The Path to Rome

# The Path to Rome

2 '. .. AMORE ANTIQUI RITUS, ALTO SUB NUMINE ROMAE'

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PRAISE OF THIS BOOK

4 To every honest reader that may purchase, hire, or

5 receive this book, and to the reviewers also (to whom it is of triple

6 profit), greeting--and whatever else can be had for nothing.

7 If you should ask how this book came to be

8 written, it was in this way. One day as I was wandering over the world I

9 came upon the valley where I was born, and stopping there a moment to

10 speak with them all--when I had argued politics with the grocer, and

11 played the great lord with the notary-public, and had all but made the

12 carpenter a Christian by force of rhetoric--what should I note (after so

13 many years) but the old tumble-down and gaping church, that I love more

14 than mother-church herself, all scraped, white, rebuilt, noble, and new,

15 as though it had been finished yesterday. Knowing very well that such a

16 change had not come from the skinflint populace, but was the work of some

17 just artist who knew how grand an ornament was this shrine (built there

18 before our people stormed Jerusalem), I entered, and there saw that all

19 within was as new, accurate, and excellent as the outer part; and this

20 pleased me as much as though a fortune had been left to us all; for one's

21 native place is the shell of one's soul, and one's church is the kernel of

22 that nut.

23 Moreover, saying my prayers there, I noticed

24 behind the high altar a statue of Our Lady, so extraordinary and so

25 different from all I had ever seen before, so much the spirit of my

26 valley, that I was quite taken out of myself and vowed a vow there to go

27 to Rome on Pilgrimage and see all Europe which the Christian Faith has

28 saved; and I said, 'I will start from the place where I served in arms for

29 my sins; I will walk all the way and take advantage of no wheeled thing; I

30 will sleep rough and cover thirty miles a day, and I will hear Mass every

31 morning; and I will be present at high Mass in St Peter's on the Feast of

32 St Peter and St Paul.'

33 Then I went out of the church still having that

34 Statue in my mind, and I walked again farther into the world, away from my

35 native valley, and so ended some months after in a place whence I could

36 fulfil my vow; and I started as you shall hear. All my other vows I broke

37 one by one. For a faggot

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39 PRAISE OF THIS BOOK****

40 must be broken every stick singly. But the strict

41 vow I kept, for I entered Rome on foot that year in time, and I heard high

42 Mass on the Feast of the Apostles, as many can testify--to wit: Monsignor

43 this, and Chamberlain the other, and the Bishop of so-and-so--o--polis

44 in partibus infidelium;* for we were all there together.

45 And why (you will say) is all this put by itself

46 in what Anglo-Saxons call a Foreword, but gentlemen a Preface? Why, it is

47 because I have noticed that no book can appear without some such thing

48 tied on before it; and as it is folly to neglect the fashion, be certain

49 that I read some eight or nine thousand of them to be sure of how they

50 were written and to be safe from generalizing on too frail a basis.

51 And having read them and discovered first, that it

52 was the custom of my contemporaries to belaud themselves in this

53 prolegomenaical ritual (some saying in a few words that they supplied a

54 want, others boasting in a hundred that they were too grand to do any such

55 thing, but most of them baritoning their apologies and chanting their

56 excuses till one knew that their pride was toppling over)--since, I say,

57 it seemed a necessity to extol one's work, I wrote simply on the lintel of

58 my diary, *Praise of this Book,* so as to end the matter at a blow.

59 But whether there will be praise or blame I really cannot tell, for I am

60 riding my pen on the snaffle, and it has a mouth of iron.

61 Now there is another thing book writers do in

62 their Prefaces, which is to introduce a mass of nincompoops of whom no one

63 ever heard, and to say 'my thanks are due to such and such' all in a

64 litany, as though any one cared a farthing for the rats! If I omit this

65 believe me it is but on account of the multitude and splendour of those

66 who have attended at the production of this volume. For the stories in it

67 are copied straight from the best authors of the Renaissance, the music

68 was written by the masters of the eighteenth century, the Latin is

69 Erasmus' own; indeed, there is scarcely a word that is mine. I must also

70 mention the Nine Muses, the Three Graces; Bacchus, the Maenads, the

71 Panthers, the Fauns; and I owe very hearty thanks to Apollo.

72 Yet again, I see that writers are for ever anxious

73 of their style, thinking (not saying) -

74 'True, I used "and which" on page 47, but Martha

75 Brown the stylist gave me leave;' or:

76 'What if I do end a sentence with a preposition? I

77 always follow the rules of Mr Twist in his "'Tis Thus 'Twas Spoke", Odd's

78 Body an' I do not!'

79 Now this is a pusillanimity of theirs (the book

80 writers) that they think style power, and yet never say as much in their

81 Prefaces. Come, let me do so ... Where are you? Let me marshal you, my

82 regiments of words!

83 8

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85 PRAISE OF THIS BOOK****

86 Rabelais! Master of all happy men! Are you

87 sleeping there pressed into desecrated earth under the doss-house of the

88 Rue St Paul, or do you not rather drink cool wine in some elysian Chinon

89 looking on the Vienne where it rises in Paradise? Are you sleeping or

90 drinking that you will not lend us the staff of Friar John wherewith he

91 slaughtered and bashed the invaders of the vineyards, who are but a

92 parable for the mincing pedants and bloodless thin-faced rogues of the

93 world?

94 Write as the wind blows and command all words like

95 an army! See them how they stand in rank ready for assault, the jolly,

96 swaggering fellows!

97 First come the Neologisms, that are afraid of no

98 man; fresh, young, hearty, and for the most part very long-limbed, though

99 some few short and strong. There also are the Misprints to confuse the

100 enemy at his onrush. Then see upon the flank a company of picked

101 Ambiguities covering what shall be a feint by the squadron of Anachronisms

102 led by old Anachronos himself; a terrible chap with nigglers and a great

103 murderer of fools.

104 But here see more deeply massed the ten thousand

105 Egotisms shining in their armour and roaring for battle. They care for no

106 one. They stormed Convention yesterday and looted the cellar of

107 Good-Manners, who died of fear without a wound; so they drank his wine and

108 are to-day as strong as lions and as careless (saving only their Captain,

109 Monologue, who is lantern-jawed).

110 Here are the Aposiopaesian Auxiliaries, and

111 Dithyramb that killed Punctuation in open fight; Parenthesis the giant and

112 champion of the host, and Anacoluthon that never learned to read or write

113 but is very handy with his sword; and Metathesis and Hendiadys, two

114 Greeks. And last come the noble Gallicisms prancing about on their light

115 horses: cavalry so sudden that the enemy sicken at the mere sight of them

116 and are overcome without a blow. Come then my hearties, my lads, my

117 indefatigable repetitions, seize you each his own trumpet that hangs at

118 his side and blow the charge; we shall soon drive them all before us

119 headlong, howling down together to the Picrocholian Sea.

120 So! That was an interlude. Forget the clamour.

121 But there is another matter; written as yet in no

122 other Preface: peculiar to this book. For without rhyme or reason,

123 pictures of an uncertain kind stand in the pages of the chronicle. Why?

124 *Because it has become so cheap to photograph on

125 zinc.*

126 In old time a man that drew ill drew not at all.

127 He did well. Then either

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129 PRAISE OF THIS BOOK****

130 there were no pictures in his book, or (if there

131 were any) they were done by some other man that loved him not a groat and

132 would not have walked half a mile to see him hanged. But now it is so easy

133 for a man to scratch down what he sees and put it in his book that any

134 fool may do it and be none the worse--many others shall follow. This is

135 the first.

136 *

137 Before you blame too much, consider the

138 alternative. Shall a man march through Europe dragging an artist on a

139 cord? God forbid!

140 Shall an artist write a book? Why no, the remedy

141 is worse than the disease.

142 Let us agree then, that, if he will, any pilgrim

143 may for the future draw (if he likes) that most difficult subject, snow

144 hills beyond a grove of trees; that he may draw whatever he comes across

145 in order to enliven his mind (for who saw it if not he? And was it not his

146 loneliness that enabled him to see it?), and that he may draw what he

147 never saw, with as much freedom as you readers so very continually see

148 what you never draw. He may draw the morning mist on the Grimsel, six

149 months afterwards; when he has forgotten what it was like: and he may

150 frame it for a masterpiece to make the good draughtsman rage.

151 The world has grown a boy again this long time

152 past, and they are building hotels (I hear) in the place where Acedes

153 discovered the Water of Youth in a hollow of the hill Epistemonoscoptes.

154 Then let us love one another and laugh. Time

155 passes, and we shall soon laugh no longer--and meanwhile common living is

156 a burden, and earnest men are at siege upon us all around. Let us suffer

157 absurdities, for that is only to suffer one another.

158 10

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160 PRAISE OF THIS BOOK

161 Nor let us be too hard upon the just but anxious

162 fellow that sat down dutifully to paint the soul of Switzerland upon a

163 fan.

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165 The Path to Rome*

166 When that first Proverb-Maker who has imposed upon

167 all peoples by his epigrams and his fallacious half-truths, his empiricism

168 and his wanton appeals to popular ignorance, I say when this man (for I

169 take it he was a man, and a wicked one) was passing through France he

170 launched among the French one of his pestiferous phrases, *'Ce n'est que

171 le premier pas qui coûté" \* and this in a

172 rolling-in-the-mouth self-satisfied kind of a manner has been repeated

173 since his day at least seventeen million three hundred and sixty-two

174 thousand five hundred and four times by a great mass of Ushers, Parents,

175 Company Officers, Elder Brothers, Parish Priests, and authorities in

176 general whose office it may be and whose pleasure it certainly is to jog

177 up and disturb that native slumber and inertia of the mind which is the

178 true breeding soil of Revelation.

179 For when boys or soldiers or poets, or any other

180 blossoms and prides of nature, are for lying steady in the shade and

181 letting the Mind commune with its Immortal Comrades, up comes Authority

182 busking about and eager as though it were a duty to force the said Mind to

183 burrow and sweat in the matter of this very perishable world, its

184 temporary habitation.

185 'Up,' says Authority, 'and let me see that Mind of

186 yours doing something practical. Let me see Him mixing painfully with

187 circumstance, and botching up some Imperfection or other that shall at

188 least be a Reality and not a silly Fantasy.'

189 Then the poor Mind comes back to Prison again, and

190 the boy takes his horrible Homer in the real Greek (not Church's book,

191 alas!); the Poet his rough hairy paper, his headache, and his cross-nibbed

192 pen; the Soldier abandons his inner picture of swaggering about in

193 ordinary clothes, and sees the dusty road and feels the hard places in his

194 boot, and shakes down again to the steady pressure of his pack; and

195 Authority is satisfied, knowing that he will get a smattering from the

196 Boy, a rubbishy verse from the Poet, and from the Soldier a long and

197 thirsty march. And Authority, when it does this commonly sets to work by

198 one of these formulae: as, in England north of Trent, by the manifestly

199 false and boastful phrase, 'A thing begun is half ended', and in the south

200 by 'The Beginning is half the Battle'; but in France by the words I have

201 attributed to the Proverb-Maker, *'Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte'.*

202 By this you may perceive that the Proverb-Maker,

203 like every other Dema-

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205 CHARACTER OF PROVERB-MAKER****

206 gogue, Energumen, and Disturber, dealt largely in

207 metaphor--but this I need hardly insist upon, for in his vast collection

208 of published and unpublished works it is amply evident that he took the

209 silly pride of the half-educated in a constant abuse of metaphor. There

210 was a sturdy boy at my school who, when the master had carefully explained

211 to us the nature of metaphor, said that so far as he could see a metaphor

212 was nothing but a long Greek word for a lie. And certainly men who know

213 that the mere truth would be distasteful or tedious commonly have recourse

214 to metaphor, and so do those false men who desire to acquire a subtle and

215 unjust influence over their fellows, and chief among them, the

216 Proverb-Maker. For though his name is lost in the great space of time that

217 has passed since he flourished, yet his character can be very clearly

218 deduced from the many literary fragments he has left, and that is found to

219 be the character of a pusillanimous and ill-bred usurer, wholly lacking in

220 foresight, in generous enterprise, and chivalrous enthusiasm--in matters

221 of the Faith a prig or a doubter, in matters of adventure a poltroon, in

222 matters of Science an ignorant Parrot, and in Letters a wretchedly bad

223 rhymester, with a vice for alliteration; a wilful liar (as, for instance,

224 '*The longest way round is the shortest way home'),* a startling

225 miser (as, *'A penny saved is a penny earned'),* one ignorant of

226 largesse and human charity (as, '*Waste not, want not'),* and a

227 shocking boor in the point of honour (as, *'Hard words break no bones'--*he

228 never fought, I see, but with a cudgel).

229 But he had just that touch of slinking humour

230 which the peasants have, and there is in all he said that exasperating

231 quality for which we have no name, which certainly is not accuracy, and

232 which is quite the opposite of judgement, yet which catches the mind as

233 brambles do our clothes, causing us continually to pause and swear. For he

234 mixes up unanswerable things with false conclusions, he is perpetually

235 letting the cat out of the bag and exposing our tricks, putting a colour

236 to our actions, disturbing us with our own memory, indecently revealing

237 corners of the soul. He is like those men who say one unpleasant and rude

238 thing about a friend, and then take refuge from their disloyal and false

239 action by pleading that this single accusation is true; and it is perhaps

240 for this abominable logicality of his and for his malicious cunning that I

241 chiefly hate him: and since he himself evidently hated the human race, he

242 must not complain if he is hated in return.

243 Take, for instance, this phrase that set me

244 writing, *'Ce nest que le premier pas qui coûte'.* It is false.

245 Much after a beginning is difficult, as everybody knows who has crossed

246 the sea, and as for the first *step* a man never so much as remembers

247 it; if there is difficulty it is in the whole launching of a thing, in the

248 first ten pages of a book, or the first half-hour of listening to a

249 sermon, or the

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251 THE GRAND CLIMACTERIC****

252 first mile of a walk. The first step is undertaken

253 lightly, pleasantly, and with your soul in the sky; it is the

254 five-hundredth that counts. But I know, and you know, and he knew (worse

255 luck) that he was saying a thorny and catching thing when he made up that

256 phrase. It worries one of set purpose. It is as though one had a voice

257 inside one saying:

258 'I know you, you will never begin anything. Look

259 at what you might have done! Here you are, already twenty-one, and you

260 have not yet written a dictionary. What will you do for fame? Eh? Nothing:

261 you are intolerably lazy--and what is worse, it is your fate. Beginnings

262 are insuperable barriers to you. What about that great work on The

263 National Debt? What about that little lyric on Winchelsea that you thought

264 of writing six years ago? Why are the few lines still in your head and not

265 on paper? Because you can't begin. However, never mind, you can't help it,

266 it's your one great flaw, and it's fatal. Look at Jones! Younger than you

267 by half a year, and already on the *Evening Yankee* taking bribes

268 from Company Promoters! And where are you?' &c., &c.--and so

269 forth.

270 So this threat about the heavy task of Beginning

271 breeds discouragement, anger, vexation, irritability, bad style, pomposity

272 and infinitives split from helm to saddle, and metaphors as mixed as the

273 Carlton. But it is just true enough to remain fast in the mind, caught, as

274 it were, by one finger. For all things (you will notice) are very

275 difficult in their origin, and why, no one can understand. *Omne Trinum:*

276 they are difficult also in the shock of maturity and in their ending.

277 Take, for instance, the Life of Man, which is the Difficulty of Birth, the

278 Difficulty of Death, and the Difficulty of the Grand Climacteric.

279 LECTOR. What is the Grand Climacteric?

280 AUCTOR. I have no time to tell you, for it would

281 lead us into a discussion on Astrology, and then perhaps to a question of

282 physical science, and then you would find I was not orthodox, and perhaps

283 denounce me to the authorities.

284 I will tell you this much; it is the moment (not

285 the year or the month, mind you, nor even the hour, but the very second)

286 when a man is grown up, when he sees things as they are (that is,

287 backwards), and feels solidly himself. Do I make myself clear? No matter,

288 it is the Shock of Maturity, and that must suffice for you.

289 But perhaps you have been reading little brown

290 books on Evolution, and you don't believe in Catastrophes, or Climaxes, or

291 Definitions? Eh? Tell me, do you believe in the peak of the Matterhorn,

292 and have you doubts on the points of needles? Can the sun be said truly to

293 rise or set, and is there any exact meaning in the phrase, 'Done to a

294 turn' as applied to omelettes? You know there is; and so also you must

295 believe in Categories, and you must admit differences of kind as well as

296 of degree, and you must accept exact definition

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298 DIFFICULTY OF ENDING A BOOK****

299 and believe in all that your fathers did, that

300 were wiser men than you, as is easily proved if you will but imagine

301 yourself for but one moment introduced into the presence of your

302 ancestors, and ask yourself which would look the fool. Especially must you

303 believe in moments and their importance, and avoid with the utmost care

304 the Comparative Method and the argument of the Slowly Accumulating Heap. I

305 hear that some scientists are already beginning to admit the reality of

306 Birth and Death--let but some brave few make an act of Faith in the Grand

307 Climacteric and all shall yet be well.

308 Well, as I was saying, this Difficulty of

309 Beginning is but one of three, and is Inexplicable, and is in the Nature

310 of Things, and it is very especially noticeable in the Art of Letters.

311 There is in every book the Difficulty of Beginning, the Difficulty of the

312 Turning-Point (which is the Grand Climacteric of a Book)--

313 LECTOR. What is that in a Book?

314 AUCTOR. Why, it is the point where the reader has

315 caught on, enters into the Book and desires to continue reading it.

316 LECTOR. It comes earlier in some books than in

317 others.

318 AUCTOR. As you say ... And finally there is the

319 Difficulty of Ending.

320 LECTOR. I do not see how there can be any

321 difficulty in ending a book.

322 AUCTOR. That shows very clearly that you have

323 never written one, for there is nothing so hard in the writing of a

324 book--no, not even the choice of the Dedication--as is the ending of it.

325 On this account only the great Poets, who are above custom and can snap

326 their divine fingers at forms, are not at the pains of devising careful

327 endings. Thus, Homer ends with lines that might as well be in the middle

328 of a passage; Hesiod, I know not how; and Mr Bailey, the New Voice from

329 Eurasia, does not end at all, but is still going on.

330 Panurge told me that his great work on Conchology

331 would never have been finished had it not been for the Bookseller that

332 threatened law; and as it is, the last sentence has no verb in it. There

333 is always something more to be said, and it is always so difficult to turn

334 up the splice neatly at the edges. On this account there are regular

335 models for ending a book or a Poem, as there are for beginning one; but,

336 for my part, I think the best way of ending a book is to rummage about

337 among one's manuscripts till one has found a bit of Fine Writing (no

338 matter upon what subject), to lead up the last paragraphs by no matter

339 what violent shocks to the thing it deals with, to introduce a row of

340 asterisks, and then to paste on to the paper below these the piece of Fine

341 Writing one has found.

342 I knew a man once who always wrote the end of a

343 book first, when his mind was fresh, and so worked gradually back to the

344 introductory chapter, which (he said) was ever a kind of summary, and

345 could not be properly dealt with till a man knew all about his subject. He

346 said this was a sovran way to write History.

347 16

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349 THE VALLEY OF THE MOSELLE****

350 But it seems to me that this is pure extravagance,

351 for it would lead one at last to beginning at the bottom of the last page,

352 like the Hebrew Bible, and (if it were fully carried out) to writing one's

353 sentences backwards till one had a style like the London School of Poets:

354 a very horrible conclusion.

355 However, I am not concerned here with the ending

356 of a book, but with its beginning; and I say that the beginning of any

357 literary thing is hard, and that this hardness is difficult to explain.

358 And I say more than this--I say that an interminable discussion of the

359 difficulty of beginning a book is the worst omen for going on with it, and

360 a trashy subterfuge at the best. In the name of all decent, common, and

361 homely things, why not begin and have done with it?

362 It was in the very beginning of June, at evening,

363 but not yet sunset, that I set out from Toul by the Nancy gate; but

364 instead of going straight on past the parade-ground, I turned to the right

365 immediately along the ditch and rampart, and did not leave the

366 fortifications till I came to the road that goes up alongside the Moselle.

367 For it was by the valley of this river that I was to begin my pilgrimage,

368 since, by a happy accident, the valley of the Upper Moselle runs straight

369 towards Rome, though it takes you but a short part of the way. What a good

370 opening it makes for a direct pilgrimage can be seen from this little map,

371 *

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373 THE FIRST GARRISON****

374 where the dotted line points exactly to Rome.

375 There are two bends which take one a little out of one's way, and these

376 bends I attempted to avoid, but in general, the valley, about a hundred

377 miles from Toul to the source, is an evident gate for any one walking from

378 this part of Lorraine into Italy. And this map is also useful to show what

379 route I followed for my first three days past Epinal and Remiremont up to

380 the source of the river, and up over the great hill, the Ballon d'Alsace.

381 I show the river valley like a trench, and the hills above it shaded, till

382 the mountainous upper part, the Vosges, is put in black. I chose the

383 decline of the day for setting out, because of the great heat a little

384 before noon and four hours after it. Remembering this, I planned to walk

385 at night and in the mornings and evenings, but how this design turned out

386 you shall hear in a moment.

387 I had not gone far, not a quarter of a mile, along

388 my road leaving the town, when I thought I would stop and rest a little

389 and make sure that I had started propitiously and that I was really on my

390 way to Rome; so I halted by a wall and looked back at the city and the

391 forts, and drew what I saw in my book. It was a sight that had taken a

392 firm hold of my mind in boyhood, and that will remain in it as long as it

393 can make pictures for itself out of the past. I think this must be true of

394 all conscripts with regard to the garrison in which they have served, for

395 the mind is so fresh at twenty-one and the life so new to every recruit as

396 he joins it, he is so cut off from books and all the worries of life, that

397 the surroundings of the place bite into him and take root, as one's school

398 does or one's first home. And I had been especially fortunate since I had

399 been with the gunners (notoriously the best kind of men) and not in a big

400 place but in a little town, very old and silent, with more soldiers in its

401 surrounding circle than there were men, women, and children within its

402 useless ramparts. It is known to be very beautiful, and though I had not

403 heard of this reputation, I saw it to be so at once when I was first

404 marched in, on a November dawn, up to the height of the artillery

405 barracks. I remembered seeing then the great hills surrounding it on every

406 side, hiding their menace and protection of guns, and in the south and

407 east the silent valley where the high forests dominate the Moselle, and

408 the town below the road standing in an island or ring of tall trees. All

409 this, I say, I had permanently remembered, and I had determined, whenever

410 I could go on pilgrimage to Rome, to make this place my starting-point,

411 and as I stopped here and looked back, a little way outside the gates, I

412 took in again the scene that recalled so much laughter and heavy work and

413 servitude and pride of arms.

414 I was looking straight at the great fort of St

415 Michel, which is the strongest thing on the frontier, and which is the key

416 to the circle of forts that make up

417 18

418 ---

419 ON JUSTICE IN ARMIES****

420 this entrenched camp. One could see little or

421 nothing of its batteries, only its hundreds of feet of steep brushwood

422 above the vineyards, and at the summit a stunted wood purposely planted.

423 Next to it on the left, of equal height, was the hog back of the Cote

424 Barine, hiding a battery. Between the Cote Barine and my road and wall, I

425 saw the rising ground and the familiar Barracks that are called (I know

426 not why) the Barracks of Justice, but ought more properly to be called the

427 Barracks of petty tyrannies and good fellowship, in order to show the

428 philosophers that these two things are the life of armies; for of all the

429 virtues practised in that old compulsory home of mine Justice came second

430 at least if not third, while Discipline and Comradeship went first; and

431 the more I think

432 of it the more I am convinced that of all the

433 suffering youth that was being there annealed and forged into soldiery

434 none can have suffered like the lawyers. On the right the high trees that

435 stand outside the ramparts of the town went dwindling in perspective like

436 a palisade, and above them, here and there, was a roof showing the top of

437 the towers of the Cathedral or of St Gengoult. All this I saw looking

438 backwards, and, when I had noticed it and drawn it, I turned round again

439 and took the road.

440 I had, in a small bag or pocket slung over my

441 shoulder, a large piece of bread, half a pound of smoked ham, a

442 sketch-book, two Nationalist papers, and a quart of the wine of

443 Brule--which is the most famous wine in the neighbourhood of the garrison,

444 yet very cheap. And Brule is a very good omen for men that are battered

445 about and given to despairing, since it is only called Brule on account of

446 its having been burnt so often by Romans, Frenchmen, Burgundians,

447 ---

448 CHARMING VILLAGE OF BRULE

449 Germans, Flemings, Huns perhaps, and generally all

450 those who in the last few thousand years have taken a short cut at their

451 enemies over the neck of the Cote Barine. So you would imagine it to be a

452 tumble-down, weak, wretched, and disappearing place; but, so far from

453 this, it is a rich and proud village, growing, as I have said, better wine

454 than any in the garrison. Though Toul stands in a great cup or ring of

455 hills, very high and with steep slopes, and guns on all of them, and all

456 these hills grow wine, none is so good as Brule wine. And this reminds me

457 of a thing that happened in the Manoeuvres of 1891, quorum pars magna;*

458 for there were two divisions employed in that glorious and fatiguing great

459 game, and more than a gross of guns--to be accurate, a hundred and

460 fifty-six--and of these one (the sixth piece of the tenth battery of the

461 eighth--I wonder where you all are now? I suppose I shall not see you

462 again; but you were the best companions in the world, my friends) was

463 driven by three drivers, of whom I was the middle one, and the worst,

464 having on my Livret the note 'conducteur mediocre'. But that is neither

465 here nor there; the story is as follows, and the moral is that the

466 commercial mind is illogical.

467 When we had gone some way, clattering through the

468 dust, and were well on on the Commercy road, there was a short halt, and

469 during this halt there passed us the largest Tun or Barrel that ever went

470 on wheels. You talk of the Great Tun of Heidelburg, or of those monstrous

471 Vats that stand in cool sheds in the Napa Valley, or of the vast barrels

472 in the Catacombs of Rheims; but all these are built *in situ* and

473 meant to remain steady, and there is no limit to the size of a Barrel that

474 has not to travel. The point about this enormous Receptacle of Bacchus and

475 cavernous huge Prison of Laughter, was that it could move, though

476 cumbrously, and it was drawn very slowly by stupid, patient oxen, who

477 would not be hurried. On the top of it sat a strong peasant, with a face

478 of determination, as though he were at war with his kind, and he kept on

479 calling to his oxen, 'Han', and 'Hu', in the tones of a sullen challenge,

480 as he went creaking past. Then the soldiers began calling out to him

481 singly, 'Where are you off to, Father, with that battery?' and 'Why carry

482 cold water to Commercy? They have only too much as it is;' and 'What have

483 you got in the little barrelkin, the barrellet, the cantiniere's

484 brandy-flask, the gourd, the firkin?' He stopped his oxen fiercely and

485 turned round to us and said: 'I will tell you what I have here. I have so

486 many hectolitres of Brule wine which I made myself, and which I know to be

487 the best wine there is, and I am taking it about to see if I cannot tame

488 and break these proud fellows who are for ever beating down prices and

489 mocking me. It is worth eight 'scutcheons the hectolitre, that is, eight

490 sols the litre; what do I say? it is worth a Louis a cup: but I will sell

491 it at the price I name, and not a penny less. But whenever I come

492 20

493 ---

494 STORY OF THE GREAT BARREL****

495 to a village the innkeeper begins bargaining and

496 chaffering and offering six sols and seven sols, and I answer, "Eight

497 sols, take it or leave it", and when he seems for haggling again I get up

498 and drive away. I know the worth of my wine, and I will not be beaten down

499 though I have to go out of Lorraine into the Barrois to sell it.'

500 So when we caught him up again, as we did shortly

501 after on the road, a sergeant cried as we passed, 'I will give you seven,

502 seven and a quarter, seven and a half', and we went on laughing and forgot

503 all about him.

504 For many days we marched from this place to that

505 place, and fired and played a confused game in the hot sun till the train

506 of sick horses was a mile long, and till the recruits were all as deaf as

507 so many posts; and at last, one evening, we came to a place called Heiltz

508 le Maurupt, which was like heaven after the hot plain and the dust, and

509 whose inhabitants are as good and hospitable as Angels; it is just where

510 the Champagne begins. When we had groomed and watered our horses, and the

511 stable guard had been set, and we had all an hour or so's leisure to

512 stroll about in the cool darkness before sleeping in the barns, we had a

513 sudden lesson in the smallness of the world, for what should come up the

514 village street but that monstrous Barrel, and we could see by its

515 movements that it was still quite full.

516 We gathered round the peasant, and told him how

517 grieved we were at his ill fortune, and agreed with him that all the

518 people of the Barrois were thieves or madmen not to buy such wine for such

519 a song. He took his oxen and his barrel to a very high shed that stood by,

520 and there he told us all his pilgrimage and the many assaults his firmness

521 suffered, and how he had resisted them all. There was much more anger than

522 sorrow in his accent, and I could see that he was of the wood from which

523 tyrants and martyrs are carved. Then suddenly he changed and became

524 eloquent:

525 'Oh, the good wine! If only it were known and

526 tasted! ... Here, give me a cup, and I will ask some of you to taste it,

527 then at least I shall have it praised as it deserves. And this is the wine

528 I have carried more than a hundred miles, and everywhere it has been

529 refused!'

530 There was one guttering candle on a little stool.

531 The roof of the shed was lost up in the great height of darkness; behind,

532 in the darkness, the oxen champed away steadily in the manger. The light

533 from the candle flame lit his face strongly from beneath and marked it

534 with dark shadows. It flickered on the circle of our faces as we pressed

535 round, and it came slantwise and waned and disappeared in the immense

536 length of the Barrel. He stood near the tap with his brows knit as upon

537 some very important task, and all we, gunners and drivers of the battery,

538 began unhooking our mugs and passing them to him.

539 ---

540 THE LAKE OF THE MOSELLE****

541 There were nearly a hundred, and he filled them

542 all; not in jollity, but like a man offering up a solemn sacrifice. We

543 also, entering into his mood, passed our mugs continually, thanking him in

544 a low tone and keeping in the main silent. A few linesmen lounged at the

545 door; he asked for their cups and filled them. He bade them fetch as many

546 of their comrades as cared to come; and very soon there was a circulating

547 crowd of men all getting wine of Brule and murmuring their

548 congratulations, and he was willing enough to go on giving, but we stopped

549 when we saw fit and the scene ended. I cannot tell what prodigious measure

550 of wine he gave away to us all that night, but when he struck the roof of

551 the cask it already sounded hollow. And when we had made a collection

552 which he had refused, he went to sleep by his oxen, and we to our straw in

553 other barns. Next day we started before dawn, and I never saw him again.

554 This is the story of the wine of Brule, and it

555 shows that what men love is never money itself but their own way, and that

556 human beings love sympathy and pageant above all things. It also teaches

557 us not to be hard on the rich.

558 I walked along the valley of the Moselle, and as I

559 walked the long evening of summer began to fall. The sky was empty and its

560 deeps infinite; the clearness of the air set me dreaming. I passed the

561 turn where we used to halt when we were learning how to ride in front of

562 the guns, past the little house where, on rare holidays, the boys could

563 eat a matelote, which is fish boiled in wine, and so on to the place where

564 the river is held by a weir and opens out into a kind of lake.

565 Here I waited for a moment by the wooden railing,

566 and looked up into the hills. So far I had been at home, and I was now

567 poring upon the last familiar thing before I ventured into the high woods

568 and began my experience. I therefore took a leisurely farewell, and

569 pondered instead of walking farther. Everything about me conduced to

570 reminiscence and to ease. A flock of sheep passed me with their shepherd,

571 who gave me a good-night. I found myself entering that pleasant mood in

572 which all books are conceived (but none written); I was 'smoking the

573 enchanted cigarettes' of Balzac, and if this kind of reverie is fatal to

574 action, yet it is so much a factor of happiness that I wasted in the

575 contemplation of that lovely and silent hollow many miles of marching. I

576 suppose if a man were altogether his own master and controlled by no

577 necessity, not even the necessity of expression, all his life would pass

578 away in these sublime imaginings.

579 This was a place I remembered very well. The

580 rising river of Lorraine is

581 ---

582 THE COMING OF EVENING****

583 *

584 caught and barred, and it spreads in a great sheet

585 of water that must be very shallow, but that in its reflections and

586 serenity resembles rather a profound and silent mere. The steeps

587 surrounding it are nearly mountainous, and are crowned with deep forests

588 in which the province reposes, and upon which it depends for its local

589 genius. A little village, which we used to call 'St Peter of the

590 Quarries', lies up on the right between the steep and the water, and just

591 where the hills end a flat that was once marshy and is now half fields,

592 half ponds, but broken with luxuriant trees, marks the great age of its

593 civilization. Along this flat runs, bordered with rare poplars, the road

594 which one can follow on and on into the heart of the Vosges. I took from

595 this silence and this vast plain of still water the repose that introduces

596 night. It was all consonant with what the peasants were about: the return

597 from labour, the bleating folds, and the lighting of lamps under the

598 eaves. In such a spirit I passed along the upper valley to the spring of

599 the hills.

600 In St Pierre it was just that passing of daylight

601 when a man thinks he can still read; when the buildings and the bridges

602 are great masses of purple that deceive one, recalling the details of

603 daylight, but when the night birds, surer than men and less troubled by

604 this illusion of memory, have discovered that their darkness has

605 conquered.

606 The peasants sat outside their houses in the

607 twilight accepting the cool air; every one spoke to me as I marched

608 through, and I answered them all, nor was there in any of their

609 salutations the omission of good fellowship or of the name of God. Saving

610 with one man, who was a sergeant of artillery on leave, and who cried out

611 to me in an accent that was very familiar and asked me to drink; but I

612 told him I had to go up into the forest to take advantage of the night,

613 since the days were so warm for walking. As I left the last house of the

614 village I was not secure from loneliness, and when the road began to climb

615 up the hill into the wild and the trees I was wondering how the night

616 would pass.

617 ---

618 THE NIGHT IN THE FOREST****

619 With every step upward a greater mystery

620 surrounded me. A few stars were out, and the brown night mist was creeping

621 along the water below, but there was still light enough to see the road,

622 and even to distinguish the bracken in the deserted hollows. The highway

623 became little better than a lane; at the top of the hill it plunged under

624 tall pines, and was vaulted over with darkness. The kingdoms that have no

625 walls, and are built up of shadows, began to oppress me as the night

626 hardened. Had I had companions, still we would only have spoken in a

627 whisper, and in that dungeon of trees even my own self would not raise its

628 voice within me.

629 It was full night when I had reached a vague

630 clearing in the woods, right up on the height of that flat hill. This

631 clearing was called 'The Fountain of Magdalen'. I was so far relieved by

632 the broader sky of the open field that I could wait and rest a little, and

633 there, at last, separate from men, I thought of a thousand things. The air

634 was full of midsummer, and its mixture of exaltation and fear cut me off

635 from ordinary living. I now understood why our religion has made sacred

636 this season of the year; why we have, a little later, the night of St

637 John, the fires in the villages, and the old perception of fairies dancing

638 in the rings of the summer grass. A general communion of all things

639 conspires at this crisis of summer against us reasoning men that should

640 live in the daylight, and something fantastic possesses those who are

641 foolish enough to watch upon such nights. So I, watching, was cut off.

642 There were huge, vague summits, all wooded, peering above the field I sat

643 in, but they merged into a confused horizon. I was on a high plateau, yet

644 I felt myself to be alone with the immensity that properly belongs to

645 plains alone. I saw the stars, and remembered how I had looked up at them

646 on just such a night when I was close to the Pacific, bereft of friends

647 and possessed with solitude. There was no noise; it was full darkness. The

648 woods before and behind me made a square frame of silence, and I was

649 enchased here in the clearing, thinking of all things.

650 Then a little wind passed over the vast forests of

651 Lorraine. It seemed to wake an indefinite sly life proper to this

652 seclusion, a life to which I was strange, and which thought me an invader.

653 Yet I heard nothing. There were no adders in the long grass, nor any frogs

654 in that dry square of land, nor crickets on the high part of the hill; but

655 I knew that little creatures in league with every nocturnal influence,

656 enemies of the sun, occupied the air and the land about me; nor will I

657 deny that I felt a rebel, knowing well that men were made to work in happy

658 dawns and to sleep in the night, and everything in that short and sacred

659 darkness multiplied my attentiveness and my illusion. Perhaps the

660 instincts of the sentry, the necessities of guard, come back to us out of

661 the ages unawares

662 24

663 ---

664 THE UNHAPPY VILLAGE****

665 during such experiments. At any rate the night

666 oppressed and exalted me. Then I suddenly attributed such exaltation to

667 the need of food.

668 'If we must try this bookish plan of sleeping by

669 day and walking by night,' I thought, 'at least one must arrange night

670 meals to suit it.'

671 I therefore, with my mind still full of the

672 forest, sat down and lit a match and peered into my sack, taking out

673 therefrom bread and ham and chocolate and Brûlé wine. For

674 seat and table there was a heathery bank still full of the warmth and

675 savour of the last daylight, for companions these great inimical

676 influences of the night which I had met and dreaded, and for occasion or

677 excuse there was hunger. Of the Many that debate what shall be done with

678 travellers, it was the best and kindest Spirit that prompted me to this

679 salutary act. For as I drank the wine and dealt with the ham and bread, I

680 felt more and more that I had a right to the road; the stars became

681 familiar and the woods a plaything. It is quite clear that the body must

682 be recognized and the soul kept in its place, since a little refreshing

683 food and drink can do so much to make a man.

684 On this repast I jumped up merrily, lit a pipe,

685 and began singing, and heard, to my inexpressible joy, some way down the

686 road, the sound of other voices. They were singing that old song of the

687 French infantry which dates from Louis XIV, and is called 'Auprès

688 de ma blonde'. I answered their chorus, so that, by the time we met under

689 the wood, we were already acquainted. They told me they had had a

690 forty-eight hours' leave into Nancy, the four of them, and had to be in by

691 roll-call at a place called Villey the Dry. I remembered it after all

692 those years.

693 It is a village perched on the brow of one of

694 these high hills above the river, and it found itself one day surrounded

695 by earthworks, and a great fort raised just above the church. Then, before

696 they knew where they were, they learnt that (1) no one could go in or out

697 between sunset and sunrise without leave of the officer in command; (2)

698 that from being a village they had become the 'buildings situate within

699 Fort No. 18'; (3) that they were to be deluged with soldiers; and (4) that

700 they were liable to evacuate their tenements on mobilization. They had

701 become a fort unwittingly as they slept, and all their streets were

702 blocked with ramparts. A hard fate; but they should not have built their

703 village just on the brow of a round hill. They did this in the old days,

704 when men used stone instead of iron, because the top of a hill was a good

705 place to hold against enemies; and so now, these 73,426 years after, they

706 find the same advantage catching them again to their hurt. And so things

707 go the round.

708 Anyway Villey the Dry is a fort, and there my four

709 brothers were going. It was miles off, and they had to be in by sunrise,

710 so I offered them a pull of my

711 ---

712 THE CRY FOR A BED****

713 wine, which, to my great joy, they refused, and we

714 parted courteously. Then I found the road beginning to fall, and knew that

715 I had crossed the hills. As the forest ended and the sloping fields began,

716 a dim moon came up late in the east in the bank of fog that masked the

717 river. So by a sloping road, now free from the woods, and at the mouth of

718 a fine untenanted valley under the moon, I came down again to the Moselle,

719 having saved a great elbow by this excursion over the high land. As I

720 swung round the bend of the hills downwards and looked up the sloping

721 dell, I remembered that these heathery hollows were called 'vallons' by

722 the people of Lorraine, and this set me singing the song of the hunters,

723 'Entends tu dans nos vallons, le Chasseur sonner du clairon,' which I sang

724 loudly till I reached the river bank, and lost the exhilaration of the

725 hills.

726 I had now come some twelve miles from my

727 starting-place, and it was midnight. The plain, the level road (which

728 often rose a little), and the dank air of the river began to oppress me

729 with fatigue. I was not disturbed by this, for I had intended to break

730 these nights of marching by occasional repose, and while I was in the

731 comfort of cities--especially in the false hopes that one got by reading

732 books--I had imagined that it was a light matter to sleep in the open.

733 Indeed, I had often so slept when I had been compelled to it in

734 Manoeuvres, but I had forgotten how essential was a rug of some kind, and

735 what a difference a fire and comradeship could make. Thinking over it all,

736 feeling my tiredness, and shivering a little in the chill under the moon

737 and the clear sky, I was very ready to capitulate and to sleep in bed like

738 a Christian at the next opportunity. But there is some influence in vows

739 or plans that escapes our power of rejudgement. All false calculations

740 must be paid for, and I found, as you will see, that having said I would

741 sleep in the open, I had to keep to it in spite of all my second thoughts.

742 I passed one village and then another in which

743 everything was dark, and in which I could waken nothing but dogs, who

744 thought me an enemy, till at last I saw a great belt of light in the fog

745 above the Moselle. Here there was a kind of town or large settlement where

746 there were ironworks, and where, as I thought, there would be houses open,

747 even after midnight. I first found the old town, where just two men were

748 awake at some cooking work or other. I found them by a chink of light

749 streaming through their door; but they gave me no hope, only advising me

750 to go across the river and try in the new town where the forges and the

751 ironworks were. 'There,' they said, 'I should certainly find a bed.'

752 I crossed the bridge, being now much too weary to

753 notice anything, even the shadowy hills, and the first thing I found was a

754 lot of waggons that belonged

755 26****

756 ---

757 THE FULL CURSE****

758 to a caravan or fair. Here some men were awake,

759 but when I suggested that they should let me sleep in their little houses

760 on wheels, they told me it was never done; that it was all they could do

761 to pack in themselves; that they had no straw; that they were guarded by

762 dogs; and generally gave me to understand (though without violence or

763 unpoliteness) that I looked as though I were the man to steal their lions

764 and tigers. They told me, however, that without doubt I should find

765 something open in the centre of the workmen's quarter, where the great

766 electric lamps now made a glare over the factory.

767 I trudged on unwillingly, and at the very last

768 house of this detestable industrial slavery, a high house with a gable, I

769 saw a window wide open, and a blonde man smoking a cigarette at a balcony.

770 I called to him at once, and asked him to let me a bed. He put to me all

771 the questions he could think of. Why was I there? Where had I come from?

772 Where (if I was honest) had I intended to sleep? How came I at such an

773 hour on foot? and other examinations. I thought a little what excuse to

774 give him, and then, determining that I was too tired to make up anything

775 plausible, I told him the full truth; that I had meant to sleep rough, but

776 had been overcome by fatigue, and that I had walked from Toul, starting at

777 evening. I conjured him by our common Faith to let me in. He told me that

778 it was impossible, as he had but one room in which he and his family

779 slept, and assured me he had asked all these questions out of sympathy and

780 charity alone. Then he wished me good-night, honestly and kindly, and went

781 in.

782 By this time I was very much put out, and began to

783 be angry. These straggling French towns give no opportunity for a shelter.

784 I saw that I should have to get out beyond the market gardens, and that it

785 might be a mile or two before I found any rest. A clock struck one. I

786 looked up and saw it was from the belfry of one of those new chapels which

787 the monks are building everywhere, nor did I forget to curse the monks in

788 my heart for building them. I cursed also those who started smelting works

789 in the Moselle valley; those who gave false advice to travellers; those

790 who kept lions and tigers in caravans, and for a small sum I would have

791 cursed the whole human race, when I saw that my bile had hurried me out of

792 the street well into the countryside, and that above me, on a bank, was a

793 patch of orchard and a lane leading up to it. Into this I turned, and,

794 finding a good deal of dry hay lying under the trees, I soon made myself

795 an excellent bed, first building a little mattress, and then piling on hay

796 as warm as a blanket.

797 I did not lie awake (as when I planned my

798 pilgrimage I had promised myself I would do), looking at the sky through

799 the branches of trees, but I slept at once without dreaming, and woke up

800 to find it was broad daylight, and the sun

801 27

802 ---

803 ON BREAKFASTS****

804 ready to rise. Then, stiff and but little rested

805 by two hours of exhaustion, I took up my staff and my sack and regained

806 the road.

807 I should very much like to know what those who

808 have an answer to everything can say about the food requisite to

809 breakfast? Those great men Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare, and Spenser

810 before him, drank beer at rising, and tamed it with a little bread. In the

811 regiment we used to drink black coffee without sugar, and cut off a great

812 hunk of stale crust, and eat nothing more till the halt: for the matter of

813 that, the great victories of '93 were fought upon such unsubstantial

814 meals; for the Republicans fought first and ate afterwards, being in this

815 quite unlike the Ten Thousand. Sailors I know eat nothing for some

816 hours--I mean those who turn out at four in the morning; I could give the

817 name of the watch, but that I forget it and will not be plagued to look up

818 technicalities. Dogs eat the first thing they come across, cats take a

819 little milk, and gentlemen are accustomed to get up at nine and eat eggs,

820 bacon, kidneys, ham, cold pheasant, toast, coffee, tea, scones, and honey,

821 after which they will boast that their race is the hardiest in the world

822 and ready to bear every fatigue in the pursuit of Empire. But what rule

823 governs all this? Why is breakfast different from all other things, so

824 that the Greeks called it the best thing in the world, and so that each of

825 us in a vague way knows that he would eat at breakfast nothing but one

826 special kind of food, and that he could not imagine breakfast at any other

827 hour in the day?

828 The provocation to this inquiry (which I have here

829 no time to pursue) lies in the extraordinary distaste that I conceived

830 that morning for Brule wine. My ham and bread and chocolate I had consumed

831 overnight. I thought, in my folly, that I could break my fast on a swig of

832 what had seemed to me, only the night before, the best revivifier and

833 sustenance possible. In the harsh dawn it turned out to be nothing but a

834 bitter and intolerable vinegar. I make no attempt to explain this, nor to

835 say why the very same wine that had seemed so good in the forest (and was

836 to seem so good again later on by the canal) should now repel me. I can

837 only tell you that this heavy disappointment convinced me of a great truth

838 that a Politician once let slip in my hearing, and that I have never since

839 forgotten. 'Man,'* said the Director of the State, *'man is but

840 the creature of circumstance.'*

841 As it was, I lit a pipe of tobacco and hobbled

842 blindly along for miles under and towards the brightening east. Just

843 before the sun rose I turned and looked backward from a high bridge that

844 recrossed the river. The long effort of the night had taken me well on my

845 way. I was out of the familiar region of the

846 28

847 ---

848 THE FURTHER VALLEY****

849 garrison. The great forest-hills that I had

850 traversed stood up opposite the dawn, catching the new light; heavy,

851 drifting, but white clouds, rare at such an hour, sailed above them. The

852 valley of the Moselle, which I had never thought of save as a half

853 mountainous region, had fallen, to become a kind of long garden, whose

854 walls were regular, low, and cultivated slopes. The main waterway of the

855 valley was now not the river but the canal that fed from it.

856 *

857 The tall grasses, the leaves, and poplars

858 bordering the river and the canal seemed dark close to me, but the valley

859 as a whole was vague, a mass of trees with one Lorraine church-tower

860 showing, and the delicate slopes bounding it on either side.

861 Descending from this bridge I found a sign-post,

862 that told me I had walked thirty-two kilometres--which is twenty

863 miles--from Toul; that it was one kilometre to Flavigny, and heaven knows

864 how much to a place called Charmes. The sun rose in the mist that lay up

865 the long even trends of the vale, between the low and level hills, and I

866 pushed on my thousand yards towards Flavigny. There, by a special

867 providence, I found the entertainment and companionship whose lack had

868 left me wrecked all these early hours.

869 As I came into Flavigny I saw at once that it was

870 a place on which a book might easily be written, for it had a church built

871 in the seventeenth century, when few churches were built outside great

872 towns, a convent, and a general air

873 29

874 ---

875 HOW TO WRITE RHYMES****

876 of importance that made of it that grand and noble

877 thing, that primary cell of the organism of Europe, that best of all

878 Christian associations - a large village.

879 I say a book might be written upon it, and there

880 is no doubt that a great many articles and pamphlets must have been

881 written upon it, for the French are furiously given to local research and

882 reviews, and to glorifying their native places: and when they cannot

883 discover folklore they enrich their beloved homes by inventing it.

884 There was even a man (I forget his name) who wrote

885 a delightful book called Popular and Traditional Songs of my Province,*

886 which book, after he was dead, was discovered to be entirely his own

887 invention, and not a word of it familiar to the inhabitants of the soil.

888 He was a large, laughing man that smoked enormously, had great masses of

889 hair, and worked by night; also he delighted in the society of friends,

890 and talked continuously. I wish he had a statue somewhere, and that they

891 would pull down to make room for it any one of those useless bronzes that

892 are to be found even in the little villages, and that commemorate solemn,

893 whiskered men, pillars of the state. For surely this is the habit of the

894 true poet, and marks the vigour and recurrent origin of poetry, that a man

895 should get his head full of rhythms and catches, and that they should

896 jumble up somehow into short songs of his own. What could more suggest

897 (for instance) a whole troop of dancing words and lovely thoughts than

898 this refrain from the Tourdenoise -

899 ... *Son beau corps est en terre Son âme

900 en Paradis.*

901 *Tu ris?*

902 *Et ris, tu ris, ma Bergère, Ris, ma Bergère,

903 tu ris.*

904 That was the way they set to work in England

905 before the Puritans came, when men were not afraid to steal verses from

906 one another, and when no one imagined that he could live by letters, but

907 when every poet took a patron, or begged or robbed the churches. So much

908 for the poets.

909 Flavigny then, I say (for I seem to be

910 digressing), is a long street of houses all built together as animals

911 build their communities. They are all very old, but the people have worked

912 hard since the Revolution, and none of them are poor, nor are any of them

913 very rich. I saw but one gentleman's house, and that, I am glad to say,

914 was in disrepair. Most of the peasants' houses had, for a ground floor,

915 cavernous great barns out of which came a delightful smell of morning --

916 that is, of hay, litter, oxen, and stored grains and old wood; which is

917 the true breath of morning, because it is the scent that all the human

918 race worth calling

919 ---

920 THE HAY-MAKING** NUNS**

921 human first meets when it rises, and is the

922 association of sunrise in the minds of those who keep the world alive: but

923 not in the wretched minds of townsmen, and least of all in the minds of

924 journalists, who know nothing of morning save that it is a time of jaded

925 emptiness when you have just done prophesying (for the hundredth time) the

926 approaching end of the world, when the floors are beginning to tremble

927 with machinery, and when, in a weary kind of way, one feels hungry and

928 alone: a nasty life and usually a short one.

929 To return to Flavigny. This way of stretching a

930 village all along one street is Roman, and is the mark of civilization.

931 When I was at college I was compelled to read a work by the crabbed

932 Tacitus on the Germans, where, in the midst of a deal that is vague and

933 fantastic nonsense and much that is wilful lying, comes this excellent

934 truth, that barbarians build their houses separate, but civilized men

935 together. So whenever you see a lot of red roofs nestling, as the phrase

936 goes, in the woods of a hillside in south England, remember that all that

937 is savagery; but when you see a hundred white-washed houses in a row along

938 a dead straight road, lift up your hearts, for you are in civilization

939 again.

940 But I continue to wander from Flavigny. The first

941 thing I saw as I came into the street and noted how the level sun stood in

942 a haze beyond, and how it shadowed and brought out the slight

943 irregularities of the road, was a cart drawn by a galloping donkey, which

944 came at and passed me with a prodigious clatter as I dragged myself

945 forward. In the cart were two nuns, each with a scythe; they were going

946 out mowing, and were up the first in the village, as Religious always are.

947 Cheered by this happy omen, but not yet heartened, I next met a very old

948 man leading out a horse, and asked him if there was anywhere where I could

949 find coffee and bread at that hour; but he shook his head mournfully and

950 wished me good-morning in a strong accent, for he was deaf and probably

951 thought I was begging. So I went on still more despondent till I came to a

952 really merry man of about middle age who was going to the fields, singing,

953 with a very large rake over his shoulder. When I had asked him the same

954 question he stared at me a little and said of course coffee and bread

955 could be had at the baker's, and when I asked him how I should know the

956 baker's he was still more surprised at my ignorance, and said, 'By the

957 smoke coming from the large chimney.' This I saw rising a short way off on

958 my right, so I thanked him and went and found there a youth of about

959 nineteen, who sat at a fine oak table and had coffee, rum, and a loaf

960 before him. He was waiting for the bread in the oven to be ready; and

961 meanwhile he was very courteous, poured out coffee and rum for me and

962 offered me bread.

963 It is a matter often discussed why bakers are such

964 excellent citizens and good men. For while it is admitted in every country

965 I was ever in that cobblers are

966 ---

967 THE VALUE OF BAKERS

968 argumentative and atheists (I except the cobbler

969 under Plinlimmon, concerning whom would to heaven I had the space to tell

970 you all here, for he knows the legends of the mountain), while it is

971 public that barbers are garrulous and servile, that millers are cheats (we

972 say in Sussex that every honest miller has a large tuft of hair on the

973 palm of his hand), yet--with every trade in the world having some bad

974 quality attached to it--bakers alone are exempt, and every one takes it

975 for granted that they are sterling: indeed, there are some societies in

976 which, no matter how gloomy and churlish the conversation may have become,

977 you have but to mention bakers for voices to brighten suddenly and for a

978 good influence to pervade every one. I say this is known for a fact, but

979 not usually explained; the explanation is, that bakers are always up early

980 in the morning and can watch the dawn, and that in this occupation they

981 live in lonely contemplation enjoying the early hours.

982 So it was with this baker of mine in Flavigny, who

983 was a boy. When he heard that I had served at Toul he was delighted beyond

984 measure; he told me of a brother of his that had been in the same

985 regiment, and he assured me that he was himself going into the artillery

986 by special enlistment, having got his father's leave. You know very little

987 if you think I missed the opportunity of making the guns seem terrible and

988 glorious in his eyes. I told him stories enough to waken a sentry of

989 reserve, and if it had been possible (with my youth so obvious) I would

990 have woven in a few anecdotes of active service, and described great

991 shells bursting under my horses and the teams shot down, and the gunners

992 all the while impassive; but as I saw I should not be believed I did not

993 speak of such things, but confined myself to what he would see and hear

994 when he joined.

995 Meanwhile the good warm food and the rising

996 morning had done two things; they had put much more vigour into me than I

997 had had when I slunk in half-an-hour before, but at the same time (and

998 this is a thing that often comes with food and with rest) they had made me

999 feel the fatigue of so long a night. I rose up, therefore, determined to

1000 find some place where I could sleep. I asked this friend of mine how much

1001 there was to pay, and he said 'fourpence'. Then we exchanged ritual

1002 salutations, and I took the road. I did not leave the town or village

1003 without noticing one extraordinary thing at the far end of it, which was

1004 that, whereas most places in France are proud of their town-hall and make

1005 a great show of it, here in Flavigny they had taken a great house and

1006 written over it ÉCOLE COMMUNALE in great letters, and then they had

1007 written over a kind of lean-to or out-house of this big place the words 'Hôtel

1008 de ville' in very small letters, so small that I had a doubt for a moment

1009 if the citizens here were good republicans--a treasonable thought on all

1010 this frontier.

1011 Then, a mile onward, I saw the road cross the

1012 canal and run parallel to it. I

1013 ---

1014 THE HEAT OF MORNING****

1015 saw the canal run another mile or so under a fine

1016 bank of deep woods. I saw an old bridge leading over it to that inviting

1017 shade, and as it was now nearly six and the sun was gathering strength, I

1018 went, with slumber overpowering me and my feet turning heavy beneath me,

1019 along the tow-path, over the bridge, and lay down on the moss under these

1020 delightful trees. Forgetful of the penalty that such an early repose would

1021 bring, and of the great heat that was to follow at midday, I quickly

1022 became part of the life of that forest and fell asleep.

1023 When I awoke it was full eight o'clock, and the

1024 sun had gained great power. I saw him shining at me through the branches

1025 of my trees like a patient enemy outside a city that one watches through

1026 the loopholes of a tower, and I began to be afraid of taking the road. I

1027 looked below me down the steep bank between the trunks and saw the canal

1028 looking like black marble, and I heard the buzzing of the flies above it,

1029 and I noted that all the mist had gone. A very long way off, the noise of

1030 its ripples coming clearly along the floor of the water, was a lazy barge

1031 and a horse drawing it. From time to time the tow-rope slackened into the

1032 still surface, and I heard it dripping as it rose. The rest of the valley

1033 was silent except for that under-humming of insects which marks the

1034 strength of the sun.

1035 Now I saw clearly how difficult it was to turn

1036 night into day, for I found myself condemned either to waste many hours

1037 that ought to be consumed on my pilgrimage, or else to march on under the

1038 extreme heat; and when I had drunk what was left of my Brule wine (which

1039 then seemed delicious), and had eaten a piece of bread, I stiffly jolted

1040 down the bank and regained the highway.

1041 In the first village I came to I found that Mass

1042 was over, and this justly annoyed me; for what is a pilgrimage in which a

1043 man cannot hear Mass every morning? Of all the things I have read about St

1044 Louis which make me wish I had known him to speak to, nothing seems to me

1045 more delightful than his habit of getting Mass daily whenever he marched

1046 down south, but why this should be so delightful I cannot tell. Of course

1047 there is a grace and influence belonging to such a custom, but it is not

1048 of that I am speaking but of the pleasing sensation of order and

1049 accomplishment which attaches to a day one has opened by Mass; a purely

1050 temporal, and, for all I know, what the monks back at the ironworks would

1051 have called a carnal feeling, but a source of continual comfort to me. Let

1052 them go their way and let me go mine.

1053 This comfort I ascribe to four causes (just above

1054 you will find it written that I could not tell why this should be so, but

1055 what of that?), and these causes are:

1056 1. That for half-an-hour just at the opening of

1057 the day you are silent and

1058 33

1059 ---

1060 _-. THE MORNING MASS****

1061 recollected, and have to put off cares, interests,

1062 and passions in the repetition of a familiar action. This must certainly

1063 be a great benefit to the body and give

1064 it tone.

1065 2. That the Mass is a careful and rapid ritual.

1066 Now it is the function of all ritual (as we see in games, social

1067 arrangements and so forth) to relieve the mind by so much of

1068 responsibility and initiative and to catch you up (as it were) into

1069 itself, leading your life for you during the time it lasts. In this way

1070 you experience a singular repose, after which fallowness I am sure one is

1071 fitter for

1072 action and judgement.

1073 3. That the surroundings incline you to good and

1074 reasonable thoughts, and for the moment deaden the rasp and jar of that

1075 busy wickedness which both working in one's self and received from others

1076 is the true source of all human miseries. Thus the time spent at Mass is

1077 like a short repose in a deep and well-built library, into which no sounds

1078 come and where you feel yourself secure against the outer world.

1079 4. And the most important cause of this feeling of

1080 satisfaction is that you are doing what the human race has done for

1081 thousands upon thousands upon thousands of years. This is a matter of such

1082 moment that I am astonished people hear of it so little. Whatever is

1083 buried right into our blood from immemorial habit that we must be certain

1084 to do if we are to be fairly happy (of course no grown man or woman can

1085 really be very happy for long--but I mean reasonably happy), and, what is

1086 more important, decent and secure of our souls. Thus one should from time

1087 to time hunt animals, or at the very least shoot at a mark; one should

1088 always drink some kind of fermented liquor with one's food--and especially

1089 deeply upon great feast-days; one should go on the water from time to

1090 time; and one should dance on occasions; and one should sing in chorus.

1091 For all these things man has done since God put him into a garden and his

1092 eyes first became troubled with a soul. Similarly some teacher or ranter

1093 or other, whose name I forget, said lately one very wise thing at least,

1094 which was that every man should do a little work with his hands.

1095 Oh! what good philosophy this is, and how much

1096 better it would be if rich people, instead of raining the influence of

1097 their rank and spending their money on leagues for this or that

1098 exceptional thing, were to spend it in converting the middle-class to

1099 ordinary living and to the tradition of the race. Indeed, if I had power

1100 for some thirty years I would see to it that people should be allowed to

1101 follow their inbred instincts in these matters, and should hunt, drink,

1102 sing, dance, sail, and dig; and those that would not should be compelled

1103 by force.

1104 Now in the morning Mass you do all that the race

1105 needs to do and has done for all these ages where religion was concerned;

1106 there you have the sacred and

1107 34

1108 ---

1109 THE SENSIBLE SQUIRE

1110 separate Enclosure, the Altar, the Priest in his

1111 Vestments, the set ritual, the ancient and hierarchic tongue, and all that

1112 your nature cries out for in the matter of worship.

1113 From these considerations it is easy to understand

1114 how put out I was to find Mass over on this first morning of my

1115 pilgrimage. And I went along the burning road in a very ill-humour till I

1116 saw upon my right, beyond a low wall and in a kind of park, a house that

1117 seemed built on some artificial raised ground surrounded by a wall, but

1118 this may have been an illusion, the house being really only very tall. At

1119 any rate I drew it, and in the village just beyond it I learnt something

1120 curious about the man that owned it.

1121 *

1122 For I had gone into a house to take a third meal

1123 of bread and wine and to replenish my bottle when the old woman of the

1124 house, who was a kindly person, told me she had just then no wine. 'But,'

1125 said she, 'Mr So and So that lives in the big house sells it to any one

1126 who cares to buy even in the smallest quantities, and you will see his

1127 shed standing by the side of the road.'

1128 Everything happened just as she had said. I came

1129 to the big shed by the park wall, and there was a kind of counter made of

1130 boards, and several big tuns and two men: one in an apron serving, and the

1131 other in a little box or compartment writing. I was somewhat timid to ask

1132 for so little as a quart, but the apron man in the most businesslike way

1133 filled my bottle at a tap and asked for fourpence. He was willing to talk,

1134 and told me many things: of good years in wine, of the nature of their

1135 trade, of the influence of the moon on brewing, of the importance of

1136 spigots, and what not; but when I tried to get out of him whether the

1137 owner were an eccentric private gentleman or a merchant that had the sense

1138 to earn little pennies as well as large ones, I could not make him

1139 understand my meaning; for his idea of rank was utterly different from

1140 mine and took no account of idleness and luxury and daftness, but was

1141 based entirely upon

1142 35

1143 ---

1144 THE LAST MILE

1145 money and clothes. Moreover we were both of us

1146 Republicans, so the matter was of no great moment. Courteously saluting

1147 ourselves we parted, he remaining to sell wine and I hobbling to Rome, now

1148 a little painfully and my sack the heavier by a quart of wine, which, as

1149 you probably know, weighs almost exactly two pounds and a half.

1150 It was by this time close upon eleven, and I had

1151 long reached the stage when some kinds of men begin talking of Dogged

1152 Determination, Bull-dog pluck, the stubborn spirit of the Island race and

1153 so forth, but when those who can boast a little of the sacred French blood

1154 are in a mood of set despair (both kinds march on, and the mobility of

1155 either infantry is much the same), I say I had long got to this point of

1156 exhaustion when it occurred to me that I should need an excellent and

1157 thorough meal at midday. But on looking at my map I found that there was

1158 nothing nearer than this town of Charmes that was marked on the

1159 milestones, and that was the first place I should come to in the

1160 department of the Vosges.

1161 It would take much too long to describe the dodges

1162 that weary men and stiff have recourse to when they are at the close of a

1163 difficult task: how they divide it up in lengths in their minds, how they

1164 count numbers, how they begin to solve problems in mental arithmetic: I

1165 tried them all. Then I thought of a new one, which is really excellent,

1166 and which I recommend to the whole world. It is to vary the road, suddenly

1167 taking now the fields, now the river, but only occasionally the turnpike.

1168 This last lap was very well suited for such a method. The valley had

1169 become more like a wide and shallow trench than ever. The hills on either

1170 side were low and exactly even. Up the middle of it went the river, the

1171 canal and the road, and these two last had only a field between them; now

1172 broad, now narrow.

1173 First on the tow-path, then on the road, then on

1174 the grass, then back on the

1175 ---

1176 CHARMES****

1177 tow-path, I pieced out the last baking mile into

1178 Charmes, that lies at the foot of a rather higher hill, and at last was

1179 dragging myself up the street just as the bell was ringing the noon

1180 Angelus; nor, however tedious you may have found it to read this final

1181 effort of mine, can you have found it a quarter as wearisome as I did to

1182 walk it; and surely between writer and reader there should be give and

1183 take, now the one furnishing the entertainment and now the other.

1184 The delightful thing in Charmes is its name. Of

1185 this name I had indeed been thinking as I went along the last miles of

1186 that dusty and deplorable road--that a town should be called 'Charms'.

1187 Not but that towns, if they are left to themselves

1188 and not hurried, have a way of settling into right names suited to the

1189 hills about them and recalling their own fields. I remember Sussex, and as

1190 I remember it I must, if only for example, set down my roll-call of such

1191 names, as--Fittleworth, where the Inn has painted panels; Amberley in the

1192 marshes; delicate Fernhurst, and Ditchling under its hill; Arundel, that

1193 is well known to every one; and Climping, that no one knows, set on a

1194 lonely beach and lost at the vague end of an impassable road; and Barlton,

1195 and Burton, and Duncton, and Coldwatham, that stand under in the shadow

1196 and look up at the great downs; and Petworth, where the spire leans

1197 sideways; and Timberley, that the floods make into an island; and No Man's

1198 Land, where first there breaks on you the distant sea. I never knew a

1199 Sussex man yet but, if you noted him such a list, would answer: 'There I

1200 was on such and such a day; this I came to after such and such a run; and

1201 that other is my home.' But it is not his recollection alone which moves

1202 him, it is sound of the names. He feels the accent of them, and all the

1203 men who live between Hind-head and the Channel know these names stand for

1204 Eden; the noise is enough to prove it. So it is also with the hidden

1205 valleys of the lie de France; and when you say Jouy or Chevreuse to a man

1206 that was born in those shadows he grows dreamy--yet they are within a walk

1207 of Paris.

1208 But the wonderful thing about a name like Charmes

1209 is that it hands down the dead. For some dead man gave it a keen name

1210 proceeding from his own immediate delight, and made general what had been

1211 a private pleasure, and, so to speak, bequeathed a poem to his town. They

1212 say the Arabs do this; calling one place 'the rest of the warriors', and

1213 another 'the end', and another 'the surprise of the horses': let those who

1214 know them speak for it. I at least know that in the west of the Cotentin

1215 (a sea-garden) old Danes married to Gaulish women discovered the just

1216 epithet, and that you have 'St Mary on the Hill' and 'High Town under the

1217 Wind' and 'The Borough over the Heath', which

1218 37

1219 ---

1220 NATURE OF TEMPTING DEVILS****

1221 are to-day exactly what their name describes them.

1222 If you doubt that England has such descriptive names, consider the great

1223 Truth that at one junction on a railway where a mournful desolation of

1224 stagnant waters and treeless, stonewalled fields threatens you with

1225 experience and awe, a melancholy porter is told off to put his head into

1226 your carriage and to chant like Charon, 'Change here for Ashton under the

1227 Wood, Moreton on the Marsh, Bourton on the Water, and Stow in the Wold.'

1228 Charmes does not fulfil its name nor preserve what

1229 its forgotten son found so wonderful in it. For at luncheon there a great

1230 commercial traveller told me fiercely that it was chiefly known for its

1231 breweries, and that he thought it of little account. Still even in Charmes

1232 I found one marvellous corner of a renaissance house, which I drew; but as

1233 I have lost the drawing, let it go.

1234 When I came out from the inn of Charmes the heat

1235 was more terrible than ever, and the prospect of a march in it more

1236 intolerable. My head hung, I went very slowly, and I played with cowardly

1237 thoughts, which were really (had I known it) good angels. I began to look

1238 out anxiously for woods, but saw only long whitened wall glaring in the

1239 sun, or, if ever there were trees, they were surrounded by wooden

1240 palisades which the owners had put there. But in a little time (now I had

1241 definitely yielded to temptation) I found a thicket.

1242 You must know that if you yield to entertaining a

1243 temptation, there is the opportunity presented to you like lightning. A

1244 theologian told me this, and it is partly true: but not of Mammon or

1245 Belphegor, or whatever Devil it is that overlooks the Currency (I can see

1246 his face from here): for how many have yielded to the Desire of Riches and

1247 professed themselves very willing to revel in them, yet did not get an

1248 opportunity worth a farthing till they died? Like those two beggars that

1249 Rabelais tells of, one of whom wished for all the gold that would pay for

1250 all the merchandise that had ever been sold in Paris since its first

1251 foundation, and the other for as much gold as would go into all the sacks

1252 that could be sewn by all the needles (and those of the smallest size)

1253 that could be crammed into Notre-Dame from the floor to the ceiling,

1254 filling the smallest crannies. Yet neither had a crust that night to rub

1255 his gums with.

1256 Whatever Devil it is, however, that tempts men to

1257 repose--and for my part I believe him to be rather an Aeon than a Devil:

1258 that is, a good-natured fellow working on his own account neither good nor

1259 ill--whatever being it is, it certainly suits one's mood, for I never yet

1260 knew a man determined to be lazy that had not ample opportunity afforded

1261 him, though he were poorer than the cure of Maigre, who formed a syndicate

1262 to sell at a scutcheon a gross such souls as were too insignificant to

1263 sell singly. A man can always find a chance for doing nothing as amply and

1264 with as ecstatic a satisfaction as the world allows, and so

1265 ---

1266 to me (whether it was there before I cannot tell,

1267 and if it came miraculously, so much the more amusing) appeared this

1268 thicket. It was to the left of the road; a stream ran through it in a

1269 little ravine; the undergrowth was thick beneath its birches, and just

1270 beyond, on the plain that bordered it, were reapers reaping in a field. I

1271 went into it contentedly and slept till evening my third sleep; then,

1272 refreshed by the cool wind that went before the twilight, I rose and took

1273 the road again, but I knew I could not go far.

1274 I was now past my fortieth mile, and though the

1275 heat had gone, yet my dead slumber had raised a thousand evils. I had

1276 stiffened to lameness, and had fallen into the mood when a man desires

1277 companionship and the talk of travellers rather than the open plain. But

1278 (unless I went backward, which was out of the question) there was nowhere

1279 to rest in for a long time to come. The next considerable village was

1280 Thayon, which is called 'Thayon of the Vosges', because one is nearing the

1281 big hills, and thither therefore I crawled mile after mile.

1282 But my heart sank. First my foot limped, and then

1283 my left knee oppressed me with a sudden pain. I attempted to relieve it by

1284 leaning on my right leg, and so discovered a singular new law in medicine

1285 which I will propose to the scientists. For when those excellent men have

1286 done investigating the twirligigs of the brain to find out where the soul

1287 is, let them consider this much more practical matter, that you cannot

1288 relieve the pain in one limb without driving it into some other; and so I

1289 exchanged twinges in the left knee for a horrible great pain in the right.

1290 I sat down on a bridge, and wondered; I saw before me hundreds upon

1291 hundreds of miles, painful and exhausted, and I asked heaven if this was

1292 necessary to a pilgrimage. (But, as you shall hear, a pilgrimage is not

1293 wholly subject to material laws, for when I came to Épinal next day

1294 I went into a shop which, whatever it was to the profane, appeared to me

1295 as a chemist's shop, where I bought a bottle of some stuff called 'balm',

1296 and rubbing myself with it was instantly cured.)

1297 Then I looked down from the bridge across the

1298 plain, and saw, a long way off beyond the railway, the very ugly factory

1299 village of Thayon, and reached it at last, not without noticing that the

1300 people were standing branches of trees before their doors, and the little

1301 children noisily helping to tread the stems firmly into the earth. They

1302 told me it was for the coming of Corpus Christi, and so proved to me that

1303 religion, which is as old as these valleys, would last out their

1304 inhabiting men. Even here, in a place made by a great laundry, a modern

1305 industrial row of tenements, all the world was putting out green branches

1306 to welcome the Procession and the Sacrament and the Priest. Comforted by

1307 this evident refutation of the sad nonsense I had read in Cities

1308 39

1309 ---

1310 OF MOUNTAIN TOWNS

1311 from the pen of intellectuals--nonsense I had

1312 known to be nonsense, but that had none the less tarnished my mind--I

1313 happily entered the inn, ate and drank, praised God, and lay down to sleep

1314 in a great bed. I mingled with my prayers a firm intention of doing the

1315 ordinary things, and not attempting impossibilities, such as marching by

1316 night, nor following out any other vanities of this world. Then, having

1317 cast away all theories of how a pilgrimage should be conducted, and broken

1318 five or six vows, I slept steadily till the middle of the morning. I had

1319 covered fifty miles in twenty-five hours, and if you imagine this to be

1320 but two miles an hour, you must have a very mathematical mind, and know

1321 little of the realities of living. I woke and threw my shutters open to

1322 the bright morning and the masterful sun, took my coffee, and set out once

1323 more towards Epinal, the stronghold a few miles away--delighted to see

1324 that my shadow was so short and the road so hot to the feet and eyes. For

1325 I said, 'This at least proves that I am doing like all the world, and

1326 walking during the day.' It was but a couple of hours to the great

1327 garrison. In a little time I passed a battery. Then a captain went by on a

1328 horse, with his orderly behind him. Where the deep lock stands by the

1329 roadside--the only suggestion of coolness--I first heard the bugles; then

1330 I came into the long street and determined to explore Epinal, and to cast

1331 aside all haste and folly.

1332 There are many wonderful things in Epinal. As, for

1333 instance, that it was evidently once, like Paris and Melun and a dozen

1334 other strongholds of the Gauls, an island city. For the rivers of France

1335 are full of long, habitable islands, and these were once the

1336 rallying-places of clans. Then there are the forts which are placed on

1337 high hills round the town and make it even stronger than Toul; for Epinal

1338 stands just where the hills begin to be very high. Again, it is the

1339 capital of a mountain district, and this character always does something

1340 peculiar and impressive to a town. You may watch its effect in Grenoble,

1341 in little Aubusson, and, rather less, in Geneva.

1342 For in such towns three quite different kinds of

1343 men meet. First there are the old plain-men, who despise the highlanders

1344 and think themselves much grander and more civilized; these are the

1345 burgesses. Then there are the peasants and wood-cutters, who come in from

1346 the hill-country to market, and who are suspicious of the plain-men and

1347 yet proud to depend upon a real town with a bishop and paved streets.

1348 Lastly, there are the travellers, who come there to enjoy the mountains

1349 and to make the city a base for their excursions, and these love the

1350 hill-men and think they understand them, and they despise the plain-men

1351 for being so middle-class as to lord it over the hill-men: but in truth

1352 40

1353 ---

1354 EPINAL CHURCH****

1355 this third class, being outsiders, are equally

1356 hated and despised by both the others, and there is a combination against

1357 them and they are exploited.

1358 And there are many other things in which Épinal

1359 is wonderful, but in nothing is it more wonderful than in its great

1360 church.

1361 I suppose that the high Dukes of Burgundy and

1362 Lorraine and the rich men from Flanders and the House of Luxemburg and the

1363 rest, going to Rome, the centre of the world, had often to pass up this

1364 valley of the Moselle, which (as I have said) is a road leading to Rome,

1365 and would halt at fipinal and would at times give money for its church;

1366 with this result, that the church belongs to every imaginable period and

1367 is built anyhow, in twenty styles, but stands as a whole a most enduring

1368 record of past forms and of what has pleased the changing mind when it has

1369 attempted to worship in stone.

1370 Thus the transept is simply an old square barn of

1371 rough stone, older, I suppose, than Charlemagne and without any ornament.

1372 In its lower courses I thought I even saw the Roman brick. It had once two

1373 towers, northern and southern; the southern is ruined and has a wooden

1374 roof, the northern remains and is just a pinnacle or minaret too narrow

1375 for bells.

1376 ---

1377 THE APPLE MAN****

1378 Then the apse is pure and beautiful Gothic of the

1379 fourteenth century, with very tall and fluted windows like single prayers.

1380 The ambulatory is perfectly modern, Gothic also, and in the manner that

1381 Viollet le Duc in France and Pugin in England have introduced to bring us

1382 back to our origins and to remind us of the place whence all we Europeans

1383 came. Again, this apse and ambulatory are not perpendicular to the

1384 transept, but set askew, a thing known in small churches and said to be a

1385 symbol, but surely very rare in large ones. The western door is purely

1386 Romanesque, and has Byzantine ornaments and a great deep round door. To

1387 match it there is a northern door still deeper, with rows and rows of

1388 inner arches full of saints, angels, devils, and flowers; and this again

1389 is not straight, but so built that the arches go aslant, as you sometimes

1390 see railway bridges when they cross roads at an angle. Finally, there is a

1391 central tower which is neither Gothic nor Romanesque but pure Italian, a

1392 loggia, with splendid round airy windows taking up all its walls, and with

1393 a flat roof and eaves. This some one straight from the south must have put

1394 on as a memory of his wanderings.

1395 The barn-transept is crumbling old grey stone, the

1396 Romanesque porches are red, like Strasburg, the Gothic apse is old white

1397 as our cathedrals are, the modern ambulatory is of pure white stone just

1398 quarried, and thus colours as well as shapes are mingled up and different

1399 in this astonishing building.

1400 I drew it from that point of view in the

1401 market-place to the north-east which shows most of these contrasts at

1402 once, and you must excuse the extreme shakiness of the sketch, for it was

1403 taken as best I could on an apple-cart with my book resting on the

1404 apples--there was no other desk. Nor did the apple-seller mind my doing

1405 it, but on the contrary gave me advice and praise saying such things as--

1406 'Excellent; you have caught the angle of the apse

1407 ... Come now, darken the edge of that pillar ... I fear you have made the

1408 tower a little confused,' and so forth.

1409 I offered to buy a few apples off him, but he gave

1410 me three instead, and these, as they incommoded me, I gave later to a

1411 little child.

1412 Indeed the people of Épinal, not taking me

1413 for a traveller but simply for a wandering poor man, were very genial to

1414 me, and the best good they did me was curing my lameness. For, seeing an

1415 apothecary's shop as I was leaving the town, I went in and said to the

1416 apothecary -

1417 'My knee has swelled and is very painful, and I

1418 have to walk far; perhaps you can tell me how to cure it, or give me

1419 something that will.'

1420 'There is nothing easier,' he said; 'I have here a

1421 specific for the very thing you complain of.'

1422 42

1423 ---

1424 THE LITTLE RUNNEL****

1425 With this he pulled out a round bottle, on the

1426 label of which was printed in great letters, 'BALM'.

1427 'You have but to rub your knee strongly and long

1428 with this ointment of mine,' he said, 'and you will be cured.' Nor did he

1429 mention any special form of words to be repeated as one did it.

1430 Everything happened just as he had said. When I

1431 was some little way above the town I sat down on a low wall and rubbed my

1432 knee strongly and long with this balm, and the pain instantly disappeared.

1433 Then, with a heart renewed by this prodigy, I took the road again and

1434 began walking very rapidly and high, swinging on to Rome.

1435 The Moselle above fipinal takes a bend outwards,

1436 and it seemed to me that a much shorter way to the next village (which is

1437 called Archettes, or 'the very little arches', because there are no arches

1438 there) would be right over the hill round which the river curved. This

1439 error came from following private judgement and not heeding tradition,

1440 here represented by the highroad which closely follows the river. For

1441 though a straight tunnel to Archettes would have saved distance, yet a

1442 climb over that high hill and through the pathless wood on its summit was

1443 folly.

1444 I went at first over wide, sloping fields, and

1445 some hundred feet above the valley I crossed a little canal. It was made

1446 on a very good system, and I recommend it to the riparian owners of the

1447 Upper Wye, which needs it. They take the water from the Moselle (which is

1448 here broad and torrential and falls in steps, running over a stony bed

1449 with little swirls and rapids), and they lead it along at an even

1450 gradient, averaging, as it were, the uneven descent of the river. In this

1451 way they have a continuous stream running through fields that would

1452 otherwise be bare and dry, but that are thus nourished into excellent

1453 pastures.

1454 Above these fields the forest went up steeply. I

1455 had not pushed two hundred yards into its gloom and confusion when I

1456 discovered that I had lost my way. It was necessary to take the only guide

1457 I had and to go straight upwards wherever the line of greatest inclination

1458 seemed to lie, for that at least would take me to a summit and probably to

1459 a view of the valley; whereas if I tried to make for the shoulder of the

1460 hill (which had been my first intention) I might have wandered about till

1461 nightfall.

1462 It was an old man in a valley called the Curicante

1463 in Colorado that taught me this, if one lost one's way going upwards*

1464 to make at once along the steepest line, but if one lost it going *downwards,*

1465 to listen for water and reach it and

1466 43

1467 ---

1468 THE FALSE BATTERY****

1469 follow it. I wish I had space to tell all about

1470 this old man, who gave me hospitality out there. He was from New England

1471 and was lonely, and had brought out at great expense a musical box to

1472 cheer him. Of this he was very proud, and though it only played four silly

1473 hymn tunes, yet, as he and I listened to it, heavy tears came into his

1474 eyes and light tears into mine, because these tunes reminded him of his

1475 home. But I have no time to do more than mention him, and must return to

1476 my forest.

1477 I climbed, then, over slippery pine needles and

1478 under the charged air of those trees, which was full of dim, slanting

1479 light from the afternoon sun, till, nearly at the summit, I came upon a

1480 clearing which I at once recognized as a military road, leading to what we

1481 used to call a 'false battery', that is, a dug-out with embrasures into

1482 which guns could be placed but in which no guns were. For ever since the

1483 French managed to produce a really mobile heavy gun they have constructed

1484 any amount of such auxiliary works between the permanent forts. These need

1485 no fixed guns to be emplaced, since the French can use now one such

1486 parapet, now another, as occasion serves, and the advantage is that your

1487 guns are never useless, but can always be brought round where they are

1488 needed, and that thus six guns will do more work than twenty used to do.

1489 This false battery was on the brow of the hill,

1490 and when I reached it I looked down the slope, over the brushwood that hid

1491 the wire entanglements, and there was the whole valley of the Moselle at

1492 my feet.

1493 As this was the first really great height, so this

1494 was the first really great view that I met with on my pilgrimage. I drew

1495 it carefully, piece by piece, sitting there a long time in the declining

1496 sun and noting all I saw. Archettes, just below; the flat valley with the

1497 river winding from side to side; the straight rows of poplar trees; the

1498 dark pines on the hills, and the rounded mountains rising farther and

1499 higher into the distance until the last I saw, far off to the south-east,

1500 *

1501 ---

1502 THE GREAT VIEW****

1503 must have been the Ballon d'Alsace at the sources

1504 of the Moselle--the hill that marked the first full stage in my journey

1505 and that overlooked Switzerland.

1506 Indeed, this is the peculiar virtue of walking to

1507 a far place, and especially of walking there in a straight line, that one

1508 gets these visions of the world from hill-tops.

1509 When I call up for myself this great march I see

1510 it all mapped out in landscapes, each of which I caught from some

1511 mountain, and each of which joins on to that before and to that after it,

1512 till I can piece together the whole road. The view here from the Hill of

1513 Archettes, the view from the Ballon d'Alsace, from Glovelier Hill, from

1514 the Weissenstein, from the Brienzer Grat, from the Grimsel, from above

1515 Bellinzona, from the Principessa, from Tizzano, from the ridge of the

1516 Apennines, from the Wall of Siena, from San Quirico, from Radicofani, from

1517 San Lorenzo, from Montefiascone, from above Viterbo, from Roncigleone, and

1518 at last from that lift in the Via Cassia, whence one suddenly perceives

1519 the City. They unroll themselves all in their order till I can see Europe,

1520 and Rome shining at the end.

1521 But you who go in railways are necessarily shut up

1522 in long valleys and even sometimes by the walls of the earth. Even those

1523 who bicycle or drive see these sights but rarely and with no consecution,

1524 since roads also avoid climbing save where they are forced to it, as over

1525 certain passes. It is only by following the straight line onwards that any

1526 one can pass from ridge to ridge and have this full picture of the way he

1527 has been.

1528 So much for views. I clambered down the hill to

1529 Archettes and saw, almost the first house, a swinging board 'At the sign

1530 of the Trout of the Vosges', and as it was now evening I turned in there

1531 to dine.

1532 Two things I noticed at once when I sat down to

1533 meat. First, that the people seated at that inn table were of the

1534 middle-class of society, and secondly, that I, though of their rank, was

1535 an impediment to their enjoyment. For to sleep in woods, to march some

1536 seventy miles, the latter part in a dazzling sun, and to end by sliding

1537 down an earthy steep into the road, stamps a man with all that this kind

1538 of people least desire to have thrust upon them. And those who blame the

1539 middle-class for their conventions in such matters, and who profess to be

1540 above the care for cleanliness and clothes and social ritual which marks

1541 the middle-class, are either anarchists by nature, or fools who take what

1542 is but an effect of their wealth for a natural virtue.

1543 I say it roundly; if it were not for the

1544 punctiliousness of the middle-class in these matters all our civilization

1545 would go to pieces. They are the conservators and the maintainers of the

1546 standard, the moderators of Europe, the salt of

1547 45

1548 ---

1549 APOLOGY FOR THE MIDDLE-CLASS****

1550 society. For the kind of man who boasts that he

1551 does not mind dirty clothes or roughing it, is either a man who cares

1552 nothing for all that civilization has built up and who rather hates it, or

1553 else (and this is much more common) he is a rich man, or accustomed to

1554 live among the rich, and can afford to waste energy and stuff because he

1555 feels in a vague way that more clothes can always be bought, that at the

1556 end of his vagabondism he can get excellent dinners, and that London and

1557 Paris are full of luxurious baths and barber shops. Of all the corrupting

1558 effects of wealth there is none worse than this, that it makes the wealthy

1559 (and their parasites) think in some way divine, or at least a lovely

1560 character of the mind, what is in truth nothing but their power of

1561 luxurious living. Heaven keep us all from great riches--I mean from very

1562 great riches.

1563 Now the middle-class cannot afford to buy new

1564 clothes whenever they feel inclined, neither can they end up a jaunt by a

1565 Turkish bath and a great feast with wine. So their care is always to

1566 preserve intact what they happen to have, to exceed in nothing, to study

1567 cleanliness, order, decency, sobriety, and a steady temper, and they fence

1568 all this round and preserve it in the only way it can be preserved, to

1569 wit, with conventions, and they are quite right.

1570 I find it very hard to keep up to the demands of

1571 these my colleagues, but I recognize that they are on the just side in the

1572 quarrel; let none of them go about pretending that I have not defended

1573 them in this book.

1574 So I thought of how I should put myself right with

1575 these people. I saw that an elaborate story (as, that I had been set upon

1576 by a tramp who forced me to change clothes: that I dressed thus for a bet:

1577 that I was an officer employed as a spy, and was about to cross the

1578 frontier into Germany in the guise of a labourer: that my doctor forbade

1579 me to shave--or any other such rhodomontade): I saw, I say, that by

1580 venturing upon any such excuses I might unwittingly offend some other

1581 unknown canon of theirs deeper and more sacred than their rule on clothes;

1582 it had happened to me before now to do this in the course of explanations.

1583 So I took another method, and said, as I sat down

1584 -

1585 'Pray excuse this appearance of mine. I have had a

1586 most unfortunate adventure in the hills, losing my way and being compelled

1587 to sleep out all night, nor can I remain to get tidy, as it is essential

1588 that I should reach my luggage (which is at Remiremont) before midnight.'

1589 I took great care to pay for my glass of white

1590 wine before dinner with a bank-note, and I showed my sketches to my

1591 neighbour to make an impression. I also talked of foreign politics, of the

1592 countries I had seen, of England especially, with such minute exactitude

1593 that their disgust was soon turned to admiration.

1594 46

1595 ---

1596 OF DORMITORY TREES****

1597 The hostess of this inn was delicate and courteous

1598 to a degree, and at every point attempting to overreach her guests, who,

1599 as regularly as she attacked, countered with astonishing dexterity.

1600 Thus she would say: 'Perhaps the joint would taste

1601 better if it were carved on the table; or do the gentlemen prefer it

1602 carved aside?'

1603 To which a banker opposite me said in a deep

1604 voice: 'We prefer, madam, to have it carved aside.'

1605 Or she would put her head in and say: 'I can

1606 recommend our excellent beer. It is really preferable to this local wine.'

1607 And my neighbour, a tourist, answered with

1608 decision: 'Madame, we find your wine excellent. It could not be bettered.'

1609 Nor could she get round them on a single point,

1610 and I pitied her so much that I bought bread and wine off her to console

1611 her, and I let her overcharge me, and went out into the afterglow with her

1612 benediction, followed also by the farewells of the middle-class, who were

1613 now taking their coffee at little tables outside the house.

1614 I went hard up the road to Remiremont. The night

1615 darkened. I reached Remiremont at midnight, and feeling very wakeful I

1616 pushed on up the valley under great woods of pines; and at last, diverging

1617 up a little path, I settled on a clump of trees sheltered and, as I

1618 thought, warm, and lay down there to sleep till morning; but, on the

1619 contrary, I lay awake a full hour in the fragrance and on the level carpet

1620 of the pine needles looking up through the dark branches at the waning

1621 moon, which had just risen, and thinking of how suitable were pine-trees

1622 for a man to sleep under.

1623 'The beech,' I thought, 'is a good tree to sleep

1624 under, for nothing will grow there, and there is always dry beech-mast;

1625 the yew would be good if it did not grow so low, but, all in all,

1626 pine-trees are the best.' I also considered that the worst tree to sleep

1627 under would be the upas tree. These thoughts so nearly bordered on nothing

1628 that, though I was not sleepy, yet I fell asleep. Long before day, the

1629 moon being still lustrous against a sky that yet contained a few faint

1630 stars, I awoke shivering with cold.

1631 In sleep there is something diminishes us. This

1632 every one has noticed; for who ever suffered a nightmare awake, or felt in

1633 full consciousness those awful impotencies which lie on the other side of

1634 slumber? When we lie down we give ourselves voluntarily, yet by the force

1635 of nature, to powers before which we melt and are nothing. And among the

1636 strange frailties of sleep I have noticed cold.

1637 Here was a warm place under the pines where I

1638 could rest in great comfort on pine needles still full of the day; a

1639 covering for the beasts underground that love an even heat--the best of

1640 floors for a tired man. Even the slight wind that

1641 47

1642 ---

1643 THE DAWN****

1644 blew under the waning moon was warm, and the stars

1645 were languid and not brilliant, as though everything were full of summer,

1646 and I knew that the night would be short; a midsummer night; and I had

1647 lived half of it before attempting repose. Yet, I say, I woke shivering

1648 and also disconsolate, needing companionship. I pushed down through tall,

1649 rank grass, drenched with dew, and made my way across the road to the bank

1650 of the river. By the time I reached it the dawn began to occupy the east.

1651 For a long time I stood in a favoured place, just

1652 above a bank of trees that lined the river, and watched the beginning of

1653 the day, because every slow increase of light promised me sustenance.

1654 The faint, uncertain glimmer that seemed not so

1655 much to shine through the air as to be part of it, took all colour out of

1656 the woods and fields and the high slopes above me, leaving them planes of

1657 grey and deeper grey. The woods near

1658 me were a silhouette, black and motionless,

1659 emphasizing the east beyond. The river was white and dead, not even a

1660 steam rose from it, but out of the further pastures a gentle mist had

1661 lifted up and lay all even along the flanks of the hills, so that they

1662 rose out of it, indistinct at their bases, clear-cut above against the

1663 brightening sky; and the farther they were the more their mouldings showed

1664 in the early light, and the most distant edges of all caught the morning.

1665 At this wonderful sight I gazed for quite

1666 half-an-hour without moving, and took in vigour from it as a man takes in

1667 food and wine. When I stirred and looked about me it had become easy to

1668 see the separate grasses; a bird or two had begun little interrupted

1669 chirrups in the bushes, a day-breeze broke from up the valley ruffling the

1670 silence, the moon was dead against the sky, and the stars had disappeared.

1671 In a solemn mood I regained the road and turned my face towards the

1672 neighbouring sources of the river.

1673 ---

1674 THE SPECIAL CHAPELS****

1675 I easily perceived with each laborious mile that I

1676 was approaching the end of my companionship with the Moselle, which had

1677 become part of my adventure for the last eighty miles. It was now a small

1678 stream, mountainous and uncertain, though in parts still placid and slow.

1679 There appeared also that which I take to be an infallible accompaniment of

1680 secluded glens and of the head waters of rivers (however canalized or even

1681 overbuilt they are), I mean a certain roughness all about them and the

1682 stout protest of the hill-men: their stone cottages and their lonely paths

1683 off the road.

1684 So it was here. The hills had grown much higher

1685 and come closer to the river-plain; up the gullies I would catch now and

1686 then an aged and uncouth bridge with a hut near it all built of enduring

1687 stone: part of the hills. Then

1688 again there were present here and there on the

1689 spurs lonely chapels, and these in Catholic countries are a mark of the

1690 mountains and of the end of the riches of a valley. Why this should be so

1691 I cannot tell. You find them also sometimes in forests, but especially in

1692 the lesser inlets of the sea-coast, and, as I have said, here in the upper

1693 parts of valleys in the great hills. In such shrines Mass is to be said

1694 but rarely, sometimes but once a year in a special commemoration. The

1695 49

1696 ---

1697 ON LOCAL NAMES****

1698 rest of the time they stand empty, and some of the

1699 older or simpler, one might take for ruins. They mark everywhere some

1700 strong emotion of supplication, thanks, or reverence, and they anchor

1701 these wild places to their own past, making them up in memories what they

1702 lack in multitudinous life.

1703 I broke my fast on bread and wine at a place where

1704 the road crosses the river, and then I determined I would have hot coffee

1705 as well, and seeing in front of me a village called Rupt, which means 'the

1706 cleft' (for there is here a great cleft in the hillside), I went up to it

1707 and had my coffee. Then I discovered a singular thing, that the people of

1708 the place are tired of making up names and give nothing its peculiar

1709 baptism. This I thought really very wonderful indeed, for I have noticed

1710 wherever I have been that in proportion as men are remote and have little

1711 to distract them, in that proportion they produce a great crop of peculiar

1712 local names for every stream, reach, tuft, hummock, glen, copse, and gully

1713 for miles around; and often when I have lost my way and asked it of a

1714 peasant in some lonely part I have grown impatient as he wandered on about

1715 'leaving on your left the stone we call the Nuggin, and bearing round what

1716 some call Holy Dyke till you come to what they call Mary's Ferry'... and

1717 so forth. Long-shoremen and the riparian inhabitants of dreadful and

1718 lonely rivers near the sea have just such a habit, and I have in my mind's

1719 eye now a short stretch of tidal water in which there are but five shoals,

1720 yet they all have names, and are called 'The House, the Knowle, Goodman's

1721 Plot, Mall, and the Patch.'

1722 But here in Rupt, to my extreme astonishment,

1723 there was no such universal and human instinct. For I said to the old man

1724 who poured me out my coffee under the trellis (it was full morning, the

1725 sun was well up, and the clouds were all dappled high above the tops of

1726 the mountains): 'Father, what do you call this hill?' And with that I

1727 pointed to a very remarkable hill and summit that lie sheer above the

1728 village.

1729 'That,' he said, 'is called the hill over above

1730 Rupt.'

1731 'Yes, of course,' I said, 'but what is its name?'

1732 'That is its name,' he answered.

1733 And he was quite right, for when I looked at my

1734 map, there it was printed, 'Hill above Rupt'. I thought how wearisome it

1735 would be if this became a common way of doing things, and if one should

1736 call the Thames 'the River of London', and Essex 'the North side', and

1737 Kent 'the South side'; but considering that this fantastic method was only

1738 indulged in by one wretched village, I released myself from fear,

1739 relegated such horrors to the colonies, and took the road again.

1740 All this upper corner of the valley is a garden.

1741 It is bound in on every side

1742 ---

1743 THE YOUTH OF RIVERS****

1744 from the winds, it is closed at the end by the

1745 great mass of the Ballon d'Alsace, its floor is smooth and level, its

1746 richness is used to feed grass and pasturage, and knots of trees grow

1747 about it as though they had been planted to please the eye.

1748 Nothing can take from the sources of rivers their

1749 character of isolation and repose. Here what are afterwards to become the

1750 influences of the plains are nurtured and tended as though in an orchard,

1751 and the future life of a whole fruitful valley with its regal towns is

1752 determined. Something about these places prevents ingress or spoliation.

1753 They will endure no settlements save of peasants; the waters are too young

1754 to be harnessed; the hills forbid an easy commerce with neighbours.

1755 Throughout the world I have found the heads of rivers to be secure places

1756 of silence and content. And as they are themselves a kind of youth, the

1757 early home of all that rivers must at last become--I mean special ways of

1758 building and a separate state of living, a local air and a tradition of

1759 history, for rivers are always the makers of provinces--so they bring

1760 extreme youth back to one, and these upper glens of the world steep one in

1761 simplicity and childhood.

1762 It was my delight to lie upon a bank of the road

1763 and to draw what I saw before me, which was the tender stream of the

1764 Moselle slipping through fields quite flat and even and undivided by

1765 fences; its banks had here a strange effect of Nature copying man's art:

1766 they seemed a park, and the river wound through it full of the positive

1767 innocence that attaches to virgins: it nourished and was guarded by trees.

1768 ---

1769 THE PIOUS WOMAN****

1770 There was about that scene something of creation

1771 and of a beginning, and as I drew it, it gave me like a gift the freshness

1772 of the first experiences of living and filled me with remembered springs.

1773 I mused upon the birth of rivers, and how they were persons and had a

1774 name--were kings, and grew strong and ruled great countries, and how at

1775 last they reached the sea.

1776 But while I was thinking of these things, and

1777 seeing in my mind a kind of picture of The River Valley, and of men

1778 clustering around their home stream, and of its ultimate vast plains on

1779 either side, and of the white line of the sea beyond all, a woman passed

1780 me. She was very ugly, and was dressed in black. Her dress was stiff and

1781 shining, and, as I imagined, valuable. She had in her hand a book known to

1782 the French as 'The Roman Parishioner', which is a prayer-book. Her hair

1783 was hidden in a stiff cap or bonnet; she walked rapidly, with her eyes on

1784 the ground. When I saw this sight it reminded me suddenly, and I cried out

1785 profanely, 'Devil take me! It is Corpus Christi, and my third day out. It

1786 would be a wicked pilgrimage if I did not get Mass at last.' For my first

1787 day (if you remember) I had slept in a wood beyond Mass-time, and my

1788 second (if you remember) I had slept in a bed. But this third day, a great

1789 Feast into the bargain, I was bound to hear Mass, and this woman hurrying

1790 along to the next village proved that I was not too late.

1791 So I hurried in her wake and came to the village,

1792 and went into the church, which was very full, and came down out of it

1793 (the Mass was low and short--they are a Christian people) through an

1794 avenue of small trees and large branches set up in front of the houses to

1795 welcome the procession that was to be held near noon. At the foot of the

1796 street was an inn where I entered to eat, and finding there another man--I

1797 take him to have been a shopkeeper--I determined to talk politics, and

1798 began as follows:

1799 'Have you any anti-Semitism in your town?'

1800 'It is not my town,' he said, 'but there is

1801 anti-Semitism. It flourishes.'

1802 'Why then?' I asked. 'How many Jews have you in

1803 your town?'

1804 He said there were seven.

1805 'But,' said I, 'seven families of Jews--'

1806 'There are not seven families,' he interrupted;

1807 'there are seven Jews all told. There are but two families, and I am

1808 reckoning in the children. The servants are Christians.'

1809 'Why,' said I, 'that is only just and proper, that

1810 the Jewish families from beyond the frontier should have local Christian

1811 people to wait on them and do their bidding. But what I was going to say

1812 was that so very few Jews seem to me an insufficient fuel to fire the

1813 anti-Semites. How does their opinion flourish?'

1814 ---

1815 THE JEWS IN THE HILLS****

1816 'In this way,' he answered. 'The Jews, you see,

1817 ridicule our young men for holding such superstitions as the Catholic. Our

1818 young men, thus brought to book and made to feel irrational, admit the

1819 justice of the ridicule, but nourish a hatred secretly for those who have

1820 exposed their folly. Therefore they feel a standing grudge against the

1821 Jews.'

1822 When he had given me this singular analysis of

1823 that part of the politics of the mountains, he added, after a short

1824 silence, the following remarkable phrase--

1825 'For my part I am a liberal, and would have each

1826 go his own way: the Catholic to his Mass, the Jew to his Sacrifice.'

1827 I then rose from my meal, saluted him, and went

1828 musing up the valley road, pondering upon what it could be that the Jews

1829 sacrificed in this remote borough, but I could not for the life of me

1830 imagine what it was, though I have had a great many Jews among my friends.

1831 I was now arrived at the head of this lovely vale,

1832 at the sources of the river Moselle and the base of the great mountain the

1833 Ballon d'Alsace, which closes it in like a wall at the end of a lane. For

1834 some miles past the hills had grown higher and higher upon either side,

1835 the valley floor narrower, the torrent less abundant; there now stood up

1836 before me the marshy slopes and the enormous forests of pine that forbid a

1837 passage south. Up through these the main road has been pierced, tortuous

1838 and at an even gradient mile after mile to the very

1839 53

1840 ---

1841 THE BALLON D'ALSACE****

1842 top of the hill; for the Ballon d'Alsace is so

1843 shaped that it is impossible for the Moselle valley to communicate with

1844 the Gap of Belfort save by some track right over its summit. For it is a

1845 mountain with spurs like a star, and where mountains of this kind block

1846 the end of main valleys it becomes necessary for the road leading up and

1847 out of the valley to go over their highest point, since any other road

1848 over the passes or shoulders would involve a second climb to reach the

1849 country beyond. The reason of this, my little map here, where the

1850 dark stands for the valley and the light for the

1851 high places, will show better than a long description. Not that this map

1852 is of the Ballon d'Alsace in particular, but only of the type of hill I

1853 mean.

1854 Since, in crossing a range, it is usually possible

1855 to find a low point suitable for surmounting it, such summit roads are

1856 rare, but when one does get them they are the finest travel in the world,

1857 for they furnish at one point (that is, at the summit) what ordinary roads

1858 going through passes can never give you: a moment of domination. From

1859 their climax you look over the whole world, and you feel your journey to

1860 be adventurous and your advance to have taken some great definite step

1861 from one province and people to another.

1862 I would not be bound by the exaggerated zig-zags

1863 of the road, which had been built for artillery, and rose at an easy

1864 slope. I went along the bed of the dell before me and took the forest by a

1865 little path that led straight upward, and when the path failed, my way was

1866 marked by the wire of the telegraph that crosses to Belfort. As I rose I

1867 saw the forest before me grow grander. The pine branches came down from

1868 the trunks with a greater burden and majesty in

1869 54

1870 ---

1871 THE INNER DARKNESS****

1872 their sway, the trees took on an appearance of

1873 solemnity, and the whole rank that faced me--for here the woods come to an

1874 even line and stand like an army arrested upon a downward march -- seemed

1875 something unusual and gigantic. Nothing more helped this impression of awe

1876 than the extreme darkness beneath those aged growths, and the change in

1877 the sky that introduced my entry into the silence and perfume of so vast a

1878 temple. Great clouds, so charged with rain that you would have thought

1879 them lower than the hills (and yet just missing their tops), came covering

1880 me like a tumbled roof and gathered all around; the heat of the day waned

1881 suddenly in their shade: it seemed suddenly as though summer was over or

1882 as though the mountains demanded an uncertain summer of their own, and

1883 shot the sunshine with the chill of their heights. A little wind ran along

1884 the grass and died again. As I gained the darkness of the first trees,

1885 rain was falling.

1886 The silence of the interior wood was enhanced by a

1887 bare drip of water from the boughs that stood out straight and tangled I

1888 know not how far above me. Its gloom was rendered more tremendous by the

1889 half-light and lowering of the sky which the ceiling of branches

1890 concealed. Height, stillness, and a sort of expectancy controlled the

1891 memories of the place, and I passed silently and lightly between the high

1892 columns of the trees from night (as it seemed) through a kind of twilight

1893 forward to a near night beyond. On every side the perspective of these

1894 bare innumerable shafts, each standing apart in order, purple and

1895 fragrant, merged into recesses of distance where all light disappeared,

1896 yet as I advanced the slight gloaming still surrounded me, as did the

1897 stillness framed in the drip of water, and beneath my feet was the level

1898 carpet of the pine needles deadening and making distant every tiny noise.

1899 Had not the trees been so much greater and more enduring than my own

1900 presence, and had not they overwhelmed me by their regard, I should have

1901 felt afraid. As it was I pushed upward through their immovable host in

1902 some such catching of the breath as men have when they walk at night

1903 straining for a sound, and I felt myself to be continually in a hidden

1904 companionship.

1905 When I came to the edge of this haunted forest it

1906 ceased as suddenly as it had begun. I left behind me such a rank of trees

1907 aligned as I had entered thousands of feet below, and I saw before me,

1908 stretching shapely up to the sky, the round dome-like summit of the

1909 mountain--a great field of grass. It was already evening; and, as though

1910 the tall trees had withdrawn their virtue from me, my fatigue suddenly

1911 came upon me. My feet would hardly bear me as I clambered up the last

1912 hundred feet and looked down under the rolling clouds, lit from beneath by

1913 the level light of evening, to the three countries that met at my feet.

1914 55

1915 ---

1916 THE KNOT OF EUROPE

1917 For the Ballon d'Alsace is the knot of Europe, and

1918 from that gathering up and ending of the Vosges you look down upon three

1919 divisions of men. To the right of you are the Gauls. I do not mean that

1920 mixed breed of Lorraine, silent, among the best of people, but I mean the

1921 tree Gauls, who are hot, ready, and born in the plains and in the

1922 vineyards. They stand in their old entrenchments on either side of the Saône

1923 and are vivacious in battle; from time to time a spirit urges them, and

1924 they go out conquering eastward in the Germanics, or in Asia, or down the

1925 peninsulas of the Mediterranean, and then they suck back like a tide

1926 homewards, having accomplished nothing but an epic.

1927 Then on the left you have all the Germanics, a

1928 great sea of confused and dreaming people, lost in philosophies and

1929 creating music, frozen for the moment under a foreign rigidity, but some

1930 day to thaw again and to give a word to us others. They cannot long remain

1931 apart from visions.

1932 Then in front of you southward and eastward, if

1933 you are marching to Rome, come the Highlanders. I had never been among

1934 them, and I was to see them

1935 in a day; the people of the high hills, the race

1936 whom we all feel to be enemies, and who run straight across the world from

1937 the Atlantic to the Pacific, understanding each other, not understood by

1938 us. I saw their first rampart, the mountains called the Jura, on the

1939 horizon, and above my great field of view the clouds still tumbled, lit

1940 from beneath with evening.

1941 I tired of these immensities, and, feeling now my

1942 feet more broken than ever, I very slowly and in sharp shoots of pain

1943 dragged down the slope towards the main road: I saw just below me the

1944 frontier stones of the Prussians, and immediately within them a hut. To

1945 this I addressed myself.

1946 It was an inn. The door opened of itself, and I

1947 found there a pleasant woman of middle age, but frowning. She had three

1948 daughters, all of great strength, and she was upbraiding them loudly in

1949 the German of Alsace and making them scour and scrub. On the wall above

1950 her head was a great placard which I read very tactfully, and in a distant

1951 manner, until she had restored the discipline of

1952 ---

1953 THE COMMON FAITH****

1954 her family. This great placard was framed in the

1955 three colours which once brought a little hope to the oppressed, and at

1956 the head of it in broad black letters were the three words, 'Freedom,

1957 Brotherhood, and an Equal Law'. Underneath these was the emblematic figure

1958 of a cock, which I took to be the Gallic bird, and underneath him again

1959 was printed in enormous italics--

1960 Quand ce coq chantera Ici crédit l'on

1961 fera.*

1962 Which means--

1963 When you hear him crowing Then's the time for

1964 owing. Till that day--Pay.

1965 While I was still wondering at this epitome of the

1966 French people, and was attempting to combine the French military tradition

1967 with the French temper in the affairs of economics; while I was also

1968 delighting in the memory of the solid coin that I carried in a little

1969 leathern bag in my pocket, the hard-working, God-fearing, and honest woman

1970 that governs the little house and the three great daughters, within a yard

1971 of the frontier, and on the top of this huge hill, had brought back all

1972 her troops into line and had the time to attend to me. This she did with

1973 the utmost politeness, though cold by race, and through her politeness ran

1974 a sense of what Teutons called Duty, which would once have repelled me;

1975 but I have wandered over a great part of the world, and I know it now to

1976 be a distorted kind of virtue.

1977 She was of a very different sort from that good

1978 tribe of the Moselle valley beyond the hill; yet she also was Catholic--

1979 (she had a little tree set up before her door for the Corpus Christi: see

1980 what religion is, that makes people of utterly different races understand

1981 each other; for when I saw that tree I knew precisely where I stood. So

1982 once all we Europeans understood each other, but now we are divided by the

1983 worst malignancies of nations and classes, and a man does not so much love

1984 his own nation as hate his neighbours, and even the twilight of chivalry

1985 is mixed up with a detestable patronage of the poor. But as I was

1986 saying--) she also was a Catholic, and I knew myself to be with friends.

1987 She was moreover not exactly of- what shall I say? the words Celtic and

1988 Latin mean nothing-- not of those who delight in a delicate manner; and

1989 her good heart prompted her to say, very loudly--

1990 'What do you want?'

1991 'I want a bed,' I said, and I pulled out a silver

1992 coin. 'I must lie down at once.'

1993 57

1994 ---

1995 THE SINGLE BEVERAGE****

1996 Then I added, 'Can you make omelettes?'

1997 Now it is a curious thing, and one I will not

1998 dwell on--

1999 LECTOR. You do nothing but dwell.

2000 AUCTOR. It is the essence of lonely travel; and if

2001 you have come to this book for literature you have come to the wrong booth

2002 and counter. As I was saying: it is a curious thing that some people (or

2003 races) jump from one subject to another naturally, as some animals (I mean

2004 the noble deer) go by bounds. While there are other races (or

2005 individuals--heaven forgive me, I am no ethnologist) who think you a

2006 criminal or a lunatic unless you carefully plod along from step to step

2007 like a hippopotamus out of water. When, therefore, I asked this

2008 family-drilling, house-managing, mountain-living woman whether she could

2009 make omelettes, she shook her head at me slowly, keeping her eyes fixed on

2010 mine, and said in what was the corpse of French with a German ghost in it,

2011 'The bed is a franc.'

2012 'Motherkin,' I answered, 'what I mean is that I

2013 would sleep until I wake, for I have come a prodigious distance and have

2014 last slept in the woods. But when I wake I shall need food, for which,' I

2015 added, pulling out yet another coin, 'I will pay whatever your charge may

2016 be; for a more delightful house I have rarely met with. I know most people

2017 do not sleep before sunset, but I am particularly tired and broken.'

2018 She showed me my bed then much more kindly, and

2019 when I woke, which was long after dusk, she gave me in the living room of

2020 the hut eggs beaten up with ham, and I ate brown bread and said grace.

2021 Then (my wine was not yet finished, but it is an

2022 abominable thing to drink your own wine in another person's house) I asked

2023 whether I could have something to drink.

2024 'What you like,' she said.

2025 'What have you?' said I.

2026 'Beer,' said she.

2027 'Anything else?' said I.

2028 'No,' said she.

2029 'Why, then, give me some of that excellent beer.'

2030 I drank this with delight, paid all my bill (which

2031 was that of a labourer), and said good-night to them.

2032 In good-nights they had a ceremony; for they all

2033 rose together and curtsied. Upon my soul I believe such people to be the

2034 salt of the earth. I bowed with real contrition, for at several moments I

2035 had believed myself better than they. Then I went to my bed and they to

2036 theirs. The wind howled outside; my boots were stiff like wood and I could

2037 hardly take them off; my feet were so

2038 ---

2039 THE TRACK TO SWITZERLAND****

2040 martyrized that I doubted if I could walk at all

2041 on the morrow. Nevertheless I was so wrapped round with the repose of this

2042 family's virtues that I fell asleep at once. Next day the sun was rising

2043 in angry glory over the very distant hills of Germany, his new light

2044 running between the pinnacles of the clouds as the commands of a conqueror

2045 might come trumpeted down the defiles of mountains, when I fearlessly

2046 forced my boots on to my feet and left their doors.

2047 The morning outside came living and sharp after

2048 the gale--almost chilly. Under a scattered but clearing sky I first

2049 limped, then, as my blood warmed, strode down the path that led between

2050 the trees of the farther vale and was soon following a stream that leaped

2051 from one fall to another till it should lead me to the main road, to

2052 Belfort, to the Jura, to the Swiss whom I had never known, and at last to

2053 Italy.

2054 But before I call up the recollection of that

2055 hidden valley, I must describe with a map the curious features of the road

2056 that lay before me into Switzerland. I was standing on the summit of that

2057 knot of hills which rise up from every side to form the Ballon d'Alsace,

2058 and make an abrupt ending to the Vosges. Before me, southward and

2059 eastward, was a great plain with the fortress of Belfort in the midst of

2060 it. This plain is called by soldiers 'the Gap of Belfort', and is the only

2061 break in the hill frontier that covers France all the way from the

2062 Mediterranean to Flanders. On the farther side of this plain ran the Jura

2063 mountains, which are like a northern wall to Switzerland, and just before

2064 you reach them is the Frontier. The Jura are fold on fold of high

2065 limestone ridges, thousands of feet high, all parallel, with deep valleys,

2066 thousands of feet deep, between them; and beyond their last abrupt

2067 escarpment is the wide plain of the river Aar.

2068 Now the straight line to Rome ran from where I

2069 stood, right across that plain of Belfort, right across the ridges of the

2070 Jura, and cut the plain of the Aar a few miles to the west of a town

2071 called Solothurn or Soleure, which stands upon that river.

2072 It was impossible to follow that line exactly, but

2073 one could average it closely enough by following the high road down the

2074 mountain through Belfort to a Swiss town called Porrentruy or Portrut--so

2075 far one was a little to the west of the direct line.

2076 From Portrut, by picking one's way through

2077 forests, up steep banks, over open downs, along mule paths, and so forth,

2078 one could cross the first ridge called the 'Terrible Hill', and so reach

2079 the profound gorge of the river Doubs, and a town called St Ursanne. From

2080 St Ursanne, by following a mountain road and then climbing some rocks and

2081 tracking through a wood, one could get straight over the second ridge to

2082 Glovelier. From Glovelier a highroad took

2083 59

2084 ---

2085 *

2086 ---

2087 THE SECLUDED VALLEY****

2088 one through a gap to Undervelier and on to a town

2089 called Moutier or Munster. Then from Munster, the road, still following

2090 more or less the line to Rome but now somewhat to the east of it, went on

2091 southward till an abrupt turn in it forced one to leave it. Then there was

2092 another rough climb by a difficult path up over the last ridge, called the

2093 Weissenstein, and from its high edge and summit it was but a straight fall

2094 of a mile or two on to Soleure.

2095 So much my map told me, and this mixture of roads

2096 and paths and rock climbs that I had planned out, I exactly followed, so

2097 as to march on as directly as possible towards Rome, which was my goal.

2098 For if I had not so planned it, but had followed the highroads, I should

2099 have been compelled to zig-zag enormously for days, since these ridges of

2100 the Jura are but little broken, and the roads do not rise above the

2101 crests, but follow the parallel valleys, taking advantage only here and

2102 there of the rare gaps to pass from one to another.

2103 Here is a sketch of the way I went, where my track

2104 is a white line, and the round spots in it are the towns and villages

2105 whose names are written at the side. In this sketch the plains and low

2106 valleys are marked dark, and the crests of the mountains left white. The

2107 shading is lighter according to the height, and the contour lines (which

2108 are very far from accurate) represent, I suppose, about a thousand feet

2109 between each, or perhaps a little more; and as for the distance, from the

2110 Ballon d'Alsace to Soleure might be two long days' march on a flat road,

2111 but over mountains and up rocks it was all but three, and even that was

2112 very good going. My first stage was across the plain of Belfort, and I had

2113 determined to sleep that night in Switzerland.

2114 I wandered down the mountain. A little secret

2115 path, one of many, saved me the long windings of the road. It followed

2116 down the central hollow of the great cleft and accompanied the stream. All

2117 the way for miles the water tumbled in fall after fall over a hundred

2118 steps of rock, and its noise mixed with the freshness of the air, and its

2119 splashing weighted the overhanging branches of the trees. A little rain

2120 that fell from time to time through the clear morning seemed like a sister

2121 to the spray of the waterfalls; and what with all this moisture and

2122 greenery, and the surrounding silence, all the valley was inspired with

2123 content. It was a repose to descend through its leaves and grasses, and

2124 find the lovely pastures at the foot of the descent, a narrow floor

2125 between the hills. Here there were the first houses of men; and, from one,

2126 smoke was already going up thinly into the morning. The air was very pure

2127 and cold; it was made more nourishing and human by the presence and noise

2128 of the waters, by the shining wet grasses and the beaded leaves all

2129 through that umbrageous valley. The shreds of clouds which, high above the

2130 calm, ran swiftly in the upper air, fed it also with soft

2131 61

2132 ---

2133 THE MANY PRIESTS****

2134 rains from time to time as fine as dew; and

2135 through those clear and momentary showers one could see the sunlight.

2136 When I had enjoyed the descent through this place

2137 for but a few miles, everything changed. The road in front ran straight

2138 and bordered--it led out and onwards over a great flat, set here and there

2139 with hillocks. The Vosges ended abruptly. Houses came more thickly, and by

2140 the ceaseless culture of the fields, by the flat slate roofs, the

2141 white-washed walls, and the voices, and the glare, I knew myself to be

2142 once more in France of the plains; and the first town I came to was

2143 Giromagny.

2144 Here, as I heard a bell, I thought I would go up

2145 and hear Mass; and I did so, but my attention at the holy office was

2146 distracted by the enormous number of priests that I found in the church,

2147 and I have wondered painfully ever since how so many came to be in a

2148 little place like Giromagny. There were three priests at the high altar,

2149 and nearly one for each chapel, and there was such a buzz of Masses going

2150 on, beginning and ending, that I am sure I need not have gone without my

2151 breakfast in my hurry to get one. With all this there were few people at

2152 Mass so early; nothing but these priests going in and out, and continual

2153 little bells. I am still wondering. Giromagny is no place for relics or

2154 for a pilgrimage, it cures no one, and has nothing of a holy look about

2155 it, and all these priests--

2156 LECTOR. Pray dwell less on your religion, and--

2157 AUCTOR. Pray take books as you find them, and

2158 treat travel as travel. For you, when you go to a foreign country, see

2159 nothing but what you expect to see. But I am astonished at a thousand

2160 accidents, and always find things twenty-fold as great as I supposed they

2161 would be, and far more curious; the whole covered by a strange light of

2162 adventure. And that is the peculiar value of this book. Now, if you can

2163 explain these priests---

2164 LECTOR. I can. It was the season of the year, and

2165 they were swarming.

2166 AUCTOR. So be it. Then if you will hear nothing of

2167 what interests me, I see no reason for setting down with minute care what

2168 interests you, and I may leave out all mention of the Girl who could only

2169 speak German, of the Arrest of the Criminal, and even of the House of

2170 Marshal Turenne--- this last something quite exceptionally entertaining.

2171 But do not let us continue thus, nor push things to an open quarrel. You

2172 must imagine for yourself about six miles of road, and then--

2173 62

2174 ---

2175 THE GREAT GARRISONS****

2176 --then in the increasing heat, the dust rising in

2177 spite of the morning rain, and the road most wearisome, I heard again the

2178 sound of bugles and the sombre excitement of the drums.

2179 It is a thought-provoking thing, this passing from

2180 one great garrison to another all the way down the frontier. I had started

2181 from the busy order of Toul; I had passed through the silence and peace of

2182 all that Moselle country, the valley like a long garden, and I had come to

2183 the guns and the tramp of Épinal. I had left Épinal and

2184 counted the miles and miles of silence in the forests, I had crossed the

2185 great hills and come down into quite another plain draining to another

2186 sea, and I heard again all the clamour that goes with soldiery, and

2187 looking backward then over my four days, one felt--one almost saw--the new

2188 system of fortification, the vast entrenched camps each holding an army,

2189 the ungarnished gaps between.

2190 As I came nearer to Belfort, I saw the guns going

2191 at a trot down a side road, and, a little later, I saw marching on my

2192 right, a long way off, the irregular column, the dust and the invincible

2193 gaiety of the French line. The sun here and there glinted on the ends of

2194 rifle-barrels and the polished pouches. Their heavy pack made their tramp

2195 loud and thudding. They were singing a song.

2196 I had already passed the outer forts; I had noted

2197 a work close to the road; I had gone on a mile or so and had entered the

2198 long and ugly suburb where the tramway lines began, when, on one of the

2199 ramshackle houses of that burning, paved, and noisy endless street, I saw

2200 written up the words,

2201 Wine; shut or open.

2202 As it is a great rule to examine every new thing,

2203 and to suck honey out of every flower, I did not--as some would--think the

2204 phrase odd and pass on. I stood stock-still gazing at the house and

2205 imagining a hundred explanations. I had never in my life heard wine

2206 divided into shut and open wine. I determined to acquire yet one more

2207 great experience, and going in I found a great number of tin cans, such as

2208 the French carry up water in, without covers, tapering to the top, and

2209 standing about three feet high; on these were pasted large printed labels,

2210 '30', '40', and '50', and they were brimming with wine. I spoke to the

2211 woman, and pointing at the tin cans, said--

2212 'Is this what you call open wine?'

2213 'Why, yes,' said she. 'Cannot you see for yourself

2214 that it is open?'

2215 That was true enough, and it explained a great

2216 deal. But it did not explain how--seeing that if you leave a bottle of

2217 wine uncorked for ten minutes you spoil it--you can keep gallons of it in

2218 a great wide can, for all the world like so

2219 ---

2220 ON BUILDING BRIDGES****

2221 much milk, milked from the Panthers of the God. I

2222 determined to test the prodigy yet further, and choosing the middle price,

2223 at fourpence a quart, I said--

2224 'Pray give me a hap'orth in a mug.'

2225 This the woman at once did, and when I came to

2226 drink it, it was delicious. Sweet, cool, strong, lifting the heart,

2227 satisfying, and full of all those things wine-merchants talk of, bouquet,

2228 and body, and flavour. It was what I have heard called a very pretty wine.

2229 I did not wait, however, to discuss the marvel,

2230 but accepted it as one of those mysteries of which this pilgrimage was

2231 already giving me examples, and of which more were to come--(wait till you

2232 hear about the brigand of Radicofani). I said to myself—

2233 'When I get out of the Terre Majeure, and away

2234 from the strong and excellent government of the Republic, when I am lost

2235 in the Jura Hills to-morrow there will be no such wine as this.'

2236 So I bought a quart of it, corked it up very

2237 tight, put it in my sack, and held it in store against the wineless places

2238 on the flanks of the hill called Terrible, where there are no soldiers,

2239 and where Swiss is the current language. Then I went on into the centre of

2240 the town.

2241 As I passed over the old bridge into the

2242 market-place, where I proposed to lunch (the sun was terrible--it was

2243 close upon eleven), I saw them building parallel with that old bridge a

2244 new one to replace it. And the way they build a bridge in Belfort is so

2245 wonderfully simple, and yet so new, that it is well worth telling.

2246 In most places when a bridge has to be made, there

2247 is an infinite pother and worry about building the piers, coffer-dams, and

2248 heaven knows what else. Some swing their bridges to avoid this trouble,

2249 and some try to throw an arch of one span from side to side. There are a

2250 thousand different tricks. In Belfort they simply wait until the water has

2251 run away. Then a great brigade of workmen run down into the dry bed of the

2252 river and dig the foundations feverishly, and begin building the piers in

2253 great haste. Soon the water comes back, but the piers are already above

2254 it, and the rest of the work is done from boats. This is absolutely true.

2255 Not only did I see the men in the bed of the river, but a man whom I asked

2256 told me that it seemed to him the most natural way to build bridges, and

2257 doubted if they were ever made in any other fashion.

2258 There is also in Belfort a great lion carved in

2259 rock to commemorate the siege of 1870. This lion is part of the precipice

2260 under the castle, and is of enormous size--- how large I do not know, but

2261 I saw that a man looked quite small by one of his paws. The precipice was

2262 first smoothed like a stone slab or tablet, and

2263 64

2264 ---

2265 THE SAD ECONOMISTS****

2266 then this lion was carved into and out of it in

2267 high relief by Bartholdi, the same man that made the statue of Liberty in

2268 New York Harbour.

2269 The siege of 1870 has been fixed for history in

2270 yet another way, and one that shows you how the Church works on from one

2271 stem continually. For there is a little church somewhere near or in

2272 Belfort (I do not know where, I only heard of it) which, a local mason and

2273 painter being told to decorate for so much, he amused himself by painting

2274 all round it little pictures of the siege--of the cold, and the wounds,

2275 and the heroism. This is indeed the way such things should be done, I mean

2276 by men doing them for pleasure and of their own thought. And I have a

2277 number of friends who agree with me in thinking this, that art should not

2278 be competitive or industrial, but most of them go on to the very strange

2279 conclusion that one should not own one's garden, nor one's beehive, nor

2280 one's great noble house, nor one's pigsty, nor one's railway shares, nor

2281 the very boots on one's feet. I say, out upon such nonsense. Then they say

2282 to me, what about the concentration of the means of production? And I say

2283 to them, what about the distribution of the ownership of the concentrated

2284 means of production? And they shake their heads sadly, and say it would

2285 never endure; and I say, try it first and see. Then they fly into a rage.

2286 When I lunched in Belfort (and at lunch, by the

2287 way, a poor man asked me to use all my influence* for his son, who

2288 was an engineer in the navy, and this he did because I had been boasting

2289 of my travels, experiences, and grand acquaintances throughout the

2290 world)--when, I say, I had lunched in a workman's cafe at Belfort, I set

2291 out again on my road, and was very much put out to find that showers still

2292 kept on falling.

2293 In the early morning, under such delightful trees,

2294 up in the mountains, the branches had given me a roof, the wild

2295 surroundings made me part of the out-of-doors, and the rain had seemed to

2296 marry itself to the pastures and the foaming beck. But here, on a road and

2297 in a town, all its tradition of discomfort came upon me. I was angry,

2298 therefore, with the weather and the road for some miles, till two things

2299 came to comfort me. First it cleared, and a glorious sun showed me from a

2300 little eminence the plain of Alsace and the mountains of the Vosges all in

2301 line; secondly, I came to a vast powder-magazine.

2302 To most people there is nothing more subtle or

2303 pleasing in a powder-magazine than in a reservoir. They are both much the

2304 same in the mere exterior, for each is a flat platform, sloping at the

2305 sides and covered with grass, and each has mysterious doors. But, for my

2306 part, I never see a powder-

2307 ---

2308 THE POWDER-MAGAZINE****

2309 magazine without being filled at once with two

2310 very good feelings--- laughter and companionship. For it was my good

2311 fortune, years and years ago, to be companion and friend to two men who

2312 were on sentry at a powder-magazine just after there had been some

2313 anarchist attempts (as they call them) upon such depots--and for the

2314 matter of that I can imagine nothing more luscious to the anarchist than

2315 seven hundred and forty-two cases of powder and fifty cases of melinite

2316 all stored in one place. And to prevent the enormous noise, confusion, and

2317 waste that would have resulted from the over-attraction of this base of

2318 operations to the anarchists, my two friends, one of whom was a duty-doing

2319 Burgundian, but the other a loose Parisian man, were on sentry that night.

2320 They had strict orders to challenge once and then to fire.

2321 Now, can you imagine anything more exquisite to a

2322 poor devil of a conscript, fagged out with garrison duty and stale

2323 sham-fighting, than an order of that kind? So my friends took it, and in

2324 one summer night they killed a donkey and wounded two mares, and broke the

2325 thin stem of a growing tree.

2326 This powder-magazine was no exception to my rule,

2327 for as I approached it I saw a round-faced corporal and two round-faced

2328 men looking eagerly to see who might be attacking their treasure, and I

2329 became quite genial in my mind when I thought of how proud these boys

2330 felt, and of how I was of the 'class of ninety, rifled and mounted on its

2331 carriage' (if you don't see the point of the allusion, I can't stop to

2332 explain it. It was a good gun in its time--now they have the seventy-five

2333 that doesn't recoil--*requiescat),* and of how they were longing for

2334 the night, and a chance to shoot anything on the sky line.

2335 Full of these foolish thoughts, but smiling in

2336 spite of their folly, I went down the road.

2337 Shall I detail all that afternoon? My leg

2338 horrified me with dull pain, and made me fear I should never hold out, I

2339 do not say to Rome, but even to the frontier. I rubbed it from time to

2340 time with balm, but, as always happens to miraculous things, the virtue

2341 had gone out of it with the lapse of time. At last I found a side road

2342 going off from the main way, and my map told me it was on the whole a

2343 short cut to the frontier. I determined to take it for those few last

2344 miles, because, if one is suffering, a winding lane is more tolerable than

2345 a wide turnpike.

2346 Just as I came to the branching of the roads I saw

2347 a cross put up, and at its base the motto that is universal to French

2348 crosses--

2349 *Ave Crux Spes Unica.*

2350 I thought it a good opportunity for recollection,

2351 and sitting down, I looked backward along the road I had come.

2352 66****

2353 ---

2354 THE LAST OF THE VOSGES

2355 There were the high mountains of the Vosges

2356 standing up above the plain of Alsace like sloping cliffs above a sea. I

2357 drew them as they stood, and wondered if that frontier were really

2358 permanent. The mind of man is greater than such accidents, and can easily

2359 overleap even the high hills.

2360 *

2361 Then having drawn them, and in that drawing said a

2362 kind of farewell to the influences that had followed me for so many

2363 miles--the solemn quiet, the steady industry, the self-control, the deep

2364 woods, of Lorraine--1 rose up stiffly from the bank that had been my desk,

2365 and pushed along the lane that ran devious past neglected villages.

2366 The afternoon and the evening followed as I put

2367 one mile after another behind me. The frontier seemed so close that I

2368 would not rest. I left my open wine, the wine I had found outside Belfort,

2369 untasted, and I plodded on and on as the light dwindled. I was in a grand

2370 wonderment for Switzerland, and I wished by an immediate effort to conquer

2371 the last miles before night, in spite of my pain. Also, I will confess to

2372 a silly pride in distances, and a desire to be out of France on my fourth

2373 day.

2374 The light still fell, and my resolution stood,

2375 though my exhaustion undermined it. The line of the mountains rose higher

2376 against the sky, and there entered into my pilgrimage for the first time

2377 the loneliness and the mystery of meres. Something of what a man feels in

2378 East England belonged to this last of the plain under the guardian hills.

2379 Everywhere I passed ponds and reeds, and saw the level streaks of sunset

2380 reflected in stagnant waters.

2381 The marshy valley kept its character when I had

2382 left the lane and regained

2383 67

2384 ---

2385 WHAT IS THE SOUL?****

2386 the highroad. Its isolation dominated the last

2387 effort with which I made for the line of the Jura in that summer twilight,

2388 and as I blundered on my whole spirit

2389 was caught or lifted in the influence of the waste

2390 waters and of the birds of evening.

2391 I wished, as I had often wished in such

2392 opportunities of recollection and of silence, for a complete barrier that

2393 might isolate the mind. With that wish came in a puzzling thought, very

2394 proper to a pilgrimage, which was: 'What do men mean by the desire to be

2395 dissolved and to enjoy the spirit free and without attachments?' That many

2396 men have so desired there can be no doubt, and the best men, whose

2397 holiness one recognizes at once, tell us that the joys of the soul are

2398 incomparably higher than those of the living man. In India, moreover,

2399 there are great numbers of men who do the most fantastic things with the

2400 object of thus unprisoning the soul, and Milton talks of the same thing

2401 with evident conviction, and the Saints all praise it in chorus. But what

2402 is it? For my part I cannot understand so much as the meaning of the

2403 words, for every pleasure I know comes from an intimate union between my

2404 body and my very human mind, which last receives, confirms, revives, and

2405 can summon up again what my body has experienced. Of pleasures, however,

2406 in which my senses have had no part I know nothing, so I have determined

2407 to take them upon trust and see whether they could make the matter clearer

2408 in Rome.

2409 But when it comes to the immortal mind, the good

2410 spirit in me that is so cunning at forms and colours and the reasons of

2411 things, that is a very different story. That,* I do indeed desire to

2412 have to myself at whiles, and the waning light of a day or the curtains of

2413 autumn closing in the year are often to me like a door shutting after one,

2414 as one comes in home. For I find that with less and less impression from

2415 without the mind seems to take on a power of creation, and by some mystery

2416 it can project songs and landscapes and faces much more desirable than the

2417 music or the shapes one really hears and sees. So also memory can create.

2418 But it is not the soul that does this, for the songs, the landscapes, and

2419 the faces are of a kind that have come in by the senses, nor

2420 68

2421 ---

2422 DISASTER OF THE WINE****

2423 have I ever understood what could be higher than

2424 these pleasures, nor indeed how in anything formless and immaterial there

2425 could be pleasure at all. Yet the wisest people assure us that our souls

2426 are as superior to our minds as are our minds to our inert and merely

2427 material bodies. I cannot understand it at all.

2428 As I was pondering on these things in this land of

2429 pastures and lonely ponds, with the wall of the Jura black against the

2430 narrow bars of evening--(my pain seemed gone for a moment, yet I was

2431 hobbling slowly)--I say as I was considering this complex doctrine, I felt

2432 my sack suddenly much lighter, and I had hardly time to rejoice at the

2433 miracle when I heard immediately a very loud crash, and turning half round

2434 I saw on the blurred white of the twilit road my quart of Open Wine all

2435 broken to atoms. My disappointment was so great that I sat down on a

2436 milestone to consider the accident and to see if a little thought would

2437 not lighten my acute annoyance. Consider that I had carefully cherished

2438 this bottle and had not drunk throughout a painful march all that

2439 afternoon, thinking that there would be no wine worth drinking after I had

2440 passed the frontier.

2441 I consoled myself more or less by thinking about

2442 torments and evils to which even such a loss as this was nothing, and then

2443 I rose to go on into the night. As it turned out I was to find beyond the

2444 frontier a wine in whose presence this wasted wine would have seemed a

2445 wretched jest, and whose wonderful taste was to colour all my memories of

2446 the Mount Terrible. It is always thus with sorrows if one will only wait.

2447 So, lighter in the sack but heavier in the heart,

2448 I went forward to cross the frontier in the dark. I did not quite know

2449 where the point came: I only knew that it was about a mile from Delle, the

2450 last French town. I supped there and held on my way. When I guessed that I

2451 had covered this mile I saw a light in the windows on my left, a trellis

2452 and the marble tables of a cafe. I put my head in at the door and said--

2453 'Am I in Switzerland?'

2454 A German-looking girl, a large heavy man, a

2455 Bavarian commercial traveller, and a colleague of his from Marseilles, all

2456 said together in varying accents: 'Yes.'

2457 'Why then,' I said, 'I will come in and drink.'

2458 This book would never end if I were to attempt to

2459 write down so much as the names of a quarter of the extraordinary things

2460 that I saw and heard on my enchanted pilgrimage, but let me at least

2461 mention the Commercial Traveller from Marseilles.

2462 60****

2463 ---

2464 THE PHOCEAN

2465 He talked with extreme rapidity for two hours. He

2466 had seen all the cities in the world and he remembered their minutest

2467 details. He was extremely accurate, his taste was abominable, his

2468 patriotism large, his wit crude but continual, and to his German friend,

2469 to the host of the inn, and to the blonde serving-girl, he was a familiar

2470 god. He came, it seems, once a year, and for a day would pour out the

2471 torrent of his travels like a waterfall of guide-books (for he gloried in

2472 dates, dimensions, and the points of the compass in his descriptions);

2473 then he disappeared for another year, and left them to feast on the memory

2474 of such a revelation.

2475 For my part I sat silent, crippled with fatigue,

2476 trying to forget my wounded feet, drinking stoup after stoup of beer and

2477 watching the Phocean. He was of the old race you see on vases in red and

2478 black; slight, very wiry, with a sharp, eager, but well-set face, a small,

2479 black, pointed beard, brilliant eyes like those of lizards, rapid

2480 gestures, and a vivacity that played all over his features as sheet

2481 lightning does over the glow of midnight in June.

2482 That delta of the Rhone is something quite

2483 separate from the rest of France. It is a wedge of Greece and of the East

2484 thrust into the Gauls. It came north a hundred years ago and killed the

2485 monarchy. It caught the value in, and created, the great war song of the

2486 Republic.

2487 I watched the Phocean. I thought of a man of his

2488 ancestry three thousand years ago sitting here at the gates of these

2489 mountains talking of his travels to dull, patient, and admiring

2490 northerners, and travelling for gain up on into the Germanics, and I felt

2491 the changeless form of Europe under me like a rock.

2492 When he heard I was walking to Rome, this man of

2493 information turned off his flood into another channel, as a miller will

2494 send the racing water into a side sluice, and he poured out some such

2495 torrent as this:

2496 'Do not omit to notice the famous view S.E. from

2497 the Villa So and So on Monte Mario; visit such and such a garden, and hear

2498 Mass in such and such a church. Note the curious illusion produced on the

2499 piazza of St Peter's by the interior measurements of the trapezium, which

2500 are so many years and so many yards, ...' &c., and so forth ...

2501 exactly like a mill.

2502 I meanwhile sat on still silent, still drinking

2503 beer and watching the Phocean; gradually suffering the fascination that

2504 had captured the villagers and the German friend. He was a very wonderful

2505 man.

2506 He was also kindly, for I found afterwards that he

2507 had arranged with the host to give me up his bed, seeing my weariness. For

2508 this, most unluckily, I was never able to thank him, since the next

2509 morning I was off before he or any one else was awake, and I left on the

2510 table such money as I thought would very likely satisfy the innkeeper.

2511 70

2512 ---

2513 THE NEW COUNTRY

2514 It was broad day, but not yet sunrise (there were

2515 watery thin clouds left here and there from the day before, a cold wind

2516 drove them) when, with extreme pain, going slowly one step after the other

2517 and resting continually, I started for Porrentruy along a winding road,

2518 and pierced the gap in the Jura. The first turn cut me off from France,

2519 and I was fairly in a strange country.

2520 The valley through which I was now passing

2521 resembled that of the lovely river Jed where it runs down from the

2522 Cheviots, and leads like a road into the secret pastures of the lowlands.

2523 Here also, as there, steep cliffs of limestone bounded a very level dale,

2524 all green grass and plenty; the plateau above them was covered also with

2525 perpetual woods, only here, different from Scotland, the woods ran on and

2526 upwards till they became the slopes of high mountains; indeed, this

2527 winding cleft was a natural passage through the first ridge of the Jura;

2528 the second stood up southward before me like a deep blue storm.

2529 I had, as I passed on along this turning way, all

2530 the pleasures of novelty; it was quite another country from the governed

2531 and ordered France which I had left. The road was more haphazard, less

2532 carefully tended, and evidently less used. The milestones were very old,

2533 and marked leagues instead of kilometres. There was age in everything.

2534 Moss grew along the walls, and it was very quiet under the high trees. I

2535 did not know the name of the little river that went slowly through the

2536 meadows, nor whether it followed the custom of its French neighbours on

2537 the watershed, and was called by some such epithet as hangs to all the

2538 waters in that gap of Belfort, that plain of ponds and marshes: for they

2539 are called 'the Sluggish', 'the Muddy', or 'the Laggard'. Even the name of

2540 the Saone, far off, meant once 'Slow Water'.

2541 I was wondering what its name might be, and how

2542 far I stood from Porrentruy (which I knew to be close by), when I saw a

2543 tunnel across the valley, and I guessed by the trend of the higher hills

2544 that the river was about to make a very sharp angle. Both these signs, I

2545 had been told, meant that I was quite close to the town; so I took a short

2546 cut up through the forest over a spur of hill--a short cut most

2547 legitimate, because it was trodden and very manifestly used--and I walked

2548 up and then on a level for a mile, along a lane of the woods and beneath

2549 small, dripping trees. When this short silence of the forest was over, I

2550 saw an excellent sight.

2551 There, below me, where the lane began to fall, was

2552 the first of the German cities.

2553 LECTOR. How 'German'?

2554 AUCTOR. Let me explain. There is a race that

2555 stretches vaguely, without

2556 ---

2557 DE GERMANIA****

2558 defined boundaries, from the Baltic into the high

2559 hills of the south. I will not include the Scandinavians among them, for

2560 the Scandinavians (from whom we English also in part descend) are

2561 long-headed, lean, and fierce, with a light of adventure in their pale

2562 eyes. But beneath them, I say, there stretches from the Baltic to the high

2563 hills a race which has a curious unity. Yes; I know that great patches of

2564 it are Catholic, and that other great patches hold varying philosophies; I

2565 know also that within them are counted long-headed and round-headed men,

2566 dark and fair, violent and silent; I know also that they have continually

2567 fought among themselves and called in Welch allies; still I go somewhat by

2568 the language, for I am concerned here with the development of a modern

2569 European people, and I say that the Germans run from the high hills to the

2570 northern sea. In all of them you find (it is not race, it is something

2571 much more than race, it is the type of culture) a dreaminess and a love of

2572 ease. In all of them you find music. They are those Germans whose

2573 countries I had seen a long way off, from the Ballon d'Alsace, and whose

2574 language and traditions I now first touched in the town that stood before

2575 me.

2576 LECTOR. But in Porrentruy they talk French!

2577 AUCTOR. They are welcome; it is an excellent

2578 tongue. Nevertheless, they are Germans. Who but Germans would so

2579 preserve--would so rebuild the past? Who but Germans would so feel the

2580 mystery of the hills, and so fit their town to the mountains? I was to

2581 pass through but a narrow wedge of this strange and diffuse people. They

2582 began at Porrentruy, they ended at the watershed of the Adriatic, in the

2583 high passes of the Alps; but in that little space of four days I made

2584 acquaintance with their influence, and I owe them a perpetual gratitude

2585 for their architecture and their tales. I had come from France, which is

2586 full of an active memory of Rome. I was to debouch into those larger

2587 plains of Italy, which keep about them an atmosphere of Rome in decay.

2588 Here in Switzerland, for four marches, I touched a northern, exterior, and

2589 barbaric people; for though these mountains spoke a distorted Latin

2590 tongue, and only after the first day began to give me a Teutonic dialect,

2591 yet it was evident from the first that they had about them neither the

2592 Latin order nor the Latin power to create, but were contemplative and

2593 easily absorbed by a little effort.

2594 The German spirit is a marvel. There lay

2595 Porrentruy. An odd door with Gothic turrets marked the entry to the town.

2596 To the right of this gateway a tower, more enormous than anything I

2597 remembered to have seen, even in dreams, flanked the approach to the city.

2598 How vast it was, how protected, how high, how eaved, how enduring! I was

2599 told later that some part of that great bastion was Roman, and I can

2600 believe it. The Germans hate to destroy. It overwhelmed me as visions

2601 overwhelm, and I felt in its presence as boys feel

2602 72

2603 ---

2604 THE ASTOUNDING WINE****

2605 when they first see the mountains. Had I not been

2606 a Christian, I would have worshipped and propitiated this obsession, this

2607 everlasting thing.

2608 As it was I entered Porrentruy soberly. I passed

2609 under its deep gateway and up its steep hill. The moment I was well into

2610 the main street, something other of the Middle Ages possessed me, and I

2611 began to think of food and wine. I went to the very first small

2612 guest-house I could find, and asked them if they could serve me food. They

2613 said that at such an early hour (it was not yet ten) they could give me

2614 nothing but bread, yesterday's meat, and wine. I said that would do very

2615 well, and all these things were set before me, and by a custom of the

2616 country I paid before I ate. (A bad custom. Up in the Limousin, when I was

2617 a boy, in the noisy valley of the Torrent, on the Vienne, I remember a

2618 woman that did not allow me to pay till she had held the bottle up to the

2619 light, measured the veal with her finger, and estimated the bread with her

2620 eye; also she charged me double. God rest her soul!) I say I paid. And had

2621 I had to pay twenty or twenty-three times as much it would have been worth

2622 it for the wine.

2623 I am hurrying on to Rome, and I have no time to

2624 write a georgic. But, oh! my little friends of the north; my struggling,

2625 strenuous, introspective, self-analysing, autoscopic, and generally

2626 reentrant friends, who spout the 'Hue! Pater, oh! Lenae!' without a ghost

2627 of an idea what you are talking about, do you know what is meant by the

2628 god? Bacchus is everywhere, but if he has special sites to be ringed in

2629 and kept sacred, I say let these be Brule, and the silent vineyard that

2630 lies under the square wood by Tournus, the hollow underplace of Heltz le

2631 Maurupt, and this town of Porrentruy. In these places if I can get no

2632 living friends to help me, I will strike the foot alone on the genial

2633 ground, and I know of fifty maenads and two hundred little attendant gods

2634 by name that will come to the festival.

2635 What a wine!

2636 I was assured it would not travel. 'Nevertheless,'

2637 said I, 'give me a good quart bottle of it, for I have to go far, and I

2638 see there is a providence for pilgrims.'

2639 So they charged me fourpence, and I took my bottle

2640 of this wonderful stuff, sweet, strong, sufficient, part of the earth,

2641 desirable, and went up on my way to Rome.

2642 Could this book be infinite, as my voyage was

2643 infinite, I would tell you about the shifty priest whom I met on the

2644 platform of the church where a cliff overhangs the valley, and of the

2645 anarchist whom I met when I recovered the highroad--- he was a sad, good

2646 man, who had committed some sudden crime

2647 73****

2648 ---

2649 THE ERRONEOUS ANARCHIST****

2650 and so had left France, and his hankering for

2651 France all those years had soured his temper, and he said he wished there

2652 were no property, no armies, and no governments.

2653 But I said that we live as parts of a nation, and

2654 that there was no fate so wretched as to be without a country of one's

2655 own--what else was exile which so many noble men have thought worse than

2656 death, and which all have feared? I also told him that armies fighting in

2657 a just cause were the happiest places for living, and that a good battle

2658 for justice was the beginning of all great songs; and that as for

2659 property, a man on his own land was the nearest to God.

2660 He therefore not convinced, and I loving and

2661 pitying him, we separated; I had not time to preach my full doctrine, but

2662 gave him instead a deep and misty glass of cool beer, and pledged him

2663 brotherhood, freedom, and an equal law. Then I went on my way, praying God

2664 that all these rending quarrels might be appeased. For they would

2665 certainly be appeased if we once again had a united doctrine in Europe,

2666 since economics are but an expression of the mind and do not (as the poor

2667 blind slaves of the great cities think) mould the mind. What is more,

2668 nothing makes property run into a few hands but the worst of the capital

2669 sins, and you who say it is 'the modern facilities of distribution' are

2670 like men who cannot read large print without spectacles; or again, you are

2671 like men who should say that their drunkenness was due to their drink, or

2672 that arson was caused by matches.

2673 But, frankly, do you suppose I came all this way

2674 over so many hills to talk economics? Very far from it! I will pray for

2675 all poor men when I get to St Peter's in Rome (I should like to know what

2676 capital St Peter had in that highly capitalistic first century), and,

2677 meanwhile, do you discuss the margin of production while I go on the open

2678 way; there are no landlords here, and if you would learn at least one

2679 foreign language, and travel but five miles off a railway, you

2680 town-talkers, you would find how much landlordism has to do with your

2681 'necessities' and your 'laws'.

2682 LECTOR. I thought you said you were not going to

2683 talk economics?

2684 AUCTOR. Neither am I. It is but the backwash of a

2685 wave ... Well, then, I went up the open way, and came in a few miles of

2686 that hot afternoon to the second ridge of the Jura, which they call 'the

2687 Terrible Hill', or 'the Mount Terrible'--and, in truth, it is very jagged.

2688 A steep, long crest of very many miles lies here between the vale of

2689 Porrentruy and the deep gorge of the Doubs. The highroad goes off a long

2690 way westward, seeking for a pass or neck in the chain, but I determined to

2691 find a straight road across, and spoke to some wood-cutters who were

2692 felling trees just where the road began to climb. They gave me this

2693 curious indication. They said--

2694 74

2695 ---

2696 THE MOUNT TERRIBLE****

2697 'Go you up this muddy track that has been made

2698 athwart the woods and over the pastures by our sliding logs' (for they had

2699 cut their trunks higher up the mountains), 'and you will come to the

2700 summit easily. From thence you will see the Doubs running below you in a

2701 very deep and dark ravine.'

2702 I thanked them, and soon found that they had told

2703 me right. There, unmistakable, a gash in the forest and across the

2704 intervening fields of grass, was the run of the timber.

2705 When I had climbed almost to the top, I looked

2706 behind me to take my last view of the north. I saw just before me a high

2707 isolated rock; between me and it was the forest. I saw beyond it the

2708 infinite plain of Alsace and the distant Vosges. The cliff of limestone

2709 that bounded that height fell sheer upon the tree-tops; its sublimity

2710 arrested me, and compelled me to record it.

2711 *

2712 'Surely,' I said, 'if Switzerland has any gates on

2713 the north they are these.' Then, having drawn the wonderful outline of

2714 what I had seen, I went up, panting, to the summit, and, resting there,

2715 discovered beneath me the curious swirl of the Doubs, where it ran in a

2716 dark gulf thousands of feet below. The shape of this extraordinary turn I

2717 will describe in a moment. Let me say, meanwhile, that there was no

2718 precipice or rock between me and the river, only a down, down, down

2719 through other trees and pastures, not too steep for a man

2720 75

2721 ---

2722 THE BENT WINDOWS****

2723 to walk, but steeper than our steep downs and

2724 fells in England, where a man hesitates and picks his way. It was so much

2725 of a descent, and so long, that one looked above the tree-tops. It was a

2726 place where no one would care to ride.

2727 I found a kind of path, sideways on the face of

2728 the mountain, and followed it till I came to a platform with a hut perched

2729 thereon, and men building. Here a good woman told me just how to go. I was

2730 not to attempt the road to Brune-Farine--that is, 'Whole-Meal Farm'--as I

2731 had first intended, foolishly trusting a map, but to take a gully she

2732 would show me, and follow it till I reached the river. She came out, and

2733 led me steeply across a hanging pasture; all the while she had knitting in

2734 her hands, and I noticed that on the levels she went on with her knitting.

2735 Then, when we got to the gully, she said I had but to follow it. I thanked

2736 her, and she climbed up to her home.

2737 This gully was the precipitous bed of a stream; I

2738 clanked down it--thousands of feet--warily; I reached the valley, and at

2739 last, very gladly, came to a drain, and thus knew that I approached a town

2740 or village. It was St Ursanne.

2741 The very first thing I noticed in St Ursanne was

2742 the extraordinary shape of the lower windows of the church. They lighted a

2743 crypt and ran along the ground, which in itself was sufficiently

2744 remarkable, but much more remarkable was their shape, which seemed to me

2745 to approach that of a horseshoe; I never saw such a thing before. It

2746 looked as though the weight of the church above had bulged these little

2747 windows out, and that is the way I explain it. Some people would say it

2748 was a man coming home from the Crusades that had made them this eastern

2749 way, others that it was a symbol of something or other. But I say--

2750 LECTOR. What rhodomontade and pedantry is this

2751 talk about the shape of a window?

2752 AUCTOR. Little friend, how little you know! To a

2753 building windows are everything; they are what eyes are to a man. Out of

2754 windows a building takes

2755 76

2756 ---

2757 PRAISE OF WINDOWS****

2758 its view; in windows the outlook of its human

2759 inhabitants is framed. If you were the lord of a very high tower

2760 overlooking a town, a plain, a river, and a distant hill (I doubt if you

2761 will ever have such luck!), would you not call your architect up before

2762 you and say--

2763 'Sir, see that the windows of my house are tall,

2764 narrow, thick,* and have a *round top to them'?*

2765 Of course you would, for thus you would best catch

2766 in separate pictures the sunlit things outside your home.

2767 Never ridicule windows. It is out of windows that

2768 many fall to their deaths. By windows love often enters. Through a window

2769 went the bolt that killed King Richard. King William's father spied

2770 Arlette from a window (I have looked through it myself, but not a soul did

2771 I see washing below). When a mob would rule England, it breaks windows,

2772 and when a patriot would save her, he taxes them. Out of windows we walk

2773 on to lawns in summer and meet men and women, and in winter windows are

2774 drums for the splendid music of storms that makes us feel so masterly

2775 round our fires. The windows of the great cathedrals are all their

2776 meaning. But for windows we should have to go out-of-doors to see

2777 daylight. After the sun, which they serve, I know of nothing so beneficent

2778 as windows. Fie upon the ungrateful man that has no window-god in his

2779 house, and thinks himself too great a philosopher to bow down to

2780 77

2781 ---

2782 GORGE OF THE DOUBS****

2783 windows! May he live in a place without windows

2784 for a while to teach him the value of windows. As for me, I will keep up

2785 the high worship of windows till I come to the windowless grave. Talk to

2786 me of windows!

2787 Yes. There are other things in St Ursanne. It is a

2788 little tiny town, and yet has gates. It is full of very old houses,

2789 people, and speech. It was founded (or named) by a Bear Saint, and the

2790 statue of the saint with his bear is carved on the top of a column in the

2791 market-place. But the chief thing about it, so it seemed to me, was its

2792 remoteness.

2793 The gorge of the Doubs, of which I said a word or

2794 two above, is of that very rare shape which isolates whatever may be found

2795 in such valleys. It turns right back upon itself, like a very narrow U,

2796 and thus cannot by any possibility lead any one anywhere; for though in

2797 all times travellers have had to follow river valleys, yet when they come

2798 to such a long and sharp turn as this, they have always cut across the

2799 intervening bend.

2800 Here is the shape of this valley with the high

2801 hills round it and in its core, which will show better than description

2802 what I mean. The little picture also shows what the gorge looked like as I

2803 came down on it from the heights above.

2804 *

2805 In the map the small white 'A' shows where the

2806 railway bridge was, and in this map, as in the others, the dark is for the

2807 depth and the light is for the

2808 ---

2809 THE TEMPTING BRIDGE****

2810 heights. As for the picture, it is what one sees

2811 when one is coming over the ridge at the north or top of the map, and when

2812 one first catches the river beneath one.

2813 I thought a good deal about what the Romans did to

2814 get through the Mont Terrible, and how they negotiated this crook in the

2815 Doubs (for they certainly passed into Gaul through the gates of

2816 Porrentruy, and by that obvious valley below it). I decided that they

2817 probably came round eastward by Delemont. But for my part, I was on a

2818 straight path to Rome, and as that line lay just along the top of the

2819 river bend I was bound to take it.

2820 Now outside St Ursanne, if one would go along the

2821 top of the river bend and so up to the other side of the gorge, is a kind

2822 of subsidiary ravine--awful, deep, and narrow--and this was crossed, I

2823 could see, by a very high railway bridge.

2824 Not suspecting any evil, and desiring to avoid the

2825 long descent into the ravine, the looking for a bridge or ford, and the

2826 steep climb up the other side, I made in my folly for the station which

2827 stood just where the railway left solid ground to go over this high, high

2828 bridge. I asked leave of the stationmaster to cross it, who said it was

2829 strictly forbidden, but that he was not a policeman, and that I might do

2830 it at my own risk. Thanking him, therefore, and considering how charming

2831 was the loose habit of small uncentralized societies, I went merrily on to

2832 the bridge, meaning to walk across it by stepping from sleeper to sleeper.

2833 But it was not to be so simple. The powers of the air, that hate to have

2834 their kingdom disturbed, watched me as I began.

2835 I had not been engaged upon it a dozen yards when

2836 I was seized with terror.

2837 79

2838 ---

2839 THE DREADFUL BRIDGE****

2840 I have much to say further on in this book

2841 concerning terror: the panic that haunts high places and the spell of many

2842 angry men. This horrible affection of the mind is the delight of our

2843 modern scribblers; it is half the plot of their insane 'short stories',

2844 and is at the root of their worship of what they call 'strength', a

2845 cowardly craving for protection, or the much more despicable fascination

2846 of brutality. For my part I have always disregarded it as something impure

2847 and devilish, unworthy of a Christian. Fear I think, indeed, to be in the

2848 nature of things, and it is as much part of my experience to be afraid of

2849 the sea or of an untried horse as it is to eat and sleep; but terror,

2850 which is a sudden madness and paralysis of the soul, that I say is from

2851 hell, and not to be played with or considered or put in pictures or

2852 described in stories. All this I say to preface what happened, and

2853 especially to point out how terror is in the nature of a possession and is

2854 unreasonable.

2855 For in the crossing of this bridge there was

2856 nothing in itself perilous. The sleepers lay very close together--I doubt

2857 if a man could have slipped between them; but, I know not how many hundred

2858 feet below, was the flashing of the torrent, and it turned my brain. For

2859 the only parapet there was a light line or pipe, quite slender and low

2860 down, running from one spare iron upright to another. These rather

2861 emphasized than encouraged my mood. And still as I resolutely put one foot

2862 in front of the other, and resolutely kept my eyes off the abyss and fixed

2863 on the opposing hill, and as the long curve before me was diminished by

2864 successive sharp advances, still my heart was caught half-way in every

2865 breath, and whatever it is that moves a man went uncertainly within me,

2866 mechanical and half-paralysed. The great height with that narrow

2867 unprotected ribbon across it was more than I could bear.

2868 I dared not turn round and I dared not stop. Words

2869 and phrases began repeating themselves in my head as they will under a

2870 strain: so I know at sea a man perilously hanging on to the tiller makes a

2871 kind of litany of his instructions. The central part was passed, the

2872 three-quarters; the tension of that enduring effort had grown intolerable,

2873 and I doubted my ability to complete the task. Why? What could prevent me?

2874 I cannot say; it was all a bundle of imaginaries. Perhaps at bottom what I

2875 feared was sudden giddiness and the fall--

2876 At any rate at this last supreme part I vowed one

2877 candle to Our Lady of Perpetual Succour if she would see that all went

2878 well, and this candle I later paid in Rome; finding Our Lady of Succour

2879 not hung up in a public place and known to all, as I thought She would be,

2880 but peculiar to a little church belonging to a Scotchman and standing

2881 above his high altar. Yet it is a very famous picture, and extremely old.

2882 80

2883 ---

2884 SAFETY BEYOND****

2885 Well, then, having made this vow I still went on,

2886 with panic aiding me, till I saw that the bank beneath had risen to within

2887 a few feet of the bridge, and that dry land was not twenty yards away.

2888 Then my resolution left me and I ran, or rather stumbled, rapidly from

2889 sleeper to sleeper till I could take a deep breath on the solid earth

2890 beyond.

2891 I stood and gazed back over the abyss; I saw the

2892 little horrible strip between heaven and hell--the perspective of its

2893 rails. I was made ill by the relief from terror. Yet I suppose railway-men

2894 cross and recross it twenty times a day. Better for them than for me!

2895 There is the story of the awful bridge of the Mont

2896 Terrible, and it lies to a yard upon the straight line--quid dicam---*

2897 the segment of the Great Circle uniting Toul and Rome.

2898 The high bank or hillside before me was that which

2899 ends the gorge of the Doubs and looks down either limb of the sharp bend.

2900 I had here not to climb but to follow at one height round the curve. My

2901 way ran by a rather ill-made lane and passed a village. Then it was my

2902 business to make straight up the farther wall of the gorge, and as there

2903 was wood upon this, it looked an easy matter.

2904 But when I came to it, it was not easy. The wood

2905 grew in loose rocks and the slope was much too steep for anything but

2906 hands and knees, and far too soft and broken for true climbing. And no

2907 wonder this ridge seemed a wall for

2908 81

2909 ---

2910 THE COMMON FIELD****

2911 steepness and difficulty, since it was the

2912 watershed between the Mediterranean and the cold North Sea. But I did not

2913 know this at the time. It must have taken me close on an hour before I had

2914 covered the last thousand feet or so that brought me to the top of the

2915 ridge, and there, to my great astonishment, was a road. Where could such a

2916 road lead, and why did it follow right along the highest edge of the

2917 mountains? The Jura with their unique parallels provide twenty such

2918 problems.

2919 Wherever it led, however, this road was plainly

2920 perpendicular to my true route, and I had but to press on my straight

2921 line. So I crossed it, saw for a last time through the trees the gorge of

2922 the Doubs, and then got upon a path which led down through a field more or

2923 less in the direction of my pilgrimage.

2924 Here the country was so broken that one could make

2925 out but little of its general features, but of course, on the whole, I was

2926 following down yet another southern slope, the southern slope of the *third*

2927 chain of the Jura, when, after passing through many glades and along a

2928 stony path, I found a kind of gate between two high rocks, and emerged

2929 somewhat suddenly upon a wide down studded with old trees and also many

2930 stunted yews, and this sank down to a noble valley which lay all before

2931 me.

2932 The open down or prairie on which I stood I

2933 afterwards found to be called the 'Pasturage of Common Right', a very fine

2934 name; and, as a gallery will command a great hall, so this field like a

2935 platform commanded the wide and fading valley below.

2936 *

2937 It was a very glad surprise to see this sight

2938 suddenly unrolled as I stood on the crest of the down. The Jura had

2939 hitherto been either lonely, or somewhat awful, or naked and rocky, but

2940 here was a true vale in which one could imagine a spirit of its own; there

2941 were corn lands and no rocks. The mountains on either

2942 82

2943 ---

2944 THE HUMAN TIDE****

2945 side did not rise so high as three thousand feet.

2946 Though of limestone they were rounded in form, and the slanting sun of the

2947 late afternoon (all the storm had left the sky) took them full and warm.

2948 The valley remaining wide and fruitful went on out eastward till the hills

2949 became mixed up with brume and distance. As I did not know its name I

2950 called it after the village immediately below me for which I was making;

2951 and I still remember it as the Valley of Glovelier, and it lies between

2952 the third and fourth ridges of the Jura.

2953 Before leaving the field I drew what I saw but I

2954 was much too tired by the double and prodigious climb of the past hours to

2955 draw definitely or clearly. Such as it is, there it is. Then I went down

2956 over the smooth field.

2957 There is something that distinguishes the rugged

2958 from the gracious in landscape, and in our Europe this something

2959 corresponds to the use and presence of men, especially in mountainous

2960 places. For men's habits and civilization fill the valleys and wash up the

2961 base of the hills, making, as it were, a tide mark. Into this zone I had

2962 already passed. The turf was trodden fine, and was set firm as it can only

2963 become by thousands of years of pasturing. The moisture that oozed out of

2964 the earth was not the random bog of the high places but a human spring,

2965 caught in a stone trough. Attention had been given to the trees. Below me

2966 stood a wall, which, though rough, was not the haphazard thing men pile up

2967 in the last recesses of the hills, but formed of chosen stones, and these

2968 bound together with mortar. On my right was a deep little dale with

2969 children playing in it--and this' I afterwards learned was called a

2970 'combe': delightful memory! All our deeper hollows are called the same at

2971 home, and even the Welsh have the word, but they spell it cwm;* it

2972 is their mountain way. Well, as I was saying, everything surrounding me

2973 was domestic and grateful, and I was therefore in a mood for charity and

2974 companionship when I came down the last dip and entered Glovelier. But

2975 Glovelier is a place of no excellence whatever, and if the thought did not

2976 seem extravagant I should be for putting it to the sword and burning it

2977 all down.

2978 For just as I was going along full of kindly

2979 thoughts, and had turned into the sign of (I think it was) the 'Sun' to

2980 drink wine and leave them my benediction--

2981 LECTOR. Why your benediction?

2982 AUCTOR. Who else can give benedictions if people

2983 cannot when they are on pilgrimage? Learn that there are three avenues by

2984 which blessing can be bestowed, and three kinds of men who can bestow it.

2985 (1) There is the good man, whose goodness makes

2986 him of himself a giver of blessings. His power is not conferred or of

2987 office, but is *inhaerens persona;* part of the stuff of his mind.

2988 This kind can confer the solemn benediction, or

2989 ---

2990 THEORY OF BLESSINGS****

2991 *Benedictio major,* if they choose; but

2992 besides this their every kind thought, word, or action is a *Benedictio

2993 generalise* and even their frowns, curses, angry looks and irritable

2994 gestures may be called *Benedictiones minores vel incerti.* I believe

2995 I am within the definitions. I avoid heresy. All this is sound theology. I

2996 do not smell of the faggot. And this kind of Benedictory Power is the

2997 fount or type or natural origin, as it were, of all others.

2998 (2) There is the Official of Religion who, in the

2999 exercise of his office--

3000 LECTOR. For Heaven's sake--

3001 AUCTOR. Who began it? You protested my power to

3002 give benediction, and I must now prove it at length; otherwise I should

3003 fall under the accusation of lesser Simony--that is, the false assumption

3004 of particular powers. Well, then, there is the Official who *ex officio,*

3005 and when he makes it quite clear that it is *qua sponsus* and not *sicut

3006 ut ipse,* can give formal benediction. This power belongs certainly to

3007 all Bishops, mitred Abbots, and Archimandrates; to Patriarchs of course,

3008 and *a fortiori* to the Pope. In Rome they will have it that

3009 Monsignores also can so bless, and I have heard it debated whether or no

3010 the same were not true in some rustic way of parish priests. However this

3011 may be, all their power proceeds, not from themselves, but from the

3012 accumulation of goodness left as a deposit by the multitudes of

3013 exceptionally good men who have lived in times past, and who have now no

3014 use for it.

3015 (3) Thirdly--and this is my point--any one, good

3016 or bad, official or non-official, who is for the moment engaged in an *opusfaustum*

3017 can act certainly as a conductor or medium, and the influence of what he

3018 is touching or doing passes to you from him. This is admitted by every one

3019 who worships trees, wells, and stones; and indeed it stands to reason, for

3020 it is but a branch of the well-known *'Sanctificatio ex loco, opere,

3021 tactu vel conditione.'* I will admit that this power is but vague,

3022 slight, tenuous, and dissipatory, still there it is: though of course its

3023 poor effect is to that of the *Benedictio major* what a cat's-paw in

3024 the Solent is to a north-east snorter on Lindsey Deeps.

3025 I am sorry to have been at such length, but it is

3026 necessary to have these things thrashed out once for all. So now you see

3027 how I, being on pilgrimage, could give a kind of little creeping blessing

3028 to the people on the way, though, as St Louis said to the Hascisch-eaters,

3029 *'May it be a long time before you can kiss my bones.'*

3030 So I entered the 'Sun' inn and saw there a woman

3031 sewing, a great dull-faced man like an ox, and a youth writing down

3032 figures in a little book. I said--

3033 'Good morning, madam, and sirs, and the company.

3034 Could you give me a little red wine?' Not a head moved.

3035 84

3036 ---

3037 THE RUDE PEASANTS****

3038 True I was very dirty and tired, and they may have

3039 thought me a beggar, to whom, like good sensible Christians who had no

3040 nonsense about them, they would rather have given a handsome kick than a

3041 cup of cold water. However, I think it was not only my poverty but a

3042 native churlishness which bound their bovine souls in that valley.

3043 I sat down at a very clean table. I notice that

3044 those whom the Devil has made his own are always spick and span, just as

3045 firemen who have to go into great furnaces have to keep all their gear

3046 highly polished. I sat down at it, and said again, still gently--

3047 'It is, indeed, a fine country this of yours.

3048 Could you give me a little red wine?'

3049 Then the ox-faced man who had his back turned to

3050 me, and was the worst of the lot, said sulkily, not to me, but to the

3051 woman--

3052 'He wants wine.'

3053 The woman as sulkily said to me, not looking me in

3054 the eyes--

3055 'How much will you pay?'

3056 I said, 'Bring the wine. Set it here. See me drink

3057 it. Charge me your due.'

3058 I found that this brutal way of speaking was just

3059 what was needed for the kine and cattle of this pen. She skipped off to a

3060 cupboard, and set wine before me, and a glass. I drank quite quietly till

3061 I had had enough, and asked what there was to pay. She said 'Threepence,'

3062 and I said 'Too much,' as I paid it. At this the ox-faced man grunted and

3063 frowned, and I was afraid; but hiding my fear I walked out boldly and

3064 slowly, and made a noise with my stick upon the floor of the hall without.

3065 Neither did I bid them farewell. But I made a sign at the house as I left

3066 it. Whether it suffered from this as did the house at Dorchester which the

3067 man in the boat caused to wither in one night, is more than I can tell.

3068 The road led straight across the valley and

3069 approached the further wall of hills. These I saw were pierced by one of

3070 the curious gaps which are peculiar to limestone ranges. Water cuts them,

3071 and a torrent ran through this one also. The road through it, gap though

3072 it was, went up steeply, and the further valley was evidently higher than

3073 the one I was leaving. It was already evening as I entered this narrow

3074 ravine; the sun only caught the tops of the rock-walls. My fatigue was

3075 very great, and my walking painful to an extreme, when, having come to a

3076 place where the gorge was narrowest and where the two sides were like the

3077 posts of a giant's stile, where also the fifth ridge of the Jura stood up

3078 beyond me in the further valley, a vast shadow, I sat down wearily and

3079 drew what not even my exhaustion could render unremarkable.

3080 ---

3081 *

3082 While I was occupied sketching the slabs of

3083 limestone, I heard wheels coming up behind me, and a boy in a waggon

3084 stopped and hailed me.

3085 What the boy wanted to know was whether I would

3086 take a lift, and this he said in such curious French that I shuddered to

3087 think how far I had pierced into the heart of the hills, and how soon I

3088 might come to quite strange people. I was greatly tempted to get into his

3089 cart, but though I had broken so many of my vows one remained yet whole

3090 and sound, which was that I would ride upon no wheeled thing. Remembering

3091 this, therefore, and considering that the Faith is rich in interpretation,

3092 I clung on to the waggon in such a manner that it did all my work for me,

3093 and yet could not be said to be actually carrying me. Distinguo.*

3094 The essence of a vow is its literal meaning. The spirit and intention are

3095 for the major morality, and concern Natural Religion, but when upon a

3096 point of ritual or of dedication or special worship a man talks to you of

3097 the Spirit and Intention, and complains of the dryness of the Word, look

3098 at him askance. He is not far removed from Heresy.

3099 I knew a man once that was given to drinking, and

3100 I made up this rule for him to distinguish between Bacchus and the Devil.

3101 To wit: that he should never drink what has been made and sold since the

3102 Reformation--I mean especially

3103 86

3104 ---

3105 LITERAL VOW****

3106 spirits and champagne. Let him (said I) drink red

3107 wine and white, good beer and mead--if he could get it--liqueurs made by

3108 monks, and, in a word, all those feeding, fortifying, and confirming

3109 beverages that our fathers drank in old time; but not whisky, nor brandy,

3110 nor sparkling wines, not absinthe, nor the kind of drink called gin. This

3111 he promised to do, and all went well. He became a merry companion, and

3112 began to write odes. His prose clarified and set, that had before been

3113 very mixed and cloudy. He slept well; he comprehended divine things; he

3114 was already half a republican, when one fatal day--it was the feast of the

3115 eleven thousand virgins, and they were too busy up in heaven to consider

3116 the needs of us poor hobbling, polyktonous and betempted wretches of

3117 men--I went with him to the Society for the Prevention of Annoyances to

3118 the Rich, where a certain usurer's son was to read a paper on the cruelty

3119 of Spaniards to their mules. As we were all seated there round a table

3120 with a staring green cloth on it, and a damnable gas pendant above, the

3121 host of that evening offered him whisky and water, and, my back being

3122 turned, he took it. Then when I would have taken it from him he used these

3123 words--

3124 'After all, it is the intention of a pledge that

3125 matters;' and I saw that all was over, for he had abandoned definition,

3126 and was plunged back into the horrible mazes of Conscience and Natural

3127 Religion.

3128 What do you think, then, was the consequence? Why,

3129 he had to take some nasty pledge or other to drink nothing whatever, and

3130 become a spectacle and a judgement, whereas if he had kept his exact word

3131 he might by this time have been a happy man.

3132 Remembering him and pondering upon the advantage

3133 of strict rule, I hung on to my cart, taking care to let my feet still

3134 feel the road, and so passed through the high limestone gates of the

3135 gorge, and was in the fourth valley of the Jura, with the fifth ridge

3136 standing up black and huge before me against the last of the daylight.

3137 There were as yet no stars.

3138 There, in this silent place, was the little

3139 village of Undervelier, and I thanked the boy, withdrew from his cart, and

3140 painfully approached the inn, where I asked the woman if she could give me

3141 something to eat, and she said that she could in about an hour, using,

3142 however, with regard to what it was I was to have, words which I did not

3143 understand. For the French had become quite barbaric, and I was now indeed

3144 lost in one of the inner places of the world.

3145 A cigar is, however, even in Undervelier, a cigar;

3146 and the best cost a penny. One of these, therefore, I bought, and then I

3147 went out smoking it into the village square, and, finding a low wall,

3148 leaned over it and contemplated the glorious clear green water tumbling

3149 and roaring along beneath it on the other side; for a little river ran

3150 through the village.

3151 ---

3152 ON THE FAITH****

3153 As I leaned there resting and communing I noticed

3154 how their church, close at hand, was built along the low banks of the

3155 torrent. I admired the luxuriance of the grass these waters fed, and the

3156 generous arch of the trees beside it. The graves seemed set in a natural

3157 place of rest and home, and just beyond this churchyard was that marriage

3158 of hewn stone and water which is the source of so peculiar a satisfaction;

3159 for the church tower was built boldly right out into the stream and the

3160 current went eddying round it. But why it is that strong human building

3161 when it dips into water should thus affect the mind I cannot say, only I

3162 know that it is an emotion apart to see our device and structure where it

3163 is most enduring come up against and challenge that element which we

3164 cannot conquer, and which has always in it something of danger for men. It

3165 is therefore well to put strong mouldings on to piers and quays, and to

3166 make an architecture of them, and so it was a splendid thought of the

3167 Romans to build their villas right out to sea; so they say does Venice

3168 enthrall one, but where I have most noticed this thing is at the Mont St

3169 Michel--only one must take care to shut one's eyes or sleep during all the

3170 low tide.

3171 As I was watching that stream against those old

3172 stones, my cigar being now half smoked, a bell began tolling, and it

3173 seemed as if the whole village were pouring into the church. At this I was

3174 very much surprised, not having been used at any time of my life to the

3175 unanimous devotion of an entire population, but having always thought of

3176 the Faith as something fighting odds, and having seen unanimity only in

3177 places where some sham religion or other glozed over our tragedies and

3178 excused our sins. Certainly to see all the men, women, and children of a

3179 place taking Catholicism for granted was a new sight, and so I put my

3180 cigar carefully down under a stone on the top of the wall and went in with

3181 them. I then saw that what they were at was vespers.

3182 All the village sang, knowing the psalms very

3183 well, and I noticed that their Latin was nearer German than French; but

3184 what was most pleasing of all was to hear from all the men and women

3185 together that very noble good-night and salutation to God which begins--

3186 *Te, lucis ante terminum.*

3187 My whole mind was taken up and transfigured by

3188 this collective act, and I saw for a moment the Catholic Church quite

3189 plain, and I remembered Europe, and the centuries. Then there left me

3190 altogether that attitude of difficulty and combat which, for us others, is

3191 always associated with the Faith. The cities dwindled in my imagination,

3192 and I took less heed of the modern noise. I went out with them into the

3193 clear evening and the cool. I found my cigar and lit it again, and musing

3194 much more deeply than before, not without tears, I considered the nature

3195 of Belief.

3196 ---

3197 STILL ON FAITH

3198 Of its nature it breeds a reaction and an

3199 indifference. Those who believe nothing but only think and judge cannot

3200 understand this. Of its nature it struggles with us. And we, we, when our

3201 youth is full on us, invariably reject it and set out in the sunlight

3202 content with natural things. Then for a long time we are like men who

3203 follow down the cleft of a mountain and the peaks are hidden from us and

3204 forgotten. It takes years to reach the dry plain, and then we look back

3205 and see our home.

3206 What is it, do you think, that causes the return?

3207 I think it is the problem of living; for every day, every experience of

3208 evil, demands a solution. That solution is provided by the memory of the

3209 great scheme which at last we remember. Our childhood pierces through

3210 again ... But I will not attempt to explain it, for I have not the power;

3211 only I know that we who return suffer hard things; for there grows a gulf

3212 between us and many companions. We are perpetually thrust into minorities,

3213 and the world almost begins to talk a strange language; we are troubled by

3214 the human machinery of a perfect and superhuman revelation; we are

3215 over-anxious for its safety, alarmed, and in danger of violent decisions.

3216 And this is hard: that the Faith begins to make

3217 one abandon the old way of judging. Averages and movements and the rest

3218 grow uncertain. We see things from within and consider one mind or a

3219 little group as a salt or leaven. The very nature of social force seems

3220 changed to us. And this is hard when a man has loved common views and is

3221 happy only with his fellows.

3222 And this again is very hard, that we must once

3223 more take up that awful struggle to reconcile two truths and to keep civic

3224 freedom sacred in spite of the organization of religion, and not to deny

3225 what is certainly true. It is hard to accept mysteries, and to be humble.

3226 We are tost as the great schoolmen were tost, and we dare not neglect the

3227 duty of that wrestling.

3228 But the hardest thing of all is that it leads us

3229 away, as by a command, from all that banquet of the intellect than which

3230 there is no keener joy known to man.

3231 I went slowly up the village place in the dusk,

3232 thinking of this deplorable weakness in men that the Faith is too great

3233 for them, and accepting it as an inevitable burden. I continued to muse

3234 with my eyes upon the ground ...

3235 There was to be no more of that studious content,

3236 that security in historic analysis, and that constant satisfaction of an

3237 appetite which never cloyed. A wisdom more imperative and more profound

3238 was to put a term to the comfortable wisdom of learning. All the balance

3239 of judgement, the easy, slow convictions, the broad grasp of things, the

3240 vision of their complexity, the pleasure in their innumerable life--all

3241 that had to be given up. Fanaticisms were no longer entirely to be

3242 despised, just appreciations and a strong grasp of reality no longer

3243 entirely to be admired.

3244 89

3245 ---

3246 ON STYLE****

3247 The Catholic Church will have no philosophies. She

3248 will permit no comforts; the cry of the martyrs is in her far voice; her

3249 eyes that see beyond the world present us heaven and hell to the confusion

3250 of our human reconciliations, our happy blending of good and evil things.

3251 By the Lord! I begin to think this intimate

3252 religion as tragic as a great love. There came back into my mind a relic

3253 that I have in my house. It is a panel of the old door of my college,

3254 having carved on it my college arms. I remembered the Lion and the Shield,

3255 *Haec fuit, Haec almae janua sacra domus.* Yes, certainly religion is

3256 as tragic as first love, and drags us out into the void away from our dear

3257 homes.

3258 It is a good thing to have loved one woman from a

3259 child, and it is a good thing not to have to return to the Faith.

3260 They cook worse in Undervelier than any place I

3261 was ever in, with the possible exception of Omaha, Neb.

3262 LECTOR. Why do you use phrases like *'possible

3263 exception'?*

3264 AUCTOR. Why not? I see that all the religion I

3265 have stuck into the book has no more effect on you than had Rousseau upon

3266 Sir Henry Maine. You are as full of Pride as a minor Devil. You would

3267 avoid the *cliché* and the commonplace, and the *phrase

3268 toute faite.* Why? Not because you naturally write odd

3269 prose--contrariwise, left to yourself you write pure journalese; but

3270 simply because you are swelled and puffed up with a desire to pose. You

3271 want what the Martha Brown school calls 'distinction' in prose. My little

3272 friend, I know how it is done, and I find it contemptible. People write

3273 their articles at full speed, putting down their unstudied and valueless

3274 conclusions in English as pale as a film of dirty wax--sometimes even they

3275 dictate to a typewriter. Then they sit over it with a blue pencil and

3276 carefully transpose the split infinitives, and write alternative

3277 adjectives, and take words away out of their natural place in the sentence

3278 and generally put the Queen's English--yes, the Queen's English--on the

3279 rack. And who is a penny the better for it? The silly authors get no real

3280 praise, not even in the horrible stucco villas where their clique meet on

3281 Sundays. The poor public buys the *Marvel* and gasps at the

3282 cleverness of the writing and despairs, and has to read what it can

3283 understand, and is driven back to toshy novels about problems, written by

3284 cooks. 'The hungry sheep,' as some one says somewhere, 'look up and are

3285 not fed;' and the same poet well describes your pipings as being on

3286 wretched straw pipes that are 'scrannel'--a good word.

3287 Oh, for one man who should write healthy, hearty,

3288 straightforward English! Oh, for Cobbett! There are indeed some great men

3289 who write twistedly simply

3290 90

3291 ---

3292 THE GERMAN****

3293 Because they cannot help it, but *their*

3294 honesty is proved by the mass they turn out. What do you turn out, you

3295 higglers and sticklers? Perhaps a bad triolet every six months, and a book

3296 of criticism on something thoroughly threadbare once in five years. If I

3297 had my way--

3298 LECTOR. I am sorry to have provoked all this.

3299 AUCTOR. Not at all! Not at all! I trust I have

3300 made myself clear.

3301 Well, as I was saying, they cook worse at

3302 Undervelier than any place I was ever in, with the possible exception of

3303 Omaha, Neb. However, I forgave them, because they were such good people,

3304 and after a short and bitter night I went out in the morning before the

3305 sun rose and took the Moutier road.

3306 The valley in which I was now engaged--the phrase

3307 seems familiar--was more or less like an H. That is, there were two high

3308 parallel ranges bounding it, but across the middle a low ridge of perhaps

3309 a thousand feet. The road slowly climbed this ridge through pastures where

3310 cows with deep-toned bells were rising from the dew on the grass, and

3311 where one or two little cottages and a village already sent up smoke. All

3312 the way up I was thinking of the surfeit of religion I had had the night

3313 before, and also of how I had started that morning without bread or

3314 coffee, which was a folly.

3315 When I got to the top of the ridge there was a

3316 young man chopping wood outside a house, and I asked him in French how far

3317 it was to Moutier. He answered in German, and I startled him by a loud

3318 cry, such as sailors give when they see land, for at last I had struck the

3319 boundary of the languages, and was with pure foreigners for the first time

3320 in my life. I also asked him for coffee, and as he refused it I took him

3321 to be a heretic and went down the road making up verses against all such,

3322 and singing them loudly through the forest that now arched over me and

3323 grew deeper as I descended.

3324 And my first verse was--

3325 Heretics all, whoever you be, In Tarbes or Nimes,

3326 or over the sea, You never shall have good words from me. *Caritas non

3327 conturbat me.*

3328 If you ask me why I put a Latin line at the end,

3329 it was because I had to show that it was a song connected with the

3330 Universal Fountain and with European culture, and with all that Heresy

3331 combats. I sang it to a lively hymn-tune that I had invented for the

3332 occasion.

3333 I then thought what a fine fellow I was, and how

3334 pleasant were my friends when I agreed with them. I made up this second

3335 verse, which I sang even more loudly than the first; and the forest grew

3336 deeper, sending back echoes--

3337 ---

3338 HERETICS****

3339 But Catholic men that live upon wine Are deep in

3340 the water, and frank, and fine; Wherever I travel I find it so, *Benedicamus

3341 Domino.*

3342 There is no doubt, however, that if one is really

3343 doing a catholic work, and expressing one's attitude to the world,

3344 charity, pity, and a great sense of fear should possess one, or, at least,

3345 appear. So I made up this third verse and sang it to suit--

3346 On childing women that are forlorn, And men that

3347 sweat in nothing but scorn: That is on all that ever were born, *Miserere

3348 Domine.*

3349 Then, as everything ends in death, and as that is

3350 just what Heretics least like to be reminded of, I ended thus--

3351 To my poor self on my deathbed, And all my dear

3352 companions dead, Because of the love that I bore them, *Dona Eis

3353 Requiem.*

3354 I say 'I ended.' But I did not really end there,

3355 for I also wrote in the spirit of the rest a verse of Mea Culpa and

3356 Confession of Sin, but I shall not print it here.

3357 So my song over and the woods now left behind, I

3358 passed up a dusty piece of road into Moutier, a detestable town, all

3359 whitewashed and orderly, down under the hills.

3360 I was tired, for the sun was now long risen and

3361 somewhat warm, and I had walked ten miles, and that over a high ridge; and

3362 I had written a canticle and sung it--- and all that without a sup or a

3363 bite. I therefore took bread, coffee, and soup in Moutier, and then going

3364 a little way out of the town I crossed a stream off the road, climbed a

3365 knoll, and, lying under a tree, I slept.

3366 I awoke and took the road.

3367 The road after Moutier was not a thing for

3368 lyrics; it stirred me in no way. It was bare in the sunlight, had fields

3369 on either side; and in the fields stood houses. In the houses were

3370 articulately-speaking mortal men.

3371 There is a school of Poets (I cannot read them

3372 myself) who treat of common things, and their admirers tell us that these

3373 men raise the things of everyday

3374 92

3375 ---

3376 EVERYDAY LIFE, HORRORS THEREOF****

3377 life to the plane of the supernatural. Note that

3378 phrase, for it is a shaft of light through a cloud revealing their

3379 disgusting minds.

3380 Everyday life! As *La Croix* said in a

3381 famous leading article: *'La Presse?'* POOH!' I know that everyday

3382 life. It goes with sandals and pictures of lean ugly people all just like

3383 one another in browny photographs on the wall, and these pictures are

3384 called, one 'The House of Life', or another, 'The Place Beautiful', or yet

3385 again a third, 'The Lamp of the Valley', and when you complain and shift

3386 about uneasily before these pictures, the scrub-minded and dusty-souled

3387 owners of them tell you that of course in photographs you lose the

3388 marvellous colour of the original. This everyday life has mantelpieces

3389 made of the same stuff as cafe-tables, so that by instinct I try to make

3390 rings on them with my wine-glass, and the people who suffer this life get

3391 up every morning at eight, and the poor sad men of the house slave at

3392 wretched articles and come home to hear more literature and more

3393 appreciations, and the unholy women do nothing and attend to local

3394 government, that is, the oppression of the poor; and altogether this

3395 accursed everyday life of theirs is instinct with the four sins crying to

3396 heaven for vengeance, and there is no humanity in it, and no simplicity,

3397 and no recollection. I know whole quarters of the towns of that life where

3398 they have never heard of Virtus or Verecundia or Pietas.

3399 LECTOR. Then--

3400 AUCTOR. Alas! alas! Dear Lector, in these houses

3401 there is no honest dust. Not a bottle of good wine or bad; no prints

3402 inherited from one's uncle, and no children's books by Mrs Barbauld or

3403 Miss Edgeworth; no human disorder, nothing of that organic comfort which

3404 makes a man's house like a bear's fur for him. They have no debts, they do

3405 not read in bed, and they will have difficulty in saving their souls.

3406 LECTOR. Then tell me, how would you treat of

3407 common things?

3408 AUCTOR. Why, I would leave them alone; but if I

3409 had to treat of them I will show you how I would do it. Let us have a

3410 dialogue about this road from Moutier.

3411 LECTOR. By all means.

3412 AUCTOR. What a terrible thing it is to miss one's

3413 sleep. I can hardly bear the heat of the road, and my mind is empty!

3414 LECTOR. Why, you have just slept in a wood!

3415 AUCTOR. Yes, but that is not enough. One must

3416 sleep at night.

3417 LECTOR. My brother often complains of insomnia. He

3418 is a policeman.

3419 AUCTOR. Indeed? It is a sad affliction.

3420 LECTOR. Yes, indeed.

3421 AUCTOR. Indeed, yes.

3422 93

3423 ---

3424 PLAYS WITHOUT WORDS****

3425 LECTOR. I cannot go on like this.

3426 AUCTOR. There. That is just what I was saying. One

3427 cannot treat of common things: it is not literature; and for my part, if I

3428 were the editor even of a magazine, and the author stuck in a string of

3429 dialogue, I would not pay him by the page but by the word, and I would

3430 count off 5 per cent for epigrams, 10 per cent for dialect, and some

3431 quarter or so for those stage directions in italics which they use to pad

3432 out their work.

3433 So. I will not repeat this experiment, but next

3434 time I come to a bit of road about which there is nothing to say, I will

3435 tell a story or sing a song, and to that I pledge myself.

3436 By the way, I am reminded of something. Do you

3437 know those books and stories in which parts of the dialogues often have no

3438 words at all? Only dots and dashes and asterisks and interrogations? I

3439 wonder what the people are paid for it? If I knew I would earn a mint of

3440 money, for I believe I have a talent for it. Look at this--

3441 *

3442 There. That seems to me worth a good deal more

3443 money than all the modern 'delineation of character', and 'folk' nonsense

3444 ever written. What verve! What terseness! And yet how clear!

3445 LECTOR. Let us be getting on.

3446 AUCTOR. By all means, and let us consider more

3447 enduring things.

3448 After a few miles the road going upwards, I passed

3449 through another gap in the hills and--

3450 LECTOR. Pardon me, but I am still ruminating upon

3451 that little tragedy of yours. Why was the guardian a duchess?

3452 AUCTOR. Well, it was a short play and modern, was

3453 it not?

3454 94

3455 ---

3456 THE ACOLYTE OF RHEIMS****

3457 LECTOR. Yes. And therefore, of course, you must

3458 have a title in it. I know that. I do not object to it. What I want to

3459 know is, why a duchess?

3460 AUCTOR. On account of the reduction of scale: the

3461 concentration of the thing. You see in the full play there would have been

3462 a lord, two baronets, and say three ladies, and I could have put suitable

3463 words into their mouths. As it was I had to make absolutely sure of the

3464 element of nobility without any help, and, as it were, in one startling

3465 moment. Do you follow? Is it not art?

3466 I cannot conceive why a pilgrimage, an adventure

3467 so naturally full of great, wonderful, far-off and holy things should

3468 breed such fantastic nonsense as all this; but remember at least the

3469 little acolyte of Rheims, whose father, in 1512, seeing him apt for

3470 religion, put him into a cassock and designed him for the Church,

3471 whereupon the youngling began to be as careless and devilish as Mercury,

3472 putting beeswax on the misericords, burning feathers in the censer, and

3473 even going round himself with the plate without leave and scolding the

3474 rich in loud whispers when they did not put in enough. So one way with

3475 another they sent him home to his father; the archbishop thrusting him out

3476 of the south porch with his own hands and giving him the Common or Ferial

3477 Malediction, which is much the same as that used by carters to stray dogs.

3478 When his father saw him he fumed terribly, cursing

3479 like a pagan, and asking whether his son were a roysterer fit for the

3480 gallows as well as a fool fit for a cassock. On hearing which complaint

3481 the son very humbly and contritely said--

3482 'It is not my fault but the contact with the

3483 things of the Church that makes me gambol and frisk, just as the Devil

3484 they say is a good enough fellow left to himself and is only moderately

3485 heated, yet when you put him into holy water all the world is witness how

3486 he hisses and boils.'

3487 The boy then taking a little lamb which happened

3488 to be in the drawing-room, said--

3489 'Father, see this little lamb; how demure he is

3490 and how simple and innocent, and how foolish and how tractable. Yet

3491 observe!' With that he whipped the cassock from his arm where he was

3492 carrying it and threw it all over the lamb, covering his head and body;

3493 and the lamb began plunging and kicking and bucking and rolling and

3494 heaving and sliding and rearing and pawing and most vigorously wrestling

3495 with the clerical and hierarchically constraining garment of darkness, and

3496 bleating all the while more and more angrily and loudly, for all the world

3497 like the great goat Baphomet himself when the witches dance about him on

3498 All-hallowe'en. But when the boy suddenly plucked off the cassock again,

3499 the lamb, after sneezing a little and finding his feet, became quite

3500 gentle once more, and looked only a little confused and dazed.

3501 95

3502 ---

3503 THE MILLS OF GOD****

3504 'There, father,' said the boy, 'is proof to you of

3505 how the meekest may be driven to desperation by the shackles I speak of,

3506 and which I pray you never lay upon me again.'

3507 His father finding him so practical and wise made

3508 over his whole fortune and business to him, and thus escaped the very

3509 heavy Heriot and Death Dues of those days, for he was a Socage tenant of

3510 St Remi in Double Burgage. But we stopped all that here in England by the

3511 statute of Uses, and I must be getting back to the road before the dark

3512 catches me.

3513 As I was saying, I came to a gap in the hills, and

3514 there was there a house or two called Gansbrunnen, and one of the houses

3515 was an inn. Just by the inn the road turned away sharply up the valley;

3516 the very last slope of the Jura, the last parallel ridge, lay straight

3517 before me all solemn, dark, and wooded, and making a high feathery line

3518 against the noon. To cross this there was but a vague path rather

3519 misleading, and the name of the mountain was Weissenstein.

3520 So before that last effort which should lead me

3521 over those thousands of feet, and to nourish Instinct (which would be of

3522 use to me when I got into that impenetrable wood), I turned into the inn

3523 for wine.

3524 A very old woman having the appearance of a witch

3525 sat at a dark table by the little criss-cross window of the dark room. She

3526 was crooning to herself, and I made the sign of the evil eye and asked her

3527 in French for wine; but French she did not understand. Catching, however,

3528 two words which sounded like the English 'White' and 'Red', I said 'Yaw'

3529 after the last and nodded, and she brought up a glass of exceedingly good

3530 red wine which I drank in silence, she watching me uncannily.

3531 Then I paid her with a five-franc piece, and she

3532 gave me a quantity of small change rapidly, which, as I counted it, I

3533 found to contain one Greek piece of fifty lepta very manifestly of lead.

3534 This I held up angrily before her, and (not without courage, for it is

3535 hard to deal with the darker powers) I recited to her slowly that familiar

3536 verse which the well-known Satyricus Empiricius was for ever using in his

3537 now classical attacks on the grammarians; and without any Alexandrian

3538 twaddle of accents I intoned to her--

3539 and so left her astounded to repentance or to

3540 shame.

3541 Then I went out into the sunlight, and crossing

3542 over running water put myself out of her power.

3543 96

3544 ---

3545 BETWEEN THE TREES****

3546 The wood went up darkly and the path branched here

3547 and there so that I was soon uncertain of my way, but I followed generally

3548 what seemed to me the most southerly course, and so came at last up

3549 steeply through a dip or ravine that ended high on the crest of the ridge.

3550 Just as I came to the end of the rise, after

3551 perhaps an hour, perhaps two, of that great curtain of forest which had

3552 held the mountain side, the trees fell away to brushwood, there was a

3553 gate, and then the path was lost upon a fine open sward which was the very

3554 top of the Jura and the coping of that multiple wall which defends the

3555 Swiss Plain. I had crossed it straight from edge to edge, never turning

3556 out of my way.

3557 It was too marshy to lie down on it, so I stood a

3558 moment to breathe and look about me.

3559 It was evident that nothing higher remained, for

3560 though a new line of wood--firs and beeches--stood before me, yet nothing

3561 appeared above them, and I knew that they must be the fringe of the

3562 descent. I approached this edge of wood, and saw that it had a rough fence

3563 of post and rails bounding it, and

3564 as I was looking for the entry of a path (for my

3565 original path was lost, as such tracks are, in the damp grass of the

3566 little down) there came to me one of those great revelations which betray

3567 to us suddenly the higher things and stand afterwards firm in our minds.

3568 There, on this upper meadow, where so far I had

3569 felt nothing but the ordinary gladness of The Summit, I had a vision.

3570 What was it I saw? If you think I saw this or

3571 that, and if you think I am inventing the words, you know nothing of men.

3572 97

3573 ---

3574 THE VISION OF THE ALPS****

3575 I saw between the branches of the trees in front

3576 of me a sight in the sky that made me stop breathing, just as great danger

3577 at sea, or great surprise in love, or a great deliverance will make a man

3578 stop breathing. I saw something I had known in the West as a boy,

3579 something I had never seen so grandly discovered as was this. In between

3580 the branches of the trees was a great promise of unexpected lights beyond.

3581 I pushed left and right along that edge of the

3582 forest and along the fence that bound it, until I found a place where the

3583 pine-trees stopped, leaving a gap, and where on the right, beyond the gap,

3584 was a tree whose leaves had failed; there the ground broke away steeply

3585 below me, and the beeches fell, one below the other, like a vast cascade,

3586 towards the limestone cliffs that dipped down still further, beyond my

3587 sight. I looked through this framing hollow and praised God. For there

3588 below me, thousands of feet below me, was what seemed an illimitable

3589 plain; at the end of that world was an horizon, and the dim bluish sky

3590 that overhangs an horizon.

3591 There was brume in it and thickness. One saw the

3592 sky beyond the edge of the world getting purer as the vault rose. But

3593 right up--a belt in that empyrean--ran peak and field and needle of

3594 intense ice, remote, remote from the world. Sky beneath them and sky above

3595 them, a steadfast legion, they glittered as though with the armour of the

3596 immovable armies of Heaven. Two days' march, three days' march away, they

3597 stood up like the walls of Eden. I say it again, they stopped my breath. I

3598 had seen them.

3599 So little are we, we men: so much are we immersed

3600 in our muddy and immediate interests that we think, by numbers and

3601 recitals, to comprehend distance or time, or any of our limiting

3602 infinities. Here were these magnificent creatures of God, I mean the Alps,

3603 which now for the first time I saw from the height of the Jura; and

3604 because they were fifty or sixty miles away, and because they were a mile

3605 or two high, they were become something different from us others, and

3606 could strike one motionless with the awe of supernatural things. Up there

3607 in the sky, to which only clouds belong and birds and the last trembling

3608 colours of pure light, they stood fast and hard; not moving as do the

3609 things of the sky. They were as distant as the little upper clouds of

3610 summer, as fine and tenuous; but in their reflection and in their quality

3611 as it were of weapons (like spears and shields of an unknown array) they

3612 occupied the sky with a sublime invasion: and the things proper to the sky

3613 were forgotten by me in their presence as I gazed.

3614 To what emotion shall I compare this astonishment?

3615 So, in first love one finds that this* can belong to *me.*

3616 Their sharp steadfastness and their clean uplifted

3617 lines compelled my

3618 ---

3619 THE ALPS, THEIR PICTURE****

3620 adoration. Up there, the sky above and below them,

3621 part of the sky, but part of us, the great peaks made communion between

3622 that homing creeping part of me which loves vineyards and dances and a

3623 slow movement among pastures, and that other part which is only properly

3624 at home in Heaven. I say that this kind of description is useless, and

3625 that it is better to address prayers to such things than to attempt to

3626 interpret them for others.

3627 These, the great Alps, seen thus, link one in some

3628 way to one's immortality. Nor is it possible to convey, or even to

3629 suggest, those few fifty miles, and those few thousand feet; there is

3630 something more. Let me put it thus: that from the height of Weissenstein I

3631 saw, as it were, my religion. I mean, humility, the fear of death, the

3632 terror of height and of distance, the glory of God, the infinite

3633 potentiality of reception whence springs that divine thirst of the soul;

3634 my aspiration also towards completion, and my confidence in the dual

3635 destiny. For I know that we laughers have a gross cousinship with the most

3636 high, and it is this contrast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring

3637 of merriment in the soul of a sane man.

3638 Since I could now see such a wonder and it could

3639 work such things in my mind, therefore, some day I should be part of it.

3640 That is what I felt.

3641 This it is also which leads some men to climb

3642 mountain-tops, but not me, for I am afraid of slipping down.

3643 Then you will say, if I felt all this, why do I

3644 draw it, and put it in my book, seeing that my drawings are only for fun?

3645 My jest drags down such a memory and makes it ludicrous. Well, I said in

3646 my beginning that I would note down whatever most impressed me, except

3647 figures, which I cannot draw (I mean figures of human beings, for

3648 mathematical figures I can draw well enough), and I have never failed in

3649 this promise, except where, as in the case of Porrentruy, my drawing was

3650 blown away by the wind and lost--- if anything ever is lost. So I put down

3651 here this extraordinary drawing of what I saw,

3652 *

3653 99

3654 ---

3655 THE CLIFF****

3656 which is about as much like it as a printed song

3657 full of misprints is to that same song sung by an army on the march. And I

3658 am consoled by remembering that if I could draw infinitely well, then it

3659 would become sacrilege to attempt to draw that sight. Moreover, I am not

3660 going to waste any more time discussing why I put in this little drawing.

3661 If it disturbs your conception of what it was I saw, paste over it a

3662 little bit of paper. I have made it small for the purpose; but remember

3663 that the paper should be thin and opaque, for thick paper will interfere

3664 with the shape of this book, and transparent paper will disturb you with a

3665 memory of the picture.

3666 It was all full of this, as a man is full of music

3667 just after hearing it, that I plunged down into the steep forest that led

3668 towards the great plain; then, having found a path, I worked zig-zag down

3669 it by a kind of gully that led through to a place where the limestone

3670 cliffs were broken, and (so my map told me) to the town of Soleure, which

3671 stands at the edge of the plain upon the river Aar.

3672 I was an hour or more going down the enormous face

3673 of the Jura, which is here an escarpment, a cliff of great height, and

3674 contains but few such breaks by which

3675 100

3676 ---

3677 SOLEURE

3678 men can pick their way. It was when I was about

3679 half-way down the mountain side that its vastness most impressed me. And

3680 yet it had been but a platform as it were, from which to view the Alps and

3681 their much greater sublimity.

3682 This vastness, even of these limestone mountains,

3683 took me especially at a place where the path bordered a steep, or rather

3684 precipitous, lift of white rock to which only here and there a tree could

3685 cling.

3686 I was still very high up, but looking somewhat

3687 more eastward than before, and the plain went on inimitably towards some

3688 low vague hills; nor in that direction could any snow be seen in the sky.

3689 Then at last I came to the slopes which make a little bank under the

3690 mountains, and there, finding a highroad, and oppressed somewhat suddenly

3691 by the afternoon heat of those low places, I went on more slowly towards

3692 Soleure.

3693 Beside me, on the road, were many houses, shaded

3694 by great trees, built of wood, and standing apart. To each of them almost

3695 was a little water-wheel, run by the spring which came down out of the

3696 ravine. The water-wheel in most cases worked a simple little machine for

3697 sawing planks, but in other cases it seemed used for some purpose inside

3698 the house, which I could not divine; perhaps for spinning.

3699 All this place was full of working, and the men

3700 sang and spoke at their work in German, which I could not understand. I

3701 did indeed find one man, a young hay-making man carrying a scythe, who

3702 knew a little French and was going my way. I asked him, therefore, to

3703 teach me German, but he had not taught me much before we were at the gates

3704 of the old town and then I left him. It is thus, you will see, that for my

3705 next four days or five, which were passed among the German-speaking Swiss,

3706 I was utterly alone.

3707 This book must not go on for ever; therefore I

3708 cannot say very much about Soleure, although there is a great deal to be

3709 said about it. It is distinguished by an impression of unity, and of civic

3710 life, which I had already discovered in all these Swiss towns; for though

3711 men talk of finding the Middle Ages here or there, I for my part never

3712 find it, save where there has been democracy to preserve it. Thus I have

3713 seen the Middle Ages especially alive in the small towns of Northern

3714 France, and I have seen the Middle Ages in the University of Paris. Here

3715 also in Switzerland. As I had seen it at St Ursanne, so I found it now at

3716 Soleure. There were huge gates flanking the town, and there was that

3717 evening a continual noise of rifles, at which the Swiss are for ever

3718 practising. Over the church, however, I saw something terribly seventeenth

3719 century, namely, Jaweh in great Hebrew letters upon its front.

3720 ---

3721 THE REMOTE INN****

3722 Well, dining there of the best they had to give me

3723 (for this was another milestone in my pilgrimage), I became foolishly

3724 refreshed and valiant, and instead of sleeping in Soleure, as a wise man

3725 would have done, I determined, though it was now nearly dark, to push on

3726 upon the road to Burgdorf.

3727 I therefore crossed the river Aar, which is here

3728 magnificently broad and strong, and has bastions jutting out into it in a

3729 very bold fashion. I saw the last colourless light of evening making its

3730 waters seem like dull metal between the gloomy banks; I felt the

3731 beginnings of fatigue, and half regretted my determination. But as it is

3732 quite certain that one should never go back, I went on in the darkness, I

3733 do not know how many miles, till I reached some cross roads and an inn.

3734 102

3735 ---

3736 THE GOOD SAVAGES****

3737 This inn was very poor, and the people had never

3738 heard in their lives, apparently, that a poor man on foot might not be

3739 able to talk German, which seemed to me an astonishing thing; and as I sat

3740 there ordering beer for myself and for a number of peasants (who but for

3741 this would have me their butt, and even as it was found something

3742 monstrous in me), I pondered during my continual attempts to converse with

3743 them (for I had picked up some ten words of their language) upon the folly

3744 of those who imagine the world to be grown smaller by railways.

3745 I suppose this place was more untouched, as the

3746 phrase goes, that is, more living, more intense, and more powerful to

3747 affect others, whenever it may be called to do so, than are even the dear

3748 villages of Sussex that lie under my downs. For those are haunted by a

3749 nearly cosmopolitan class of gentry, who will have actors, financiers, and

3750 what not to come and stay with them, and who read the paper, and from time

3751 to time address their village folk upon matters of politics. But here, in

3752 this broad plain by the banks of the Emmen, they knew of nothing but

3753 themselves and the Church which is the common bond of Europe, and they

3754 were in the right way. Hence it was doubly hard on me that they should

3755 think me such a stranger.

3756 When I had become a little morose at their

3757 perpetual laughter, I asked for a bed, and the landlady, a woman of some

3758 talent, showed me on her fingers that the beds were 50c., 75c., and a

3759 franc. I determined upon the best, and was given indeed a very pleasant

3760 room, having in it the statue of a saint, and full of a country air. But I

3761 had done too much in this night march, as you will presently learn, for my

3762 next day was a day without salt, and in it appreciation left me. And this

3763 breakdown of appreciation was due to what I did not know at the time to be

3764 fatigue, but to what was undoubtedly a deep inner exhaustion.

3765 When I awoke next morning it was as it always is:

3766 no one was awake, and I had the field to myself, to slip out as I chose. I

3767 looked out of the window into the dawn. The race had made its own

3768 surroundings.

3769 These people who suffocated with laughter at the

3770 idea of one's knowing no German, had produced, as it were, a German

3771 picture by the mere influence of years and years of similar thoughts.

3772 Out of my window I saw the eaves coming low down.

3773 I saw an apple-tree against the grey light. The tangled grass in the

3774 little garden, the dog-kennel, and the standing butt were all what I had

3775 seen in those German pictures which they put into books for children, and

3776 which are drawn in thick black lines: nor did I see any reason why tame

3777 faces should not appear in that framework. I

3778 103

3779 ---

3780 ISOLATION****

3781 expected the light lank hair and the heavy

3782 unlifting step of the people whose only emotions are in music.

3783 But it was too early for any one to be about, and

3784 my German garden, si j'ose m'exprimer ainsi,* had to suffice me for

3785 an impression of the Central Europeans. I gazed at it a little while as it

3786 grew lighter. Then I went downstairs and slipped the latch (which, being

3787 German, was of a quaint design). I went out into the road and sighed

3788 profoundly.

3789 All that day was destined to be covered, so far as

3790 my spirit was concerned, with a motionless lethargy. Nothing seemed

3791 properly to interest or to concern me, and not till evening was I visited

3792 by any muse. Even my pain (which was now dull and chronic) was no longer a

3793 subject for my entertainment, and I suffered from an uneasy isolation that

3794 had not the merit of sharpness and was no spur to the mind. I had the

3795 feeling that every one I might see would be a stranger, and that their

3796 language would be unfamiliar to me, and this, unlike most men who travel,

3797 I had never felt before.

3798 The reason being this: that if a man has English

3799 thoroughly he can wander over a great part of the world familiarly, and

3800 meet men with whom he can talk. And if he has French thoroughly all Italy,

3801 and I suppose Spain, certainly Belgium, are open to him. Not perhaps that

3802 he will understand what he hears or will be understood of others, but that

3803 the order and nature of the words and the gestures accompanying them are

3804 his own. Here, however, I, to whom English and French were the same, was

3805 to spend (it seemed) whole days among a people who put their verbs at the

3806 end, where the curses or the endearments come in French and English, and

3807 many of whose words stand for ideas we have not got. I had no room for

3808 good-fellowship. I could not sit at tables and expand the air with

3809 terrible stories of adventure, nor ask about their politics, nor provoke

3810 them to laughter or sadness by my tales. It seemed a poor pilgrimage taken

3811 among dumb men.

3812 Also I have no doubt that I had experienced the

3813 ebb of some vitality, for it is the saddest thing about us that this

3814 bright spirit with which we are lit from within like lanterns, can suffer

3815 dimness. Such frailty makes one fear that extinction is our final destiny,

3816 and it saps us with numbness, and we are less than ourselves. Seven nights

3817 had I been on pilgrimage, and two of them had I passed in the open. Seven

3818 great heights had I climbed: the Forest, Archettes, the Ballon, the Mont

3819 Terrible, the Watershed, the pass by Moutier, the Weissenstein. Seven

3820 depths had I fallen to: twice to the Moselle, the gap of Belfort, the

3821 gorge of the Doubs, Glovelier valley, the hole of Moutier, and now this

3822 plain of the Aar. I had marched 180 miles. It was no wonder that on this

3823 eighth day I was oppressed and that all the light long I drank no good

3824 wine,

3825 104

3826 ---

3827 DESOLATION****

3828 met no one to remember well, nor sang any songs.

3829 All this part of my way was full of what they call Duty, and I was

3830 sustained only by my knowledge that the vast mountains (which had

3831 disappeared) would be part of my life very soon if I still went on

3832 steadily towards Rome.

3833 The sun had risen when I reached Burgdorf, and I

3834 there went to a railway station, and outside of it drank coffee and ate

3835 bread. I also bought old newspapers in French, and looked at everything

3836 wearily and with sad eyes. There was nothing to draw. How can a man draw

3837 pain in the foot and knee? And that was all there was remarkable at that

3838 moment.

3839 I watched a train come in. It was full of

3840 tourists, who (it may have been a subjective illusion) seemed to me common

3841 and worthless people, and sad into the bargain. It was going to

3842 Interlaken; and I felt a languid contempt for people who went to

3843 Interlaken instead of driving right across the great hills to Rome.

3844 After an hour, or so of this melancholy dawdling,

3845 I put a map before me on a little marble table, ordered some more coffee,

3846 and blew into my tepid life a moment of warmth by the effort of coming to

3847 a necessary decision. I had (for the first time since I had left Lorraine)

3848 the choice of two roads; and why this was so the following map will make

3849 clear.

3850 Here you see that there is no possibility of

3851 following the straight way to Rome, but that one must go a few miles east

3852 or west of it. From Burgundy one has to strike a point on the sources of

3853 the Emmen, and Burgdorf is on the

3854 *

3855 105****

3856 ---

3857 A DAY WITHOUT SALT****

3858 Emmen. Therefore one might follow the Emmen all

3859 the way up. But it seemed that the road climbed up above a gorge that way,

3860 whereas by the other (which is just as straight) the road is good (it

3861 seemed) and fairly level. So I chose this latter Eastern way, which, at

3862 the bifurcation, takes one up a tributary of the Emmen, then over a rise

3863 to the Upper Emmen again.

3864 Do you want it made plainer than that? I should

3865 think not. And, tell me--what can it profit you to know these geographical

3866 details? Believe me, I write them down for my own gratification, not

3867 yours.

3868 I say a day without salt. A trudge. The air was

3869 ordinary, the colours common; men, animals, and trees indifferent.

3870 Something had stopped working.

3871 Our energy also is from God, and we should never

3872 be proud of it, even if we can cover thirty miles day after day (as I

3873 can), or bend a peony in one's hand as could Frocot, the driver in my

3874 piece--a man you never knew--or write bad verse very rapidly as can so

3875 many moderns. I say our energy also is from God, and we should never be

3876 proud of it as though it were from ourselves, but we should accept it as a

3877 kind of present, and we should be thankful for it; just as a man should

3878 thank God for his reason, as did the madman in the Story of the Rose, who

3879 thanked God that he at least was sane though all the rest of the world had

3880 recently lost their reason.

3881 Indeed, this defaillance and breakdown which comes

3882 from time to time over the mind is a very sad thing, but it can be made of

3883 great use to us if we will draw from it the lesson that we ourselves are

3884 nothing. Perhaps it is a grace. Perhaps in these moments our minds repose

3885 ... Anyhow, a day without salt.

3886 You understand that under (or in) these

3887 circumstances--

3888 When I was at Oxford there was a great and

3889 terrible debate that shook the Empire, and that intensely exercised the

3890 men whom we send out to govern the Empire, and which, therefore, must have

3891 had its effect upon the Empire, as to whether one should say 'under these

3892 circumstances' or 'in these circumstances'; nor did I settle matters by

3893 calling a conclave and suggesting Quae quum ita sint* as a common

3894 formula, because a new debate arose upon when you should say *sint*

3895 and when you should say *sunt,* and they all wrangled like kittens in

3896 a basket.

3897 Until there rose a deep-voiced man from an

3898 outlying college, who said, 'For my part I will say that under these

3899 circumstances, or in these circumstances, or in spite of these

3900 circumstances, or hovering playfully above these circumstances, or--

3901 106

3902 ---

3903 IN ALL THESE CIRCUMSTANCES

3904 *

3905 I take you all for Fools and Pedants, in the

3906 Chief, in the Chevron, and in the quarter Fess. Fools absolute, and

3907 Pedants lordless. Free Fools, unlanded Fools, and Fools incommensurable,

3908 and Pedants displayed and rampant of the Tierce Major. Fools incalculable

3909 and Pedants irreparable; indeed, the arch Fool-pedants in a universe of

3910 pedantic folly and foolish pedantry, O you pedant-fools of the world!'

3911 But by this time he was alone, and thus was this

3912 great question never properly decided.

3913 Under these circumstances, then (or in these

3914 circumstances), it would profit you but little if I were to attempt the

3915 description of the Valley of the Emmen, of the first foot-hills of the

3916 Alps, and of the very uninteresting valley which runs on from Langnau.

3917 I had best employ my time in telling the story of

3918 the Hungry Student.

3919 LECTOR. And if you are so worn-out and bereft of

3920 all emotions, how can you tell a story?

3921 AUCTOR. These two conditions permit me. First,

3922 that I am writing some time after, and that I have recovered; secondly,

3923 that the story is not mine, but taken straight out of that nationalist

3924 newspaper which had served me so long

3925 107

3926 ---

3927 THE HUNGRY STUDENT FAILS TO APPEAR****

3928 to wrap up my bread and bacon in my haversack.

3929 This is the story, and I will tell it you.

3930 Now, I think of it, it would be a great waste of

3931 time. Here am I no farther than perhaps a third of my journey, and I have

3932 already admitted so much digression that my pilgrimage is like the story

3933 of a man asleep and dreaming, instead of the plain, honest, and

3934 straightforward narrative of fact. I will therefore postpone the Story of

3935 the Hungry Student till I get into the plains of Italy, or into the barren

3936 hills of that peninsula, or among the over-well-known towns of Tuscany, or

3937 in some other place where a little padding will do neither you nor me any

3938 great harm.

3939 On the other hand, do not imagine that I am going

3940 to give you any kind of description of this intolerable day's march. If

3941 you want some kind of visual Concept (pretty word), take all these little

3942 châlets which were beginning and make what you can of them.

3943 LECTOR. Where are they?

3944 AUCTOR. They are still in Switzerland; not here.

3945 They were overnumerous as I maundered up from where at last the road

3946 leaves the valley and makes over a little pass for a place called

3947 Schangnau. But though it is not a story, on the contrary, an exact

3948 incident and the truth--a thing that I would swear to in the court of

3949 justice, or quite willingly and cheerfully believe if another man told it

3950 to me; or even take as historical if I found it in a modern English

3951 history of the Anglo-Saxon Church--though, I repeat, it is a thing

3952 actually lived, yet I will tell it you.

3953 It was at the very end of the road, and when an

3954 enormous weariness had begun to add some kind of interest to this

3955 stuffless episode of the dull day, that a peasant with a brutal face,

3956 driving a cart very rapidly, came up with me. I said to him nothing, but

3957 he said to me some words in German which I did not understand. We were at

3958 that moment just opposite a little inn upon the right hand of the road,

3959 and the peasant began making signs to me to hold his horse for him while

3960 he went in and drank.

3961 How willing I was to do this you will not perhaps

3962 understand, unless you have that delicate and subtle pleasure in the

3963 holding of horses' heads, which is the boast and glory of some rare minds.

3964 And I was the more willing to do it from the fact that I have the habit of

3965 this kind of thing, acquired in the French manoeuvres, and had once held a

3966 horse for no less a person than a General of Division, who gave me a franc

3967 for it, and this franc I spent later with the men of my battery,

3968 purchasing wine. So to make a long story short, as the publisher

3969 108

3970 ---

3971 STORY OF THE HORSE****

3972 said when he published the popular edition of Pamela,*

3973 I held the horse for the peasant; always, of course, under the implicit

3974 understanding that he should allow me when he came out to have a drink,

3975 which I, of course, expected him to bring in his own hands.

3976 Far from it. I can understand the anger which some

3977 people feel against the Swiss when they travel in that country, though I

3978 will always hold that it is monstrous to come into a man's country of your

3979 own accord, and especially into a country so free and so well governed as

3980 is Switzerland, and then to quarrel with the particular type of citizen

3981 that you find there.

3982 Let us not discuss politics. The point is that the

3983 peasant sat in there drinking with his friends for a good three-quarters

3984 of an hour. Now and then a man would come out and look at the sky, and

3985 cough and spit and turn round again and say something to the people within

3986 in German, and go off; but no one paid the least attention to me as I held

3987 this horse.

3988 I was already in a very angry and irritable mood,

3989 for the horse was restive and smelt his stable, and wished to break away

3990 from me. And all angry and irritable as I was, I turned around to see if