Rome beyond the Rhine, already apparent, and the German and Slav troops
with the Roman army and the raids from those beyond, which made the
later Emperors so often act from Treves and take Treves as their seat of
government.
The era of this official greatness in Treves was not long; perhaps a
hundred years; and even so, only intermittently during those hundred
years. But it was long enough to impress the little town with imperial
greatness, with the Roman grandeur. When a seat of government is thus
planted in a place, even for short, interrupted periods, economic power
of demand concentrates in the place and expresses itself in buildings—so
it was with eighteenth-century Dublin, so it was with Santiago, in
Galicia; so it was with Avignon. Treves, holding the court now and again
for short periods of the last Roman Emperors in the West, built great
things with the money of that court. By a most happy accident, most of
those great things remain.
For its size there is, perhaps, no place in Europe where the impression
of our foundation, our roots in the old Græco-Roman society, is more
evident to the eye. Not only does Treves preserve magnificent ruins,
which are the finest Northern monuments of our Roman origins, but there
is also about it an unbroken continuity. It has gone on from the Roman
day to this, changing, but still itself. On each occasion, whenever I
return to walk about its streets or to admire the very lovely statue,
which was made only the other day out of limestone and is on the
north-east pillar of the choir in Our Lady’s Church, I feel, more than in
any other town of Western Europe, more even than in little Pons, or in
Pevensey (where also I feel it acutely), my lineage and your lineage.
The great evidence of the past in Treves, the stones of which all its
citizens are most justly proud, the witness of antiquity, is the Black
Gate, the _Porta Nigra_. It stands looking westward, down the Moselle
valley, accepting the great route from Cologne and forming the most
ancient entry into the city. Such evidences of the greatness of that
ancient society once stood everywhere. Elsewhere, for the most part, they
have been destroyed, save where the desert or some accident has preserved
them. Timgad has its fine triumphal arch above the roadway; Orange its
entry under similar Roman masonry; but Treves has something enormous and
magnificent to show by way of a portal or introduction to the town and by
way of making us understand what the town in the height of its glory must
have been.
[Illustration: TREVES: PORTA NIGRA.
To face page 196.]
The _Porta Nigra_ was originally a great four-storied building, ended
and flanked by two big bastions, the road entry into Treves from Cologne
and the Germanies passing through the round arches in its centre, while,
above this, barrack rooms, or perhaps the quarters of civilian servants
took up the space.
It is astonishing how little it has lost in nearly two thousand years,
especially seeing that Treves has been raided again and again, although I
think, not as badly sacked as have been other cities. The south tower has
been somewhat ruined, the metal clamps of the stone have been robbed by
the soldiery of this, that and the other power, notably, it is said, by
the French in the revolutionary wars; yet the structure remains, strong,
erect, imposing, not apparently changeable. It impresses the mind much
as an object of nature may impress the mind, a mountain or an ancient
tree. I think if I had to show a man anywhere in Europe some external,
concrete, material thing which would make him realise the nature of our
long past, and if I had only one thing to show him, I would show him the
_Porta Nigra_ at Treves.
But Treves has much more to show. It is curious to note the Basilica
which Constantine put up and which was, happily, I think, restored as a
garrison church for the Prussian garrison before the war. I say ‘happily’
because this restoration has left us the building intact—there has been
no destruction. Yet it is not a happy but an unhappy thing to see a place
turned entirely from its old use and forming a kind of mixed body, half
of the whole modern, half ancient. Not that the thing has been badly
done—far from it—the proportions have been exactly observed; one side is
old and the other side is new; but, in the new part, even the size of the
Roman bricks has been copied accurately. It is quite a feather in the cap
of the Prussian administration that this most ancient thing should have
a modern use and should have been maintained alive. When I see its high
arch of brick, I think of those ruined semi-domes in the Forum of Rome
which also bear the name of the Basilica of Constantine.
[Illustration: TREVES: OUR LADY’S CHURCH.
To face page 199.]
Outside the city, to the south and east, lies the flattened ruin of
the amphitheatre, yet there also, in spite of the decay of its ancient
height, one feels the strength of the past, and I, for my part, many
years ago, sat me down on one of the lower benches, which is covered
now with earth, and pondered upon that arena; wondering what the sight
was like when Constantine the Great, newly arrived from York, threw to
the lions scores upon scores of Rhineland men who had attempted to raid
the Empire; while, no doubt, their brother Rhineland men, who had taken
service in the Roman armies, were watching, amused or impassive, under
their Roman uniforms, the spectacle of such a sacrifice. The garrison and
the victims were both Franks, but they felt no common bond.
Treves has, like all towns with any continuity, a mass of the Dark
Ages, of the Middle Ages and of the modern centuries. Much more than
most towns, it suffers no jerk at any point between them. You may stand
outside its ancient cathedral and look curiously at the Roman stones of
its base, just as you may look curiously at them at Aix-la-Chapelle.
You may distinguish in the structure the arches of the first Christian
time, of the later centuries of the Dark Ages, and you may note, exactly
adjoining, the new Gothic of the Middle Ages in Our Lady’s Church. Across
one of the streets an archway, bearing a stone crucifix, powerfully
reminds the onlooker of the religious struggle following upon the
reformation: quite a modern thing. The fountains, the public places, the
remnants of the fortifications, everything in Treves is continuous: a
series covering two thousand years.
[Illustration: TREVES: A ROCOCO DOORWAY.
To face page 200.]
But of all its monuments I feel the old palace of the Cæsars most. It
is in complete ruin, it is as ruined as the Roman wall of Silchester, or
the Thermes in Paris. Though its broken arches stand high into the air,
yet those halls are quite empty, unroofed, a mass of weeds and grass and
trees, with the small Roman brick hanging together by its cement.
There it was that the great tragedy of Priscillian was played out. That
magician, around whom such dark accusations lay, but who boasted the
pride of a Christian bishop in the beginnings of the Christian Empire,
was dragged up here to be tried. Here was he condemned; hence did he
go up to his death; and it was at the gates of this mighty structure,
then in its glory, that one of the greatest of all our European race,
Martin of Tours, stood apart against the trial and conviction—insisting
that no matter what the man had done, magician or no magician, he was
a Christian bishop and could not be condemned by a lay tribunal, even
though that tribunal were imperial. It is a marvellous story, full of the
change between the old pagan and lay conception of the state and the new
theocracy. Here was it played out, and these ruined brick arches of the
Cæsars’ palace make me live it over again.
CHAPTER XXVIII
BONN
The modern student of the Rhine, and all that the Rhine means for the
future of Europe, will see in it, if he is wise, a great evil and a great
interest. The evil is the evil of modern industrialism; the evil of the
coalfields. The interest—an absorbing one—is the recovery of the Rhine as
the chief highway of western Europe.
[Illustration: THE RHINE AT BONN.
To face page 201.]
Nothing can now prevent the Rhine from being an international highway
(and thereby a force making for European union) except some new
unification of the German culture under some new conqueror, such
as Prussia was in the lifetime before the Great War. If some such
conqueror should appear, and once more create an exclusive German
state, politically jealous, self-dependent, arrogant and including all
populations of German culture, then it is conceivable that the Rhine
should once again become a local, particular, national river, a cause of
dissension and a threat to peace. But if, as is more probable, no such
further conquest and welding into a new exclusive state appears, then the
Rhine will remain what it now is—and promises to be still more in the
future—a common bond for the material activities of Europe.
To-day that stream is an arresting sight for the eyes of a spectator who
desires, as I do, a new and communal European life. You see upon its
crowded water every flag of the states which reach its banks between the
Alps and the sea, and even of those, such as Belgium, whose traffic comes
to it by canals. You may see a French tug, towing a long train of very
large, deeply-laden barges, and that train flying Dutch, Belgian, German
colours. You will see a German tug performing the same office for another
train in which the Swiss red cross and the French tricolour appear, and
the whole of those hundreds of miles of rapid broad water remains in the
mind like the memory of a crowded street. The Rhine has recovered the
place which it held those hundreds of years ago when Christendom was
united.
But all this has been made possible only by the presence of the great
coalfield lying on its lower reaches, and by the industrial civilisation
based upon that coalfield; and it is here that you have the evil
side of the thing. For no one will now deny that human happiness has
severely suffered from the advent of these new powers. This disaster
has not followed upon a mere material cause. It was not coal, or the
mechanism which used it, that did us the harm: it was the rush of a
sudden development with which we could not cope, and—much more—the false
philosophy of avarice under which the development took place; a greedy
and individual error in the political action of man.
[Illustration: ROLANDSBOGEN, ABOVE BONN.
To face page 202.]
Take it all in all, the Germans have made a better job of the too-rapid
expansion than we did. They had the advantage of coming much later. Our
great towns sprawled out on coalfields, shapeless, hideous and morally
anarchic. The modern German industrial system had greater opportunity
to plan. None the less, here also the effect is evil. It is worst in
the main towns of the Ruhr, it is bad in the great capital of the
whole affair, Cologne, and all up-stream, wherever the great mass of
transported coal is used for manufactory or has its effect upon other
urban centres (such as Mayence), you have that deplorable degradation of
life into a mechanical system, and of mankind into a disassociated dust
of individuals, and of the works of man into the meaningless, or the
disgusting or the absurd; notably in architecture, and worst of all, in
the architecture of the last twenty-five years.
But in the midst of this there remain the older towns and the far higher
and older civilisation of the Rhineland. The contrast is almost as sharp
as the contrast here in England between our cathedral towns and our
sprawling manufacturing camps of brick and iron.
Of these older towns, the first upon which you come as you leave the
coalfield going southward up-stream is Bonn. Its university, its
typically Rhenish collegiate church, its traditional market-place, its
unchanged streets, the noble line of its seventeenth-century park and of
its stately academic buildings, all these are the older and the better
Germany—which still survives, and which it may be an effect of the Great
War to call back again into life under another form. Bonn has its roots
in Rome. It stands where it does as a Roman frontier garrison upon the
great river just below the Gorge.
This Gorge of the Rhine, that part of the river’s course which has been
so much more drawn and described, and known to our romantic fathers
and grandmothers than all the rest of its course put together, is,
geographically, a strange thing. It suggests the presence on the upper
river of a great lake, the bed of which lay between the Swiss hills and
the Taurus, and the flat bottom of which is now the Alsatian plain and
the rich alluvial land to the north thereof. It is as though, in some
cataclysm, a rift of sixty miles, sinuous and deep, had once cracked
suddenly through the mass of high hills to the north of such a lake and
drained it; so that after the breach was made, the lake ran dry, leaving
the upper Rhine winding through the midst of its emptied bed, the middle
Rhine confined within that Gorge, the lower Rhine spreading out again
through its flats to the North Sea.
This deep and narrow valley forms a short section of the whole story
of the Rhine, quite separate from the rest in physical character and,
therefore, in history. The crossings of the stream eastward and westward,
for war or for commerce, lay below and above that Gorge. Roman Bonn
watched the crossing below, Roman Mayence the crossing above: two gates.
In that deep valley the confusion, the noise, the waste, and the despair
of the great cities disappear. Every village, every ruined stronghold,
maintains its position; and to pass into it is like coming out from a
factory into the countryside, or like reading a book of a better time, in
which one may forget the surroundings of our own.
[Illustration: RHINE: THE DRACONFELS.
To face page 204.]
It is odd that these famous reaches of the great river, which had become
almost ridiculous in the eyes of moderns for their theatrical setting
and for the reiterated, somewhat clumsy legends which the guide-books
emphasise, should now, in their contrast with what lies above and below
them, have recovered so much dignity.
Who could have prophesied forty years ago that the over-picturesque
rocks and ruins and rapids (the Lorelei, which had become a jest,
and the Bishop’s Tower, and the rest) would become classic under the
pressure of new things and rouse our affections again? Yet that is what
they do to-day. I can imagine a man who had made his acquaintance with
Ludwigshafen and Cologne swearing that he would never see the Rhine again
unless it were above Bonn and below Mayence.
There is in all that piece of journeying up the Gorge nothing monstrous,
unless it be the statue of William the First at Coblenz, on the cape
between the Rhine and the Moselle; and that big and vulgar blunder is
rather absurd than monstrous. But the great engineering works, notably
the modern bridges of concrete or iron, which disfigure the river, are
absent from the Gorge. You leave behind you one of the worst at Bonn; you
are spared the sight of another until you are close upon Mayence.
[Illustration: BONN: A CORNER OF THE DOUBLE CLOISTER.
To face page 206.]
In Bonn itself the note of antiquity is struck especially by the
cloisters and their little, old squat palace, to which the Archbishops
of Cologne were driven in the early Middle Ages when they fled from the
rebellion of their capital city; and this typical monument of the German
past is not a rare exception to be sought out in the midst of vilely
different things (as are here and there such fragments in Cologne), but
is native to the city and on a scale with it, as is the great church
to which it is attached. The impression of antiquity here is strongly
heightened by the massive simplicity of short pillar, rude capital (often
unsculptured) and double rounded arch. It lacks the magnificence of
that later work which so weighs upon the mind at Worms and at Spires,
and which I shall next describe; but it the more suggests our passage
from the Dark into the Middle Ages, which transition such small, very
massive, domestic things recall. You may see something of the same sort
in the forgotten churches of the hills of Auvergne and in the very
oldest stones of the Jura. It is odd to find it surviving here, and so
thoroughly a part of and a centre of a city right on the main river of
the Western World. It seems to belong rather to the mountain regions from
which travel is diverted, and which have not the wealth to rebuild. It
is an introduction to all that tenacious chain of antiquity which runs
through the Rhine Gorge above the City, and which, in ruin or in careful
preservation, or in mere survival, carries on that soul of the Rhineland
which an alien Prussian rule from the east had so nearly ruined.
CHAPTER XXIX
WORMS AND SPIRES
Worms and Spires are the two towns on the Rhine which a wise man would
pick out as the two typical historic towns upon that river, because they
share the historical interest of the rest of the Roman chain—Cologne,
Coblenz, Mayence, Bonn, Basle—but, unlike all the others, have remained
exactly themselves; Worms very largely, Spires entirely, has remained the
city of the past, or, rather, has preserved its spiritual continuity.
Moreover, Worms and Spires are the two towns most intimately connected
with that great turning point in the modern history of the West,
the Reformation. It was at Worms that the new position was taken up
definitely in the Diet there held. It was at Spires that the name
‘Protestant’ took its rise, from the Protest of those in the meeting
there held that they could not accept the decision of their ruler.
There is also about these two famous towns something which you will
often discover in the intact relics of an earlier age; and that is, the
overwhelming proportion borne by the great church in the scale of the
little city.
[Illustration: WORMS: OLD HOUSES ON MARKET PLACE.
To face page 208.]
Elsewhere on the Rhine it is otherwise. Even the new mass of Cologne
cathedral is lost in the modern industrial town which lives by the
coal basin to the north of it. The ancient shrine of Mayence, with its
doors of one thousand years, stands greatly in the midst of the modern
industrial city, but is overwhelmed by that city.
In Worms and Spires it is very different. There the two majestic
buildings, thundering (if one may use such a metaphor in architecture)
with the last of the Dark Ages—two titanic structures in the round arch
and the last expression of ancient strength before it was transformed
by the vision of the French Gothic—occupy the eye from every side and
challenge the sky.
What it is that gives this effect of mass in architecture no one can
determine. It is, perhaps, a spirit in the builder, or, rather, in the
mood of his time, surviving the centuries and still proceeding from that
mind to ours. At any rate, so it is. You may show me modern buildings
of which the actual measurements are superior in any degree to those of
Worms and Spires, but not one of them produces the same effect of weight
and enormity.
The two towns have this great advantage, as modern places go, that they
are not on the main track of travel. Many expresses pass them; some few
halt at Worms. Even Spires is reached easily enough. But they do not
compel the traveller through the modern method of communication, and
they are left fairly alone. It is a great advantage. For the traveller
who would recapture the permanent spirit of the Rhineland it is an
incalculable advantage—thus to be remote, spiritually at least, from the
noise of modern Europe.
Of Worms the characteristic is rather the preservation of what was
domestic and familiar among western Germans before the new industrial
transformation. It is a town the old houses of which recall, as vividly
as a well-acted play or a well-written historical novel, the German
culture of the highest German time; lovable, familiar, a little confused,
but at ease and confident of itself. It is strange how fully that
confidence can be felt in the spirit of the place, when one considers
the passing and repassing of armies through it for centuries and the
destruction wrought by the wars in that frontier-belt.
Spires more than Worms, indeed, more than any other little city I know in
all the West, preserves itself wholly to itself.
I have written of Cherchell, on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa,
and said, quite rightly, that it was a little paradise.
[Illustration: SPIRES.
To face page 210.]
In quite another way, Spires has become an oasis of repose and quiet
delight in my recent memories of travel. There is the same isolation,
the same silence, the same goodwill; but the one is wholly of the North;
the other is of the burned and difficult Southern land held by arms. I
could imagine a man with full liberty taking his ease for the proper
months of the year alternately in Spires and in Cherchell.
At one end of the little town stands that high gateway, ‘The Old Gate,’
which is alive and august with the spirit of the German Middle Ages. At
the other stands the great block of cathedral: spoiled, indeed, by a
modern attempt at Gothic in its western end, but majestic in its multiple
lines converging towards the sky throughout the rest of its structure,
and provided with a measure of its vastness by the trees of the close or
little park round about it.
[Illustration: SPIRES: THE CATHEDRAL THROUGH THE TREES OF THE CLOSE.
To face page 212.]
Between the two runs the one great street of the place, very broad,
quite quiet, at peace. There is not an electric tramway in the place.
I had almost written (though that would be an exaggeration) that a man
sauntering by those old doors from that most ancient shrine which was
sacred to the Emperors, down to the tower height of the old gate, could
even forget petrol and the stench and noise thereof. I cannot quite write
that; nothing in Europe to-day is free from the internal-combustion
engine; but, at any rate, Spires is as free as it is given to any modern
town to be free of the modern evils; and the people who inhabit it have
for that reason retained a courtesy and a kindness which also the modern
world has forgotten.
Spires is a place to return to, and I shall return to it, unless, as well
may be, new troubles intervene. It is a city saved and content. Long may
it so remain!
CHAPTER XXX
THE VOSGES
In one section only have the Marches something of a natural frontier;
that section is the long line of rounded mountains spread with deep
forest called the Vosges.
Very soon, I suppose, the Vosges will be well known. They will be visited
by men of all nations, as to-day they are not, and as they have not been
since railways first were laid down to their approach. Meanwhile, they
still stand half apart, an attitude inherited from the abnormal fifty
years, which only came to a close at the end of the Great War. From 1871
to 1919 an artificial frontier ran between the German conquests of the
Franco-Prussian War and the territory of the French Republic. It followed
the crest of these mountains; but that crest is not abrupt, and though it
often (by no means everywhere) divides two forms of speech, it does not
divide two races. These solemn, rounded hills, with their deep forests
and leagues of solitude, their endless views to east and west over the
Gauls and the Germanies, are altogether one thing; almost as much one
in the soul of their people as in their physical structure, which is
nowhere interrupted by the precipice or the ravine.
I do not mean that the outer stamp of German architecture and manner on
one side, French on the other, do not form a sharp contrast, for they do;
and that contrast is to-day accentuated by the political action of the
last half-century. Put a man down in any one of the villages near the
sources of the Moselle and he could not mistake a French village. Put him
down in any village of the Munster or the Saverne valleys and he could
not mistake an Alsatian one. But in the long formative centuries prior to
the effects of central governments, in the great crucible of the Dark and
Middle Ages and on, well into the seventeenth century, when countrysides
formed naturally their own spirits and unities, the Vosges Mountains
and their people were one thing, though cut by the boundaries of petty
princedoms, of great dioceses and of monastic lands. The summer and
the winter customs, the complex arrangement of water rights, forestry,
pasture and the use of the streams were, and are, an inherited tradition
throughout the range as much on the east as on the west side; and were
one thing until the mechanical barrier of 1871 was established.
During all the time covered by the lives and memories of those who
to-day are not over sixty-five years of age, travel, growing universal
throughout western Europe, has missed the unity of, and largely avoided,
the Vosges. For during all that time this countryside, as large as a
couple of English counties, was the seat of a latent war. On the one side
were the packed garrisons of the French, on the other of the Germans. The
line in between was closely watched by sentinels and police and spies,
as a line is watched when hostilities may break out at any moment. Every
obstacle was placed to travel back and forth. No new tunnel through the
range was pierced from those early days of the Second Empire, when the
main line to Strasbourg had built for it the tunnel of Saverne, to the
present day. No great new road even, that I can call to mind, during all
those fifty years of French road-building, was allowed to link up with
the system beyond. The few passes served by such roads (the Schlucht,
the Bonhomme, and so forth) remained with no addition to their number
of any new passage for wheels. What had been left a footpath or bridle
track between the pines when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, remained
one throughout to the tragedy of 1914. Moreover, everything was done to
prevent international as well as local travel across the range. At a time
when all were free to go from one country to another without hindrance,
this line was blocked by passports. The object of the government of
Berlin was to compel travel to pass—and only necessary travel at that—by
the two railways, neither of which really touches the mass of mountains.
Even the coming of the motor car hardly affected this hindrance. Every
foreigner wandering on foot on the east side was suspect, as, indeed,
were most natives; while upon the French side, the turning of all that
district into one great camp hampered its use for any more human purpose.
It is true that a good deal of tourist traffic developed locally, on
either side of the range, especially on the French side. There were
mountain stations for the summer and a growing knowledge of these hills;
but the interruption of common travel from east to west as a whole
paralysed the district; and the higher valleys, and the great sweep of
woods, which form their unbroken character for many days of wandering,
were almost unknown to Englishmen.
That will now soon change, with the evils and advantages following on
such a change. I shall, for my part, regret the old loneliness, but no
one can regret the restoration of natural freedom which will have broken
that loneliness down. Before the war it was my custom, from the time when
I was an undergraduate, to cross this frontier without formalities. I did
so pretty well every year. There was a certain adventure about getting
down from the forests of the escarpment on the side towards the Rhine,
without running into the curiosity of questioning men; and in risking
one’s stay in the towns without a permit. It was especially amusing to
watch the military manœuvres in the plains and to study discreetly the
relations between the Alsatian people and the garrisons that kept them
down with arms piled in the street; and their relations, also, with
the new population which the German Government was steadily planting,
especially in Strasbourg.
The sudden and great prosperity of Germany after the Franco-Prussian
War, especially in the last half of the period, was nowhere felt more
than in Alsace, and it was apparent that as time went on the work of
transformation accelerated. There seemed to be here what you find
throughout history, I think, and what historians so often neglect, that
is, the effect of the unit of time formed by an average human life. Had
the occupation continued for another generation, I believe that the old
tradition would have been broken and that the crest of the Vosges would
have come to separate two communities as sharply as an arm of the sea. As
it is, the impress of those fifty years is still stamped upon the society
of the Vosges. I saw it this year, in a singular experience in one of
the higher eastern valleys, an experience you could not match in, say,
the Cévennes (though there, also, two contrasting religions stand side
by side), nor in the central Pyrenees, where you have two contrasting
governments and languages.
Two villages stood upon either slope of a valley beneath the great
forests which crown all the summits thereabouts. Between them ran a
little mountain stream which had, I suppose, been the boundary of
two lordships when the great religious quarrel settled down in the
seventeenth century. The one of these villages, that one which was
nearest to the crest, and, therefore, the nearest to the French-speaking
people beyond, was Protestant. The other was Catholic. The separation
in religion was sharper than you will get along the frontiers of the
two religions in north-east Ireland, yet the relations between the two
villages were familiar and intimate. The language of both was German; in
both French was spoken and understood; in each it amused me to observe
that the inscriptions upon tombs were German and in the Gothic script up
to 1871, and after that in French and in the Latin script; a very typical
form of protest. Upon the Sunday the inhabitants of either village packed
each its parish church, following each its separate rite; and I noticed
how the alien domination had not only preserved, but intensified, the
religion of the Catholic village. At the High Mass everyone packed into
the old building, the village _pompiers_ stood in uniform along the
central aisle in military fashion. Just before the elevation of the Host,
three men filed out of the church armed and, as the bell rang, a salvo of
guns was fired outside. That was something—the crowd of villagers, men,
women and children; no one missing; the salvo of guns—which you would not
have heard or seen in any other French province between the Rhine and the
Atlantic.
It will be curious to note in what places the new travel of the Vosges
will fix its centres. Munster, I think, will be one; Thann another.
Gerardmer will remain, of course, another; but I can imagine that with
the new opening of the roads, the northern half of the district will
most lose its isolation. They will make more of Rothau and Ste. Marie
and, perhaps, of St. Dié. What I profoundly hope will be spared—what I
think will be spared—(which is the reason I do not hesitate to speak of
it here) is that heavenly valley in the extreme south, which goes up
into the heart of the ‘Ballon d’Alsace,’ and recalls to me the hidden
higher valleys of California. Here the French army built a road (under
long-distance and desultory fire) in the course of the Great War. Before
1917 there had been nothing but an ill-distinguishable path threading its
way across high pastures and down through the very steep beech woods that
overhang the lake below.
I say I do not think that this delightful garden of the Vosges will be
overrun, because the new road will not tempt travel. The motors will, as
is their providential habit, follow the main great way down to Belfort,
or, if their destination is Mulhouse, they will go by the Moselle valley
and the Pass of Bussang. This diversion to the left will not serve
their purpose, and I shall find it, I fancy, as much mine in ten years
as I did not long ago, when I went down it with a companion, passing
the emplacement of the battery by what is called the Black Rock, on the
shoulder of the mountain, and looking down upon the lake and away towards
the high side of the Black Forest, a day’s journey off, beyond the Rhine.
_Part VI_
_Tournai_
CHAPTER XXXI
TOURNAI AND THE FIELD OF FONTENOY
There is an old town lying on the edges of the Teutonic-Flemish country
northward of the French-speaking people and just within the modern
boundaries of the modern State of Belgium. A sluggish river goes past
its venerable quays; its streets are inhabited by decent repose which
only now and then a market or a fair disturbs. Its buildings have the
dignity of the centuries; grey houses of stone of the just proportions
in which our fathers knew how to build. Its plan is of that irregularity
which you find in all the undisturbed cities of Europe, and which grew up
very slowly like an undergrowth of the original strict Roman parallels,
right angles and squares. From far off its higher roofs stand against
the sky in a fine outline and are framed in tall trees which dignify all
that flat country land of Flanders. But in particular its ancient belfry
shows against the grey sky of the north, and next against it five gaunt,
enormous towers which mark the chief glory of the place, and, to me, the
most interesting, I think, of all northern structures, the cathedral;
vastly more in scale than anything which a modern town of such a clime
would erect; a sort of town of itself within a town; a spiritual keep,
round which all the place gathers and up to which all its lines lead.
The name of this place is Tournai. It is forgotten; it is little more
than a railway station to the chance travellers; it has achieved none of
the fame which the later miracle of the Gothic has bestowed upon Amiens,
upon Rheims, upon Rouen, upon Chartres, and twenty other towns. It might
be thought hardly to count even in history, so little do men now remember
it. The great industrial hive of Lille close by quite shoulders it out
from the modern eye, for that is only a long day’s march away, and those
who pass it by have Brussels or Paris in their mind, or the Straits to
which they are going and the crossing over to England.
It is well that it should be thus passed by and remain intact and
unvulgarised in this time of ours when everything that is changed is
changed for the worse. Thus it remains for the delight of such few as
can take in the full pleasure of it and become one with its spirit;
for the place is steeped in history and counts in a fashion more as a
starting for the transition between Pagan and Christian times than any
other of the North, while, centuries after that origin, it is the town
of Fontenoy. Yet those who must concern themselves with the transition
between the Roman society of antiquity and the Christian Europe which
spread eastward thence, converted the Germanies, Hungary, the Poles, the
Bohemians, Scandinavia, East England and built up what has since been
Christendom, have forgotten Tournai and the Irish exiles, and do not hear
the name of Fontenoy.
[Illustration: TOURNAI.
To face page 224.]
I have said that Tournai was the starting point of the great change from
a Pagan to a Christian Gaul. It holds such a place in history for this
reason: that it was the seat of government of the Merovingian kings. Here
lies buried the father of Clovis, who here commanded the Roman garrison
of the place, the King of the Franks, and here his tomb was found two
hundred years ago, all Roman in design and spirit and the soldier within
it Roman in his accoutrements.
When the universal society of the Empire had grown old and was losing
vigour, when the seat of authority had been transferred to its distant
Greek-speaking half and Constantinople had usurped the place of the
Eternal City, the two great marks of the new time were the transformation
of the army and the gradual establishment of the Catholic Church as the
soul of civilised mankind.
The transformation of the army, very gradual, lasting over centuries, had
changed it from an Italian to a provincial, and from a provincial to a
half-barbaric thing.
Its recruitment had been drawn at first from the citizens of Rome alone,
and by universal levy. That was in the very old times when the city was
beginning its first steps towards universal rule and had gone no further
than to extend a power over near neighbouring towns and tribes which were
rather allies than subjects. That mastering army, as it vastly increased,
still remained Italian in recruitment during the struggle with Semitic
Carthage, which it destroyed, and during the sudden expansion over Gaul
and Spain and the fierce civil wars between the great rival leaders of
the Republic. Already in those civil wars there had appeared a certain
foreign element; small bands of Germans hired by the competing generals
had been seen in the field; certain Slavs, the Moors of the North African
coast and Orientals too—it would seem here and there even some few
Mongols. But the great bulk of the armed men were of Italian stock or
Gallic. The great bulk of them had been born in the full tradition of
civilisation and the army retained the character of that civilisation.
But with the advent of the Empire, its peace, security and wealth,
its vast extent, its preoccupation with frontiers against barbarism
and the East, the nature of the Roman armies changed. Very gradually,
imperceptibly, in a process which covers four hundred years, the legions
grew sedentary, found their recruits from the men of the countryside
wherein they were stationed, pensioned off their veterans with local
land; continued the service with those veterans’ sons. And, side by
side with these, as the population now wholly civilian and increasingly
averse to arms, gradually abandoned military force, there were enrolled
‘federates,’ as they were called, groups of half-civilised men from
beyond the frontiers, barbarians, who desired nothing better than to
enjoy the high civilisation which they interpenetrated but which they
could not build. These bands, organised under their tribal chiefs as a
rule, for the most part German in their origin and speech (though there
were many other stocks among them, Mongol, Slav, Berber and the rest)
come very gradually to be the main vital stock of the imperial forces. In
the very end of ordered and united social rule, the two Roman generals
who stood on Italian soil, now allied, now engaged in civil war one
against the other—Stilicho and Alaric—were, the one a Vandal (that is,
presumably a Slav with German admixture), the other a Goth. And all up
and down the Empire you found, wherever you turned, garrisons and armies
commanded by barbarians.
The change was fundamental, for Roman society was held together by the
army and was governed as a military state. The word ‘Emperor’ itself
means nothing more than commander-in-chief; and title after title, to
descend at last in much later times into other meanings, the duke, the
count, the centurian, later the centenarius, were terms of military
command and titles of military rank in the Roman service.
Before the end of the fifth century, between the years 400 and 500, just
as the last powers of rule and taxation from Rome were ebbing away, when
the Empire had ceased to renew the garrisons in Britain and later had
ceased to send its officials into Gaul and Spain, government was taken
over by the heads of these barbaric troops, Goth, Burgundian, Vandal and
the rest. Nothing could have seemed more natural and more inevitable to
the time. They were part of the Empire as they had always been, though
that Empire had ceased to be a political unity. Its coins, its laws, the
whole structure of its society, went on uninterrupted, but the executive
power had passed to these local chiefs and, among them, one in the North
particularly concerns us and Tournai.
He was the general in command of some small ‘federal’ force consisting in
recruitment of ‘Franks’—a term which does not stand for any particular
stock or race, but for a confederation, probably loose, and varying
widely in size at different times, of armed bands along the lower Rhine
and on the course of the Meuse and of the Scheldt. Such of them as
lay beyond the Empire had often raided it and had suffered for their
temerity, cut to pieces, thrown to the beasts of the arena, sold into
slavery. Others had accepted Roman service as federates, and of these
that group which was to be of most moment to the story of the world lay
here round about Tournai, from which citadel the tribal chief or ‘rex’—as
the Romans called him—ruled. He was a Pagan and we know his name. His
name was Childeric. He died and left a son, Clovis, no more than a lad in
his sixteenth year, but accepted as leader and general through hereditary
right. The general fought with another general of another band to the
west of him, a certain Syragius, defeated him and joined the government
of all that lay beyond the Somme to his own. It was from Tournai then
that the great adventure started which was to lead to the final triumph
of the Catholic Church.
For though Roman society was now in the mass Catholic, though there were
now bishops in all the chief towns and the hierarchic organisation of
the West was fully founded, yet by a curious historical accident, at
first deplorable but destined to lead to the best of results, most of
the local governments, their rulers and their courts, were Arian, that
is, opponents and persecutors of the Catholic name, somewhat after the
fashion in which the Irish garrison has been its opponent and persecutor.
These barbaric chiefs had got such a taint from the fact that the Emperor
himself, his court and influence had been Arian at the moment when the
great change came. The new rising power in the far north, the army led
by Clovis, the influence which had sprung from Tournai, was an exception.
Its commander was Pagan. The few thousands of his command were a mixed
body of Pagan Franks speaking the Flemish tongue, of Gallo-Romans and of
ordinary citizens and barbarians. The ruler himself was not yet of the
Faith.
In that he was married to a Catholic wife from the South, he was spared
the hatred and animosity which the population and its leaders, the
bishops, felt for the Arian rulers elsewhere in the West. While he was
taking up the perpetual Roman task of driving out the barbaric raiders,
the ceaseless Roman task of defending the Rhine frontier, he gained a
victory at Tolbiac in the Rhineland (it would seem to be Zulpich) which
he put down to the God of the Christians, upon whom he had called. On
Christmas Day of the year 496 he was baptised with the Pagans of his
little army, and from that moment there was a Catholic sword in Europe.
The populace demanded Clovis. He marched south to their aid, he overthrew
the Arian governments of the South, he began the reuniting of Gaul, and
he died possessed of, and leaving to his sons, the enormous field of that
quadrilateral between the Pyrenees and the Channel, the Atlantic and
the Rhine, which was the heir of Rome, contained its living traditions
and carried on its mission. He was still but a part of the Empire; he
thought it before his death a great honour to be given by the Emperor at
Constantinople a subordinate title, but he was the sole true ruler of
Gaul. It was from such a new foundation that the later universal rule of
another house, the house of Charlemagne, was to spring, and it was from
such a platform that the conversion and the subjugation and the gradual
civilisation of all countries beyond the Rhine was to be made, until at
last Christendom appeared in its fulness: Christendom which is to-day in
peril.
And the point of origin of all this was Tournai.
It is no wonder that with such thoughts in mind a man approaches with
awe, across the long cornlands of the plain, the five high towers,
standing up towards the northern clouds. They mark, as I have said, the
great church which rose upon the foundations of that earlier basilica
wherein had been buried the founder of the French monarchy—of the ‘men
of the first race,’ as the French call them (the second being the
Carolingian, the third the Capetian).
It was not the Merovingian blood from Tournai which continued the line
down through the centuries uninterrupted. The family decayed; within
three centuries another had supplanted it; within three centuries again a
third had taken over the rule of Gaul. But it was the ruling family at
Tournai which started the tradition, which began the spread of the French
realm and from which the crown of France had taken its rise.
Though there remains very little of that original Roman church in which
the Childeric lay dead, clothed and armed for the tomb, yet the cathedral
at Tournai, rebuilt, carries on most strongly its very ancient tradition
of building. The round arch is everywhere, the small low door, the hugely
thick wall, and, although it came so many centuries later, a man looking
from the north, against the stern naked height of unrelieved stone which
soars up in the growth of the transept, is reminded of that Roman gate
in Treves. This impression of antiquity and of a solid Roman thing is
not destroyed by the later apse, and though that apse has copied the
pointed arch of the Gothic, the general spirit of Tournai still remains
that of stones much older than the spirit of the thirteenth century and
conforms, visibly stamped with limitation, the certitude, the strength,
of the Dark Ages. But there is even very much later work within Tournai
cathedral which still does not detract from that weight of a simpler
past; notably there has been flung across the front of the choir a rood
screen of the Renaissance, exquisitely worked, and the side chapels have
altar glass, but though a man has curiously noted each of these details
in their excellence, there still remains with him as a permanent memory
of the place those stark, exceedingly ancient walls, those small, round,
weathered arches of lasting stone, those wholly simple short pillars
which support them, and all the feeling of the time when Europe was
standing at siege, yet hammering out against the North and the East the
centuries before the great crusading march, the centuries of endurance
and of perennial fortitude.
[Illustration: TOURNAI CATHEDRAL.
To face page 232.]
From four to three miles south-east of what were once the city ramparts,
lies the famous battlefield of Fontenoy; the whole meaning of which turns
again upon the town of Tournai, though under conditions wholly changed
by the passage of so many centuries—1300 years since the place was the
capital of Childeric’s garrison and his little Roman army of Frankish
soldiery.
Tournai was invested by the French armies in the great war of the Spanish
Succession in 1745. There marched to its relief a large mixed force of
English, Hanoverian and Dutch and a contingent of troops of Austria.
They were met upon the rising ground east of the Scheldt. Louis XV.,
the King, was there with his heir, in the angle formed by the front of
the defence which lay in right angle thrust forward against the attack,
so that one side, to the right, was exposed to the Dutch advance; the
other, that to the left and the north, to the English, Hanoverian and
Austrian. Westward, beyond the river, high batteries could just reach
the enemy, and either end of the French right angle reposed upon the
river. At the apex of that front was the little village of Fontenoy,
which gives the battle its name, but it should more justly be called ‘the
Battle of Tournai’; for upon its issue depended the fate of the siege
of the campaign. The French strength in artillery was so great, their
defensive organisation was so strong, that it seemed after the first
attacks of that famous morning as though nothing could shake the line.
All the first efforts against it broke down and that with heavy loss when
a final effort was made by the English and Hanoverian troops. It stands
out as the most vivid episode perhaps in all European fighting between
the Wars of Marlborough and those of the Revolution, and which still, in
particular, remain fixed in the tenacious memory of the Irish because
of the part they took in the final stroke which decided the day. The
English and Hanoverian column, very dense and deep and dragging its few
pieces with it by men’s labour, attempted the apparently impossible task
of forcing that defensive front after such heavy and murderous failure
during the preceding hours. The effect of their advance was profound
and unexpected. Their discipline was so strong, their fire so accurate
and sustained, that they had begun to throw their enemy into confusion
within the first half-hour of their advance. The battle, which had
seemed already won for the French King, was imperilled, and might have
been thought at one moment lost, so heavy were the casualties, so rapidly
increasing the confusion in the line. There was a critical moment when it
seemed indeed as though nothing could coordinate the spasmodic centres
of resistance still remaining, but there entered into the action just at
that decisive point the factor which Marshal Foch put tersely enough when
he said that ‘it was the last quarter of an hour.’
The attack all but succeeded, and it deserved to succeed, if only for
the iron binding of the English and Hanoverian forces, and for that
highest of the silent military virtues which it had displayed. Already
the King of France had been warned to seek safety and had refused, and
already the last efforts seemed upon the French side to be failing
when Saxe, tortured as he was by the illness which killed him and only
carried from place to place in his wicker chair at the cost of excessive
pain, attempting to rally the dissipated and separate last forces of
resistance, could see that the enemy advanced itself, the strict column
which had not hitherto wavered and which had so penetrated as almost to
dislocate his line, had not only reached but passed its breaking point
of strain. It had all but conquered. It could not conquer because its
bleeding and exhaustion was just in that turn of fate too much for it.
Against it, thus wavering, Saxe managed to rally and coordinate all that
he had beneath his hand and to organise and to let loose a converging
fire. The opposing column was on the point of breaking. Then did he
launch the cavalry, and among them was that Irish brigade which has
taken its place in legend. They were near the wood to the extreme left
of the French line, and they covered the interval of fields at the trot,
they charged on the now failing opponent with all the rest of the horse
serving the King of France, and it was this cavalry charge which ended
rather than decided the day.
The field lies to-day as do most of our European battlefields, deserted
and silent. Its small woods are what they were so long ago—nearly two
hundred years—its little villages are grown no larger. The sluggish
narrow water of the Upper Scheldt crawls now as it did then up to the
city northward and through its quiet quays; and from the highest points
to the stage upon which all that carnage was played out, one sees against
the northern sky much what one would have seen so long ago, specially
those five giant towers of the cathedral. You find upon Fontenoy, as you
find upon the land of Waterloo, of Crécy, of Blenheim and of nearly all
the great battles, a peculiar and haunting silence and a vivid absence of
men which makes the memory of the place the more inhabited by the past.
Nearly all the great battlefields affect me thus, none more than this
open, windy place under the Flemish sky, with the shafts of the cathedral
to the north and the quiet of Flanders all around.
_Part VII_
_Three Towns of Life and Death_
CHAPTER XXXII
NARBONNE
Upon a Whitsunday I found myself returning from the Balearics, through
Spain, to that luxuriant warm plain between the mountains and the sea,
which the Romans knew as the “Narbonnese.” It was the wealthiest district
of their Gaul; grouped round its great central port; the pole of so much
energy, superb achievement and tradition.
I had spent these spring weeks, from April onward, in passing through
the recovered countries of Sicily, North Africa and Spain, drawing and
writing upon the towns in which our civilisation has re-established
itself, so gradually, recovering them from the flood of Mohammedanism in
which they had been for centuries drowned.
Here, in the Narbonnese, I was at the end of that excursion and back
again in the unbroken tradition of our people and of the Faith. For
though the Saracen flood had indeed beaten upon the walls of this place,
and though sundry small garrisons of Islam had lingered on between
the Pyrenees and the central mountains of France, yet they had not
here occupied, ruined or transformed, as they occupied, ruined and
transformed elsewhere. And Narbonne catches on back through 2000 years
to its origin without interruption, and has, stored up within itself,
the very essence of Rome. It was in these fields that the great landed
family, the highest name in whose lineage was that of Charlemagne, had
its origin and root.
For Charlemagne was, on his father’s side and by direct descent, the head
of the Ferreoli, Roman nobles of the Narbonnese.
The place is better suited for the conservation of the past and for the
handing on of most ancient memories to us, the modern passers-by, from
the fact that it is decayed. Those great centres of Europe which have
been continuously active from the Pagan days to our own, have largely
destroyed, with rebuilding and with the change of fashion, the material
objects of their inheritance. But towns which have been arrested at some
moment and fossilised, as it were, present the remote past, and we can
live it again within their walls.
It is so with Narbonne. The great port which had been filled for so
many centuries with all the shipping of the Mediterranean, which had
been greater than Marseilles or Genoa, had rivalled Naples opposite,
and was the queen of all that coast between Tarragona and the Atione,
slowly filled. The land rose in one of those imperceptible movements
which change political geography, and the great land-locked bay turned,
as the centuries proceeded, into a shallow lagoon, with but one issue,
where a small port called the New Port continued to carry on perhaps
one-hundredth of the trade that the mother city had once conducted.
That mother city slowly turned to a shrunken, inland place, its ancient
function lost.
And the date of the turning point, when at last the narrows had become
too difficult, and the harbour too shoal for a continued life, is well
fixed by the enormous cathedral and palace of the Bishop, which stand
like a fortress, and are yet uncompleted, halted at mid-building in the
very midst of the Middle Ages.
The Palace of the Popes at Avignon, nearly contemporary, is larger and
even more solid in effect, but it does not pretend to combine church and
stronghold. Here in Narbonne both the ideas are commingled and form one
thing. Coming upon it from the outer streets, if you approach by the
palace side, you see indeed the buttresses and the ogives of a Gothic
church, but there is a strength and bigness, a massiveness of stone, a
reduction of ornament, which still suggests the fortress and the keep.
Next you notice that the huge thing is incomplete. It was never finished.
It has an apse with transepts only begun, and where the nave should be
are only the unconnected juttings of great stones squared for the builder
and uncontinued.
But this effect of power and of resistance, this character of standing
for a siege, which is the chief mark of the cathedral of Narbonne,
disappears in a sort of magic and a transformation when one passes the
door and gets within. Then all is suddenly changed into a place of
coloured light. And that which externally was all shoulders and masonry,
seeming to allow but small open spaces between, from within is one great
round of those solemn and soaring windows which turn the greater glories
of the thirteenth century into a vision.
When I thus came to Narbonne, it being yet long before noon in the
mid-morning, a strong May sun poured through that glass and made the
whole airy cavern celestially alive. It seemed to have (though it had not
actually the measurement) the height of Beauvais, the majesty of Paris,
and something of the magic of Chartres.
For the thirteenth century learned to work this miracle of contrasts:
so to arrange the external stonework that its characteristics to the
onlooker from without was the strength of this world, but so to devise
the interior with the least proportion of fine, long-drawn supports, that
the lights were its universal mark, and that the building itself seemed
half air.
I came to the town just in time for the Great High Mass of Pentecost, and
going straight to the palace and past it into the cathedral, I took my
place in what were once the stalls of the canons (for, as I have said,
there is no nave, and only the choir is roofed), till the procession
entered, and the Sacrifice began.
It was an experience such as I shall not have again, I suppose, in this
life; such as I had not had before in all the many years and towns of
my travels. For there met in combination there, by some divine chance,
certain streams of emotion, their combination all enhanced by the quality
of the place. What I had just seen in Barbary, the several crossings of
the Mediterranean Sea, the town under the strong light, the mountains
to the south and to the north, far away, the richness of the plain,
the great story of activity and of decay, all this combined to give an
immense significance to this which I was about to follow, this Act,
repeated daily upon ten thousand altars, which is also more significant
than anything else in the world.
It was as though this High Mass which was about to open had something
about it especial; catching up the spirit of the myriad others which in
succession were rising to meet the sun in the progress of morning light
around the world; and I was filled with the recollection that I had
chanced, by the best of fortunes, to find myself here upon the Feast of
the Holy Ghost. It was a little after nine o’clock of the morning of that
Whitsunday.
Men are often blamed (and more often justly blamed) for permitting the
sensual to invade the intellectual; that is, for allowing their judgment
(which is our highest faculty, after love) to be warped by the appetitive
in man.
On this account it is that the detestable Manicheans (for whom the
modern name is ‘Puritans’) reject the proper glories of public worship
and the unison of the whole of man into the act of God’s praise and
of God’s service. Without considering their unhappy malformation, it
remains true that a man must never misinterpret his mere emotion for
faith, nor his mere mood for intellectual assent and conviction; still
less must he ever substitute intention for act, and a feeling, however
strong, for achievement. Faith is of the will. He would be a poor heir
of the Catholic Church who would consider the splendours of her most
noble pageantry in the greatest Mass, as in some way adding to the inward
values and to the unseen glory of a low Mass said hurriedly in some
chapel of a hamlet.
Nevertheless, I would advance it to be true that the soul is supported
by all sacramental things; that is, by all unison of the mind and the
body upon a proper object; and that when great architecture and glorious
colour and solemn music, and the profound rhythms of the Latin tongue,
and the ritual of many centuries, and the uncommunicable atmosphere of
age, all combine to exalt a man in his worship, he is made greater and
not less. He is supported. He is fed.
Well do I know that the greatest of visions have come to men in small
rough huts of stone, round in shape, piled by their own hands above the
Western seas of Ireland or in the Hebrides. And I know very well that
these men scaled heaven.
I know also that men similarly isolated in the deserts between the Nile
and the Red Sea perceived our final inheritance and were admitted into
divine company.
There is no necessity of any aid from the senses; and the greatest of
those who were adepts in the search for heaven did, upon the contrary,
withdraw themselves from all influence of the senses when they most
desired the satisfaction of the _prægustatum_—the foretaste of that for
which we were designed: our home.
But I cannot boast myself to be of such a kind, and on my own poor level
it is landscape, the sea, human love, music, and the rest, that help to
make me understand: and in their absence I am very empty indeed.
Now here in the cathedral of Narbonne, upon the Whitsunday of 1925,
having so come in with one companion in the morning of a hot summer’s
day, after so much exploration of the heights of Africa, so much
watching of the conflict between Islam and ourselves, so much content
in the glories of Spain and in the peace and wealth and good manners of
Palma, of Majorca, so much breathing of the Mediterranean air in long
nights upon the decks at sea, certainly all the support requisite, all
the augmentations valuable to a man of my kind, came very fortunately
together; and I received, at this Whitsunday High Mass in the cathedral
of Narbonne, what I had desired to receive: a great good.
The over-cautious heretics who misunderstand the end of dignity do not
confess these things to their fellow beings. But I am willing to confess
them, well knowing, first, that dignity is of another kind; secondly,
that whatever has done oneself good should be communicated to others;
and, thirdly, that the whole affair lasts only for a little time, and
that we are bound upon a very different journey from that of this world.
Well then, the Mass began. They bore above the head of the celebrant
priest that round shade of silk which had also come centuries and
centuries ago from Rome. They had their particular rites of the
bishopric, and of their tradition. They read the Gospel, not from the
altar steps, but from high up near the roof, above the heads of the whole
people; from the organ loft, in splendid fashion. And when they sang
the _Veni Creator_, I could swear that the spring sunlight which fell
coloured on the stone floors took on another quality.
And I remembered the singing of that same song on the great day when St.
Dominic sang it upon the scaling ladder, and our people stormed the wall
and destroyed the mortal Albigensian peril, and restored Europe.
I must tell you that all this time the Blessed Sacrament was exposed
above the altar on a very high place in a blaze of light. The Mass
proceeded; the final prayers were said; the thing was over.
If I could have got into that nave of Narbonne all the starved,
unbelieving men cut off from the past in the dissolution of our modern
world, there would have come out some reasonable proportion restored to
the traditions of Europe.
CHAPTER XXXIII
CHAISE DIEU
On the level summit of a mountain-land, not isolated, yet above the
general confusion of the bare hills—looking over a deep toward the
sombre wall of the Margeride beyond—stands the Chaise Dieu. It is a
church of granite, enormous, forsaken and alone. Attached to it, a sort
of fortress, hangs a cube of high-walled building, equally huge and
deserted, which once held its community. A sombre warden keep or tower
and a guarded gate, deep like a tunnel, watch toward the east. The face
of the great shrine watches toward the west; but it seems blind or fixed,
without that movement in stone, that expectation, which is the note of
Christian shrines; without that serenity which is the note of Pagan. It
is enchanted; not asleep, but gazing dumbly; and its sheer blanks of wall
confront time. They are very dark; and their simplicity is more than
austere, for it has about it something of doom. The two square towers
which our civilisation sets upon the face of its temples are here the
two strong limbs of a giant beast, neither in repose nor at bay, but
eternally awaiting. I know nothing like it in Europe.
About the great affair still gathers a little town, impoverished since
the life of its overwhelming maker sank into such silence. The inns are
small and ill-frequented. The flow of human power has left the hill and
its wealth is no longer gathered. I believe that few to-day have seen or
know the place or even read of it. Yet one of the main roads to the south
passes over that summit. Le Puy, which all the world talks about, is a
day’s walk upon one side; Vichy—which might be Ascot or Nice—is two days’
walk upon the other. The Chaise Dieu is preserved by that ironic power
which sends wealth to live down noisy highways and protects whatever
desires to be silent and to endure. It can build up its memories within
itself and await securely the return of its business. No sound disturbs
it.
The name it bears signifies ‘The House of God’—‘Casa Dei’ (for the
mountaineers of Central France soften the Latin ‘c’ into ‘ch’)—and that
name hangs fittingly about the mighty roof; it is consonant with the
purpose of those stones: their centuries of strength, their unchangeable
hard lines, their purpose of resurrection. If ever too great a title
might be excused it is here. For there is a sense both of habitation
brooding about the stronghold and of supremacy; and each of these its
soundlessness to-day enforces.
Its foundation was new when they fought at Battle; the later stones are
of the fourteenth century. It will not seem older in a thousand years.
The profound and simple windows which pierce its man-deep sides might
be unglazed and a passage for storm-winds without affecting its aspect.
Its monstrous oak doors might be taken away and yet leave the aspect the
same. It depends upon no ornament; but is a majesty in itself, in its
proportion and assize, its weight upon the rock from which it was hewn.
The hurricanes of winter on these Avernian summits, their long depths of
snow, and their frosts so near the stars, and the brazen heat of their
summers on the bare uplands, do nothing to the exact fitting of those
stones or to their surface; less than to the quarries whence they came.
It is as though the men who built them up and squared them had known
spells; or as though they had been given power to bridge across decay
from their own time, through outs, to a return.
I came upon all this through the deep woods which cover the mountain on
its northern slopes and cease towards its summit. I discovered the mass
of the thing suddenly, not a mile off, towards the approach of night.
Indeed the evening was far advanced, the trees had already grown dark
against the smouldering sky, and the water of the ponds had taken on
that dead flat white which they present to the beginning of darkness,
when I came upon those harder lines of granite and that black immensity
towering. I entered by a very broad and high archway to the side of the
church in the monastery wall. I went up a flight of steps made as though
for a host of men, as broad as a river, dark now, and echoing too loudly
to a single tread; there was no voice near: nor any other sound. I came
abruptly into the awful emptiness of that nave. The last glimmer of
light, within, barely distinguished floor from wall, and the roof was
all gloom. The powerful arches of the windows were exactly cut against
the last faint colour from the west. I stood there till this had wholly
faded, and the first stars were seen.
With the morning I returned. The solemnity of the place was oddly greater
under the effect of day. And this was because the bare stones, upon
which in the darkness one might have imagined relief, were seen to be
unadorned. The effect was greatly emphasised by the one monument the
place contained.
For, in the midst of the church, stands an exquisite tomb, the tomb of
that Avignon Pope, Clement, who had concentrated so much wealth upon this
rebuilding of the Chaise Dieu, and who desired to connect it for ever
with his name. The tomb is of black and white marble, and the anarchists
of the Huguenot rebellions (who went about destroying all they could of
ancient beauty) shattered the minor statues wherewith it was surrounded.
I am not sure that they did not increase the value, through isolation,
of what remains: the noble figure of the dead, and the contrasting
simplicity of the twin-coloured stone. There is a Dance of Death upon
part of the wall; there are also tapestries hung, not very large. There
is woodwork, but not of a sort enriching or dominating the great space,
and, for the rest, there is still this strange emptiness, as though the
whole place were a tomb, with this one reclining figure in its midst.
Even if one had not heard a word of the long history one would know the
place to be haunted. Here Anselm waited upon the mountain height for
the message from Rufus. That is truth—but there is also an odd legend.
For men here showed the tomb of Edith, the Confessor’s Queen, Harold’s
sister. Yet surely the Conqueror had her buried by her husband’s side at
Westminster? I know not how the story arose, but they seemed convinced
that she came in her widowhood to retirement here and here died. She was
the only one of Godwin’s hateful blood for whom men could find a good
word. But how came she to be linked with this deserted hill?
That, then, is the Chaise Dieu. I left it by noon to go down the long
mountain slope towards Le Puy. To my right, as I journeyed, still stood
endless, level and high, the blue ridge of the Margeride; and I could
fancy to hear—though it was a long day’s walking away—the tumbling of the
torrent Red Cap, which roars through its gorges. Before me and to the
left, the Cévennes showed an indigo edge of lump and peak. All about me
was the burned land. But the landscape was filled with the spirit of the
Chaise Dieu as a garden is changed and informed by music.
I could wish to return in a hundred or two hundred years and see whether
my guess that the great place should come into use again had proved true
or false; for certainly it bears the air of a foundation intended to
endure, and to be restored to life.
CHAPTER XXXIV
CORNETO OF THE TARQUINS
Corneto stands upon a rocky hill that overlooks the Mediterranean, three
miles away and below, over a dead-flat plain of marsh and fever. It is
the town of the Tarquins. Its name is still ‘The Tarquinian.’ Its gate
is the Tarquinian Gate. That great lordship still hangs over Corneto;
the family that gave Kings to Rome. They might return after twenty-five
centuries and find the place still their own; for it is still Etruscan,
and, what is more, Etruria has here risen from the dead. The thousand
tombs have sent back to the light strong faces in stone, and stone
coffins sculptured with the fates of the soul, and vases carrying every
picture of that life, and the ornaments of women—still to be worn. The
spirits have refused to leave that ground.
It was the sacred and perhaps the chief of the Etruscan cities—the one
lying most to seaward, and that which had outside its wall a national
cemetery stretching for miles to the east and the south. Above the sharp
precipice to the landward, where the wall stands most forbidding and with
its most ancient foundations apparent, a man sees from the ramparts
that cluster of mountains, the old volcanoes, which are the makers of an
undying race; the burnt land of Tuscany, mother of Gods and Kings. None
knows whence the blood came, or sprung from the very earth or brought in
from oversea; but that same soil where the old fire smoulders underground
and where the silent craters hold very wide lakes of water high above
the world in their rims, that same igneous dust which subtly strengthens
the vine, made the Etrurian people and through them the iron laws, the
subterranean vision of death, the dusk of religion, which they imposed on
Rome and from which we all inherit.
For, indeed, the business of the soul and the doom of man haunted this
people. On the day when I watched the mountains to the east from the
walls of the Tarquinian crags—mountains of Orvieto, of Volterra, of all
the federation—angry storms swept those summits, and the Sirocco piled
clouds above the heights and veiled them here and there with rain; though
westward, towards the sea, it was already clear. It was under such storms
a man could best brood over the sweep of slope and barren rising down,
which hid (save for small entries of white against the dark wrack) the
miles of tombs.
I did not descend among them, among those dead. I did no more than walk
out through the early evening into their vast, deserted field. I came
back before the end of the day to look at the great stone coffins which
have been gathered in the museum of the town.
Though that museum is a lovely palace of the later Middle Ages, I found
no shock of discontinuity between the time of the tombs thousands of
years ago, of the palace five centuries ago and my own time in the quiet
town. All had grown; and, what was more, the domination of the founders
has so impressed itself upon Corneto that the oldest things and the
latest are in the same air.
With what majesty are the stone faces upon those very ancient coffins
hewn! I saw one there of a young man not awakened, as it were, from
sleep, but upon the point of waking; the face turned to the left in a
complete repose which had yet about it something stern; half the head
was lost in the material, left rough, from which the whole was carved,
suggesting those modern tricks which Rodin affected and vulgarised. Here,
in this immemorial thing, there was no suggestion of trick or effort.
Some instinct, not a willed effort, prompted the man who chiselled it to
leave uncarven the body of stone upon which the profile reposed. On the
sides of the coffin beneath were sculptured those dreadful figures which
in the dark origins of religion (or, more probably, the dark inheritance
of some fall and failure from a better creed) peopled the places below
the earth.
It would seem that this ancient nation thought of the soul in its
passage as something hunted; yet there was here no note of terror—which
is always unworthy of art, a weakness and a defilement—but there was
certainly a note of darkness and of peril. More, still, was there a
certitude of immortality. For though it be true, as it is true, that
the full doctrine of immortality which has made Europe the head of the
world, came to us ultimately from the islands of the Atlantic Sea; though
it be true, as it is true, that the last edges of the West, the great
salt cliffs of Ireland, of Brittany and of the Hebrides, are first found
possessed of that revelation and sent it in a distorted message through
Britain and Gaul, till at last it awakened even Syria; yet here in these
Etruscan tombs, as in the Egyptian, the quality of immortality was
apparent; an adumbration or a memory: confused, I think; perhaps without
dogma, and therefore unrooted; but certainly there.
This marriage of living and of dying, this obsession with the passing of
the soul, was apparent again in the superb figure of a matron, upon whose
tomb the sculptor had revived what was surely her very body; for never
have I seen any stone living more intensely with personality.
There was little or no action. It was a head raised, and the shoulders
with it slightly; the movement of a strong frame attending to some
speech, but still reclining and fully in repose. There was no pretence
to beauty, not even to a beauty lost, in that face of middle age, but
a singular majesty and a full bearing of that burden which we, the
Christians, in our later age, call also the duty of living. Of what sons
was she the mother? Of what soldier the widow, or of what lord? What
fields were the fortune of the great family from whom she inherited? What
slaves of what household thronged her funerals?
If ever there was a face made for ever, it is that face! I shall come
back to it again. For Corneto, once seen, is a place to which a man
returns as he returns to the Capitol or to his home. Corneto, once seen,
inhabits the mind and becomes an habitation for the mind. For there you
have the impress, memorial and perpetuation of a great people, wholly
preoccupied with the great business not only of life, but of death.
Were I to add also something on the strength of that dead mother’s face,
I might mislead my readers; for clearly this people were not concerned
with strength save as a means to an end. Nor did the artist know, I
think, when he made that superb head and fixed its life and its death
for eternity (of so much eternity as there is in even the hardest stone)
that he would give to one coming so long after any message of strength.
He was concerned rather with a purpose fulfilled and with the dignity and
completion of the woman whom he thus established. Therein might be seen
all the affair: the bearing of children; the governance of a household:
the loss of this and that affection and companionship; and all, whatever
losses beside, make up the burden of mankind. Therein also was the last
descent out of the light of the sun; the loss of the light of the sun;
the last and mortal loss of all. The weight of a lifetime, so borne, was
in that face, and a resolute acceptance of the end.
When I had left my long contemplation of that face, I went up upon
the ramparts of the city and looked out over the sea. The hills run
down abruptly, lovely enough. The flat between it and the surf line
has nothing of our northern sea-sides, nothing enjoyable or livable,
but rather is it a barrier where men do not live. Also the sea, empty
of sails at the ending of that day, enhanced the effect of desertion
and silence. The sun was sinking unclouded into the even line of the
Mediterranean. The storm clouds had gathered up far to the east in a
mass of gloom upon the mountains. All was the symbol of life ending and
darkness beyond.
Then I thought to myself, as I so looked westward from the wall, how men
might say of the life of all our race as of the life of one, that we know
not whence it came, nor whither it goes.
For there is no introduction to Corneto. These great dead, their powerful
art, their living, immortal stones, spring out from a remote beginning,
with no hint of what power formed them; nor did they themselves pretend
to tell us, nor, I think, did they themselves pretend to know what origin
there might be for so much, so greatly made; their walls, their ritual,
their tombs, their effigies!
This place, how many thousands pass in a week along the main line that
runs below Corneto from the north: from Leghorn, from Genoa, from the
slime of the Riviera, from Paris, from London, all on their way to the
hotels of Rome. And how many know what they are passing?
They are passing the things of life and of death.
THE END.
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