Hills and the Sea Part 9

It is remarkable that in any country, even if one does not know that country well, what is unusual to the country strikes the traveller at once. And so it is with the Cerdagne. For all the valleys of the Pyrenees except this one are built upon the same plan. They are deep gorges, narrowing in two places to gates or profound corridors, one of these places being near the crest and one near the plain; and down these valleys fall violent torrents, and in them there is only room for tiny villages or very little towns, squeezed in between the sheer surfaces of the rock or the steep forests.

So it is with the Valley of Laruns, and with that of Meuleon, and with that of Luz, and with those of the two Bagneres, and with the Val d'Aran, and with the Val d'Esera, and with the very famous Valley of Andorra.

With valleys so made the mountains are indeed more awful than they might be in the Alps: but you never see them standing out and apart, and the mastering elevation of the Pyrenees is not apprehended until you come to the cirque or hollow at the end of each valley just underneath the main ridge; by that time you have climbed so far that you have halved the height of the barrier.

But the Cerdagne, unlike all the other valleys, is as broad as half a county, and is full of towns and fields and men and mules and slow rivulets and corn; so, standing upon either side and looking to the other, you see all together and in the large its mountain boundaries. It is like the sight of the Grampians from beyond Strathmore, but very much more grand. Moreover, as no one has written sufficiently about it to prepare the traveller for what he is to see (and in attempting to do so here I am probably doing wrong, but a man must write down what he has seen), the Cerdagne breaks upon him quite unexpectedly, and his descent into that wealthy plain is the entry into a new world. He may have learnt the mountains by heart, as we had, in many stumbling marches and many nights slept out beneath the trees, and many crossings of the main chain by those precipitous cols which make the ridge of the Pyrenees more like a paling than a mountain crest, but though he should know them thoroughly all the way from the Atlantic for two hundred miles, the Cerdagne will only appear to him the more astonishing. It renews in any man however familiar he may be with great mountains, the impressions of that day when he first saw the distant summits and thought them to be clouds.

Apart from all this, the Cerdagne is full of a lively interest, because it preserves far better than any other Pyrenean valley those two Pyrenean things--the memory of European history and the intense local spirit of the Vals.

The memory of European history is to be seen in the odd tricks which the frontier plays. It was laid down by the commissioners of Mazarin two hundred and fifty years ago, and instead of following the watershed (which would leave the Cerdagne all Spanish politically as it is Catalan by language and position) it crosses the valley from one side to another, leaving the top end of it and the sources of its rivers under French control.

That endless debate as to whether race or government will most affect a people can here be tested, though hardly decided. The villages are Spanish, the hour of meals is Spanish, and the wine is Spanish wine. But the clocks keep time, and the streets are swept, and, oddest of all, the cooking is French cooking. The people are Spanish in that they are slow to serve you or to find you a mount or to show you the way, but they are French in that they are punctual in the hour at which they have promised to do these things; and they are Spanish in the shapes of their ricks and the nature of their implements, but French in the aspect of their fields. One might also discuss--it would be most profitable of all--where they are Spanish and where they are French in their observance of religion.

This freak which the frontier plays in cutting so united a countryside into two by an imaginary line is further emphasised by an island of Spanish territory which has been left stranded, as it were, in the midst of the valley. It is called Llivia, and is about as large as a large English country parish, with a small country town in the middle.

One comes across the fields from villages where the signs and villagers and the very look of the surface of the road are French; one suddenly notices Spanish soldiers, Spanish signs, and Spanish prices in the streets of the little place; one leaves it, and in five minutes one is in France again. It is connected with its own country by a neutral road, but it is an island of territory all the same, and the reason that it was so left isolated is very typical of the old regime, with its solemn legal pedantry, which we in England alone preserve in all Western Europe. For the treaty which marked the limits here ceded to the French "the valley and all its villages." The Spaniards pleaded that Llivia was not a village but a town, and their plea was admitted.

I began by saying that this wide basin of land, with its strong people and its isolated traditions, though it was so little known to-day, would soon be too well known. So it will be, and the reason is this, that the very low pa.s.s at one end of it will soon be crossed by a railway. It is the only low pa.s.s in the Pyrenees, and it is so gradual and even (upon the Spanish side) that the railway will everywhere be above ground.

Within perhaps five years it will be for the Pyrenees what the Brenner is for the Alps, and when that is done any one who has read this may go and see for himself whether it is not true that from that plain at evening the frontier ridge of Andorra seems to be the highest thing in the world.

CARCa.s.sONNE

Carca.s.sonne differs from other monumental towns in this: that it preserves exactly the aspect of many centuries up to a certain moment, and from that moment has "set," and has suffered no further change. You see and touch, as you walk along its ramparts, all the generations from that crisis in the fifth century when the public power was finally despaired of--and after which each group of the Western Empire began to see to its own preservation--down to that last achievement of the thirteenth, when medieval civilisation had reached its full flower and was ready for the decline that followed the death of St. Louis and the extinction of the German phantasy of empire.

No other town can present so vivid and clean-cut a fossil of the seven hundred years into which poured and melted all the dissolution of antiquity, and out of which was formed or chrystallised the highly specialised diversity of our modern Europe.

In the fascination of extreme age many English sites are richer; Winchester and Canterbury may be quoted from among a hundred. In the superimposition of age upon age of human history, Arles and Rome are far more surprising. In historic continuity most European towns surpa.s.s it, from Paris, whose public justice, worship, and market have kept to the same site for quite sixteen centuries, to London, of which the city at least preserves upon three sides the Roman limit. But no town can of its nature give as does Carca.s.sonne this overwhelming impression of survival or resurrection.

The att.i.tude and position of Carca.s.sonne enforce its character. Up above the river, but a little set back from the valley, right against the dawn as you come to it from Toulouse through the morning, stands a long, steep, and isolated rock, the whole summit of which from the sharp cliff on the north to that other on the south is doubled in height by what seems one vast wall--and more than twenty towers. Indeed, it is at such a time, in early morning, and best in winter when the frost defines and chisels every outline, that Carca.s.sonne should be drawn. You then see it in a band of dark blue-grey, all even in texture, serrated and battlemented and towered, with the metallic shining of the dawn behind it.

So to have seen it makes it very difficult to write of it or even to paint; what one wishes to do is rather to work it out in enamel upon a surface of bronze. This rock, wholly covered with the works of the city, stands looking at the Pyrenees and holding the only level valley between the Mediterranean and the Garonne, and even if one had read nothing concerning it one would understand why it has filled all the legends of the return of armies from Spain, why Victor Hugo could not rest from the memory of it, and why it is so strongly woven in with the story of Charlemagne.

There is another and better reason for the quality of Carca.s.sonne, and that is the act, to which I can recall no perfect parallel in Christian history, by which St. Louis turned what had been a living town into a mere stronghold. Every inhabitant of Carca.s.sonne was transferred, not to suburbs, but right beyond the river, a mile and more away, to the site of that delightful town which is the Carca.s.sonne of maps and railways, the place where the seventeenth century meets you in graceful ornaments, and where is, to my certain knowledge, the best inn south of parallel 45. St. Louis turned the rock into a mere stronghold, strengthened it, built new towers, and curtained them into that unsurpa.s.sable masonry of the central Middle Ages which you may yet admire in Aigues-Mortes and in Carnarvon.

This political act, the removal of a whole city, may have been accomplished in many other places; it is certainly recorded of many: but, for the moment at least, I can remember none except Carca.s.sonne in which its consequences have remained. To this many causes have contributed, but chiefly this, that the new town was transferred to the open plain from the trammels of a narrow plateau, just at the moment when all the towns of Western Europe were growing and breaking their bonds; just after the princ.i.p.al cities of north-western Europe had got their charters, and when Paris (the typical munic.i.p.ality of that age as of our own) was trebling its area and its population.

The transference of the population once accomplished, the rock and towers of Carca.s.sonne ceased to change and to grow. Humanity was gone.

The fortress was still of great value in war; the Black Prince attempted its destruction, and it is only within living memory that it ceased to be set down on maps (and in Government offices!) as a fortified place: but the necessity for immediate defence, and the labour which would have remodelled it, had disappeared. There had disappeared also that eager and destructive activity which accompanies any permanent gathering of French families. The new town on the plain changed perpetually, and is changing still. It has lost almost everything of the Middle Ages; it carries, by a sort of momentum, a flavour of Louis XIV, but the masons are at it as they are everywhere, from the Channel to the Mediterranean; for to pull down and rebuild is the permanent recreation of the French.

The rock remains. It is put in order whenever a stone falls out of place--no one of weight has talked nonsense here against restoration, for the sense of the past is too strong--but though it is minutely and continually repaired, Old Carca.s.sonne does not change. There is no other set of walls in Europe of which this is true.

Walking round the circuit of these walls and watching from their height the long line of the mountains, one is first held by that modern subject, the landscape, or that still more modern fascination of great hills. Next one feels what the Middle Ages designed of ma.s.s and weight and height, and wonders by what accident of the mind they so succeeded in suggesting infinity: one remembers Beauvais, which is infinitely high at evening, and the tower of Portrut, which seems bigger than any hill.

But when these commoner emotions are pa.s.sed, one comes upon a very different thing. A little tower there, jutting out perilously from the wall, shows three courses of a _small red brick_ set in a mortar-like stone. When I saw this kind of building I went close up and touched it with my hand. It was Roman. I knew the signal well. I had seen that brick, and picked it loose from an Arab stable on the edge of the Sahara, and I had seen it jutting through moss on the high moors of Northumberland. I know a man who reverently brought home to Suss.e.x such another, which he had found unbroken far beyond Damascus upon the Syrian sand.

It is easy to speak of the Empire and to say that it established its order from the Tyne to the Euphrates; but when one has travelled alone and on foot up and down the world and seen its vastness and its complexity, and yet everywhere the unity even of bricks in their courses, then one begins to understand the name of Rome.

LYNN

Every man that lands in Lynn feels all through him the antiquity and the call of the town; but especially if he comes, as I came in with another man in springtime, from the miles and miles of emptiness and miles of bending gra.s.s and the shouting of the wind. After that morning, in which one had been a little point on an immense plane, with the gale not only above one, as it commonly is, but all around one as it is at sea; and after having steeped one's mind in the peculiar loneliness which haunts a stretch of ill-defined and wasted sh.o.r.e, the narrow, varied, and unordered streets of the port enhance the creations of man and emphasise his presence.

Words so few are necessarily obscure. Let me expand them. I mean that the unexpected turning of the ways in such a port is perpetually revealing something new; that the little s.p.a.ces frame, as it were, each unexpected sight: thus at the end of a street one will catch a patch of the Fens beyond the river, a great moving sail, a cloud, or the sculptured corner of an excellent house.

The same history also that permitted continual encroachment upon the public thoroughfares and that built up a gradual High Street upon the line of some cow-track leading from the fields to the ferry, the spirit that everywhere permitted the powerful or the cunning to withstand authority--that history (which is the history of all our little English towns) has endowed Lynn with an endless diversity.

It is not only that the separate things in such towns are delightful, nor only that one comes upon them suddenly, but also that these separate things are so many. They have characters as men have. There is nothing of that repet.i.tion which must accompany the love of order and the presence of strong laws. The similar insistent forms which go with a strong civilisation, as they give it majesty, so they give it also gloom, and a heavy feeling of finality: these are quite lacking here in England, where the poor have for so long submitted to the domination of the rich, and the rich have dreaded and refused a central government.

Everything that goes with the power of individuals has added peculiarity and meaning to all the stones of Lynn. Moreover, a quality whose absence all men now deplore was once higher in England than anywhere else, save, perhaps, in the northern Italian hills. I mean ownership, and what comes from ownership--the love of home.

You can see the past effect of ownership and individuality in Lynn as clearly as you can catch affection or menace in a human voice. The outward expression is most manifest, and to pa.s.s in and out along the lanes in front of the old houses inspires in one precisely those emotions which are aroused by a human crowd.

All the roofs of Lynn and all its pavements are worthy (as though they were living beings) of individual names.

Along the river sh.o.r.e, from the race of the ebb that had so nearly drowned me many years before, I watched the walls that mark the edge of the town against the Ouse, and especially that group towards which the ferry-boat was struggling against the eddy and tumble of the tide.

They were walls of every age, not high, brick of a dozen harmonious tones, with the accidents, corners, and breaches of perhaps seven hundred years. Beyond, to the left, down the river, stood the masts in the new docks that were built to preserve the trade of this difficult port. Up-river, great new works of I know not what kind stood like a bastion against the plain; and in between ran these oldest bits of Lynn, somnolescent and refreshing--permanent.

The lanes up from the Ouse when I landed I found to be of a slow and natural growth, with that slight bend to them that comes, I believe, from the drying of fishing-nets. For it is said that courts of this kind grew up in our sea-towns all round our eastern and the southern coast in such a manner. It happened thus.

The town would begin upon the highest of the bank, for it was flatter for building, drier and easier to defend than that part next to the water. Down from the town to the sh.o.r.e the fishermen would lay out their nets to dry. How nets look when they are so laid, their narrowness and the curve they take, everybody knows. Then on the s.p.a.ces between the nets shanties would be built, or old boats turned upside down for shelter, so that the curing of fish and the boiling of tar and the serving and parcelling of ropes could be done under cover. Then as the number of people grew, the squatters' land got value, and houses were raised (you will find many small freeholds in such rows to this day), but the lines of the net remained in the alley-ways between the houses.

All this I was once told by an old man who helped me to take my boat down Breydon. He wore trousers of a brick red, and the stuff of them as thick as boards, and had on also a very thick jersey and a cap of fur.

He was shaved upon his lips and chin, but all round the rest of his face was a beard. He smoked a tiny pipe, quite black, and upon matters within his own experience he was a great liar; but upon matters of tradition I was willing to believe him.

Within the town, when I had gained it from that lane which has been the ferry-lane, I suppose, since the ferry began, age and distinction were everywhere.

Where else, thought I, in England could you say that nine years would make no change? Whether, indeed, the Globe had that same wine of the nineties I could not tell, for the hour was not congenial to wine; but if it has some store of its Burgundy left from those days it must be better still by now, for Burgundy wine takes nine years to mature, for nine years remains in the plenitude of its powers, and for nine years more declines into an honourable age; and this is also true of claret, but in claret it goes by sevens.

The open square of the town, which one looks at from the Globe, gives one a mingled pleasure of reminiscence and discovery. It breaks on one abruptly. It is as wide as the pasture field, and all the houses are ample and largely founded. Indeed, throughout this country, elbow-room--the sense that there is s.p.a.ce enough and to spare in such flats and under an open sky--has filled the minds of builders. You may see it in all the inland towns of the Fens; and one found it again here upon the further bank, upon the edge of the Fens; for though Lynn is just off the Fens, yet it looks upon their horizon and their sky, and belongs to them in spirit.

In this large and comfortable square a very steadfast and most considerable English bank is to be discovered. It is of honest brown brick! its architecture is of the plainest; its appearance is such that its credit could never fail, and that the house alone by its presence could conduct a dignified business for ever. The rooms in it are so many and so great that the owners of such a bank (having become princes by its success) could inhabit them with a majesty worthy of their new t.i.tle. But who lives above his shop since Richardson died? And did old Richardson? Lord knows!... Anyhow, the bank is glorious, and it is but one of the fifty houses that I saw in Lynn.

Thus, in the same street as the Globe, was a facade of stone. If it was Georgian, it was very early Georgian, for it was relieved with ornaments of a delicate and accurate sort, and the proportions were exactly satisfying to the eye that looked on it. The stone also was of that kind (Portland stone, I think) which goes black and white with age, and which is better suited than any other to the English climate.

In another house near the church I saw a roof that might have been a roof for a town. It covered the living part and the stables, and the outhouse and the brewhouse, and the barns, and for all I know the pig-pens and the pigeons' as well. It was a benediction of a roof--a roof traditional, a roof patriarchal, a roof customary, a roof of permanence and unity, a roof that physically sheltered and spiritually sustained, a roof majestic, a roof eternal. In a word, it was a roof catholic.