Prose Idylls, New and Old Part 10

Yes. France has grown better, and has been growing better, I believe, for centuries past. And the difference between the France of the middle age and the France of the present day, is fitly typified by the difference between the new Carca.s.sone below and the old Carca.s.sone above, where every traveller, even if he be no antiquarian, should stop and gaze about a while.

The contrast is complete; and one for which a man who loves his fellow-men should surely return devout thanks to Almighty G.o.d.

Below, on the west bank of the river, is the new town, spreading and growing, unwalled, for its fortifications are now replaced by boulevards and avenues; full of handsome houses; squares where, beneath the plane-tree shade, marble fountains pour out perpetual health and coolness; manufactories of gay woollens; healthy, cheerful, market folk; comfortable burghers; industry and peace. We pa.s.s outside to the great basin of the Ca.n.a.l de Languedoc, and get more avenues of stately trees, and among them the red marble statue of Riquet, whose genius planned and carried out the mighty ca.n.a.l which joins the ocean to the sea; the wonder of its day, which proved the French to be, at least in the eighteenth century, the master- engineers of the world; the only people who still inherited the mechanical skill and daring of their Roman civilizers. Riquet bore the labour of that ca.n.a.l--and the calumny and obstructiveness, too, which tried to prevent its formation; France bore the expense; Louis Quatorze, of course, the glory; and no one, it is to be feared, the profit: for the navigation of the Garonne at the one extremity, and of the Mediterranean shallows at the other, were left unimproved till of late years, and the ca.n.a.l has become practically useful only just in time to be superseded by the railroads.

Now cross the Aude. Look down upon the willow and aspen copses, where over the heads of busy washerwomen, the nightingale and the hippolais crowded together away from the dusty plains and downs, shake the copses with their song; and then toil upward to the grey fortress tower on the grey limestone knoll; and pa.s.s, out of nature and her pure sunshine, into the black shadow of the unnatural Middle Age; into the region of dirt and darkness, cruelty and fear; grim fortresses, crowded houses, narrow streets, and pestilence. Pa.s.s through the outer circle of walls, of the latter part of the thirteenth century, to examine--for their architecture is a whole history engraved in stones--the ancient walls of the inner enceinte; ma.s.sive Roman below, patched with striped Visigothic work, with mean and hasty Moorish, with graceful, though heavy, Romanesque of the times of the Troubadours; a whole museum of ancient fortifications, which has been restored, stone by stone, through the learning of M.

Viollet le Duc and the public spirit of the late Emperor. Pa.s.s in under the gateway and give yourself up to legends. There grins down on you the broad image of the mythic Dame Carcas, who defended the town single-handed against Charlemagne, till this tower fell down by miracle, and let in the Christian host. But do not believe that she gave to the place its name of Carca.s.sone; for the first syllable of the word is hint enough that it was, long ere her days, a Celtic caer, or hill-fortress. Pause at the inner gate; you need not exactly believe that when the English Crusader, Simon de Montfort, burst it open, and behold, the town within was empty and desolate, he cried: 'Did I not tell you that those heretics were devils; and behold, being devils, they have vanished into air.' You must believe, I fear, that of the great mult.i.tude who had been crowded, starving, and fever-stricken within, he found four hundred poor wretches who had lingered behind, and burnt them all alive. You need not believe that that is the mouth of the underground pa.s.sage which runs all the way from the distant hills, through which the Vicomte de Beziers, after telling Simon de Montfort and the Abbot of Citeaux that he would sooner be flayed alive than betray the poor folk who had taken refuge with him, got them all safe away, men, women, and children. You need not believe that that great vaulted chamber was the 'Chamber of the Inquisition.' But you must believe that those two ugly rings let into the roof were put there for the torture of the cord; and that many a naked wretch has dangled from them ere now, confessing anything and everything that he--or, alas she--was bidden.

But these and their like are the usual furniture of every mediaeval court of justice; and torture was not altogether abolished in France till the latter part of the eighteenth century. You need not believe, again, that that circular tower on the opposite side of the town was really the 'Tower of the Inquisition;' for many a feudal lord, besides the Inquisitors, had their dens of cruelty in those old times. You need not even believe--though it is too likely to be true--that that great fireplace in the little first-floor room served for the torture of the scarpines. But you must believe that in that little round den beneath it, only approached by a trap in the floor, two skeletons were found fastened by those chains to that central pillar, having died and rotted forgotten in that horrid oubliette-- how many centuries ago?

'Plusieurs ont gemis la bas,' said M. Viollet le Duc's foreman of the works, as he led us out of that evil hole, to look, with eyes and hearts refreshed by the change, at a curious Visigothic tower, in which the good bishop Sidonius Apollinaris may have told of the last Burgundian invasion of his Auvergne to the good king Theodoric of the West Goths.

If anyone wishes to learn what the Middle Ages were like, let him go to Carca.s.sone and see.

And now onward to Narbonne--or rather, to what was once Narbonne; one of the earliest colonies ever founded by the Romans; then the capital of the Visigothic kingdom; then of an Arab kingdom: now a dull fortified town--of a filth unspeakable, and not to be forgotten or forgiven. Stay not therein an hour, lest you take fever, or worse: but come out of the gate over the drawbridge, and stroll down the ca.n.a.l. Look back a moment, though, across the ditch. The whole face of the wall is a museum of Roman G.o.ds, tombs, inscriptions, bas- reliefs: the wreck of Martial's 'Pulcherrima Narbo,' the old Roman city, which was demolished by Louis XIII., to build the ugly fortifications of the then new fashion, now antiquated and useless.

Take one glance, and walk on, to look at live Nature--far more interesting than dead Art.

Everything fattens in the close damp air of the ca.n.a.l. The great flat, with its heavy crops, puts you in mind of the richest English lowland--save for the total want of old meadows. The weeds on the bank are English in type, only larger and richer--as becomes the climate. But as you look among them, you see forms utterly new and strange, whose kinship you cannot fancy, but which remind you that you are nearing Italy, and Greece, and Africa. And in the hedges are great bay-trees; and inside them, orchards of standard fig and white mulberry, with its long yearling shoots of glorious green--soon to be stripped bare for the silkworms; and here and there long lines of cypresses, black against the bright green plain and bright blue sky.

No; you are not in Britain. Certainly not; for there is a drake (not a duck) quacking with feeble treble in that cypress, six feet over your head; and in Britain drakes do not live in trees. You look for the climbing palmipede, and see nothing: nor will you see; for the quacker is a tiny green tree-frog, who holds on by the suckers at the ends of his toes (with which he can climb a pane of gla.s.s, like a fly), and has learnt the squirrel's art of going invisible, without 'the receipt of fern-seed,' by simply keeping always on the further side of the branch.

But come back; for the air even here is suggestive of cholera and fever. The uncleanliness of these Narbonnois is shameless and shocking; and 'immondices' of every kind lie festering in the rainless heat. The sickened botanist retreats, and buys a bottle of Eau Bully--alias aromatic vinegar.

There, crowding yon hill, with handsome houses and churches, is Beziers--the blood-stained city. Beneath the pavement of that church, it is said, lie heaped together the remains of thousands of men, women, and children, slaughtered around their own altars, on that fatal day, when the Legate Amalric, asked by the knights how they should tell Catholics from heretics, cried, "Kill them all--the Lord will know his own."

We will pa.s.s on. We have had enough of horrors. And, beside, we are longing to hurry onward; for we are nearing the Mediterranean now.

There are small skiffs lying under the dark tower of Agde, another place of blood, fitly built of black lava blocks, the offspring of the nether pit. The railway cuts through rolling banks of dark lava; and now, ahead of us, is the conical lava-hill of Cette, and the mouth of the Ca.n.a.l du Midi.

There it is, at last. The long line of heavenly blue; and over it, far away, the white-peaked lateen sails, which we have seen in pictures since our childhood; and there, close to the rail, beyond the sand-hills, delicate wavelets are breaking for ever on a yellow beach, each in exactly the same place as the one which fell before.

One glance shows us children of the Atlantic, that we are on a tideless sea.

There it is,--the sacred sea. The sea of all civilization, and almost all history, girdled by the fairest countries in the world; set there that human beings from all its sh.o.r.es might mingle with each other, and become humane--the sea of Egypt, of Palestine, of Greece, of Italy, of Byzant, of Ma.r.s.eilles, and this Narbonnaise, 'more Roman than Rome herself,' to which we owe the greater part of our own progress; the sea, too, Algeria and Carthage, and Cyrene, and fair lands now desolate, surely not to be desolate for ever;--the sea of civilization. Not only to the Christian, nor to the cla.s.sic scholar, but to every man to whom the progress of his race from barbarism toward humanity is dear, should the Mediterranean Sea be one of the most august and precious objects on this globe; and the first sight of it should inspire reverence and delight, as of coming home--home to a rich inheritance in which he has long believed by hearsay, but which he sees at last with his own mortal corporal eyes.

Exceedingly beautiful is that first view of the sea from Cette, though altogether different in character from the views of the Mediterranean which are common in every gallery of pictures. There is nothing to remind one of Claude, or Vernet, or Stanfield. No mountain-ranges far aloft, no cliffs toppling into the water, with convents and bastides perched on their crags; and seaports, with their land-locked harbours, and quaint lighthouses, nestling on the brink. That scenery begins on the other side of the Rhone mouth, and continues, I believe, almost without interruption, to the sh.o.r.es of Southern Palestine, one girdle of perpetual beauty.

But here, the rail runs along a narrow strip of sand, covered with straggling vines, and tall white iris, between the sea and the great Etang de Thau, a long narrow salt-lake, beyond which the wide lowlands of the Herault slide gently down, There is not a mountain, hardly a hill, visible for miles: but all around is the great sheet of blue gla.s.sy water: while the air is as gla.s.sy clear as the water, and through it, at seemingly immense distances, the land shows purple and orange, blue and grey, till the landscape is one great rainbow.

White ships slide to and from far-off towns; fishermen lounge on the marshes, drying long lines of net. Everywhere is vastness, freedom, repose gentle and yet not melancholy; because with all, under the burning blue, there is that fresh wholesome heat, which in itself is life, and youth, and joy.

Beyond, nearer the mouths of the Rhone, there are, so men say, desolate marshes, tenanted by herds of half-wild horses; foul mud- banks, haunted by the pelican and the flamingo, and waders from the African sh.o.r.e; a region half land, half water, where dwell savage folk, decimated by fever and ague. But short of those Bouches du Rhone, the railway turns to the north, toward Montpellier and

'Arli, dove il Rhodano stagna.'

And at Cette ends this little tour from Ocean to Sea, with the wish that he who next travels that way may have as glorious weather, and as agreeable a companion, as the writer of these lines had in 1864.

VI. NORTH DEVON {225a}

I.--EXMOOR.

We were riding up from Lynmouth, on a pair of ragged ponies, Claude Mellot and I, along the gorge of Watersmeet. And as we went we talked of many things; and especially of some sporting book which we had found at the Lyndale Hotel the night before, and which we had not by any means admired. {225b} I do not object to sporting books in general, least of all to one on Exmoor. No place in England is more worthy of one. There is no place whose beauties and peculiarities are more likely to be thrown into strong relief by being looked at with a sportsman's eye. It is so with all forests and moorlands.

The spirit of Robin Hood and Johnny of Breadislee is theirs. They are remnants of the home of man's fierce youth, still consecrated to the genius of animal excitement and savage freedom; after all, not the most ign.o.ble qualities of human nature. Besides, there is no better method of giving a living picture of a whole country than by taking some one feature of it as a guide, and bringing all other observations into harmony with that original key. Even in merely scientific books this is very possible. Look, for instance, at Hugh Miller's 'Old Red Sandstone,' 'The Voyage of the Beagle,' and Professor Forbes's work (we had almost said epic poem) on 'Glaciers.'

Even an agricultural writer, if he have a real insight in him--if he have anything of that secret of the piu nel' uno, 'the power of discovering the infinite in the finite;' of seeing, like a poet, trivial phenomena in their true relation to the whole of the great universe into which they are so cunningly fitted; if he has learned to look at all things and men, down to the meanest, as living lessons written with the finger of G.o.d; if, in short, he has any true dramatic power: then he may impart to that apparently muddiest of sciences a poetic or a humorous tone, and give the lie to Mephistopheles when he dissuades Faust from farming as an occupation too mean and filthy for a man of genius. The poetry of agriculture remains as yet, no doubt, unwritten, and the comedy of it also; though its farce-tragedy has been too often extensively enacted in practice--unconsciously to the players. As for the old 'pastoral'

school, it only flourished before agriculture really existed--that is, before sound science, hard labour, and economy were necessary-- and has been for the last two hundred years simply a dream.

Nevertheless, as signs of what may be done even now by a genial man with so stubborn a subject as 'turnips, barley, clover, wheat,' it is worth while to look at old Arthur Young's books, both travels and treatises; and also at certain very spirited 'Chronicles of a Clay Farm,' by Talpa, which teem with humour and wisdom.

In sporting literature--a tenth muse, exclusively indigenous to England--the same observation holds good tenfold. Some of our most perfect topographical sketches have been the work of sportsmen. Old Izaak Walton, and his friend Cotton, of Dovedale, whose names will last as long as their rivers, have been followed by a long train of worthy pupils. White's 'History of Selborne;' Sir Humphry Davy's 'Salmonia;' 'The Wild Sports of the West;' Mr. St. John's charming little works on Highland Shooting; and, above all, Christopher North's 'Recreations'--delightful book! to be read and re-read, the tenth time even as the first--an inexhaustible fairy well, springing out of the granite rock of the st.u.r.dy Scotch heart, through the tender green turf of a genial boyish old age. Sporting books, when they are not filled--as they need never be--with low slang, and ugly sketches of ugly characters--who hang on to the skirts of the sporting world, as they would to the skirts of any other world, in default of the sporting one--form an integral and significant, and, it may be, an honourable and useful part, of the English literature of this day; and, therefore, all shallowness, vulgarity, stupidity, or bookmaking in that cla.s.s, must be as severely attacked as in novels and poems. We English owe too much to our field sports to allow people to talk nonsense about them.

Claude smiled at some such words of mine that day. 'You talk often of the poetry of sport. I can see nothing in it but animal excitement, and a certain quant.i.ty, I suppose, of that animal cunning which the Red Indian possesses in common with the wolf and the cat, and any other beast of prey. As a fact, the majority of sportsmen are of the most unpoetical type of manhood.'

'More unpoetical than the average man of business, or man of law, Claude? Or even than the average preacher? I believe, on the contrary, that for most of them it is sport which at once keeps alive and satisfies what you would call their aesthetic faculties, and so-- smile if you will--helps to make them purer, simpler, more genial men.'

'Little enough of aesthetic appears either in their conversation or their writing.'

'Esau is a dumb soul, especially here in England; but he has as deep a heart in him as Jacob, nevertheless, and as tender. Do you fancy that the gentleman over whose book we were grumbling last night, attached no more to his own simple words than you do? His account of a stag's run looks bald enough to you: but to him (unless Diana struck him blind for intruding on her privacy) what a whole poem of memories there must be in those few words,--"Turned down * * Water for a mile, and crossed the forest to Watersmeet, where he was run into after a gallant race."'

'A whole poem?'

'Why not? How can there be less, if he had eyes to see?'

'Does he fancy that it is an account of a run to tell us that "Found at * * * * cover, held away at a slapping pace for * * * * Barn, then turned down the * * * Water for a mile, and crossed the Forest; made for * * * Hill, but being headed, went by ** ** woods to D * * *

where he was run into after a gallant race of * * * * hours and * * *

*miles"? It is nearly as dull as a history book!'

'Nay, I never rode with those staghounds: and yet I can fill up his outline for him, wherever the stag was roused. Do you think that he never marked how the panting cavalcade rose and fell on the huge mile-long waves of that vast heather sea; how one long brown hill after another sunk down, greyer and greyer, behind them, and one long grey hill after another swelled up browner and browner before them; and how the sandstone rattled and flew beneath their feet, as the great horses, like Homer's of old, "devoured up the plain;" and how they struggled down the hill-side, through bushes and rocks, and broad slipping rattling sheets of screes, and saw beneath them stag and pack galloping down the shallow glittering river-bed, throwing up the shingle, striking out the water in long glistening sheets; and how they too swept after them, down the flat valley, rounding crag and headland, which opened one after another in interminable vista, along the narrow strip of sand and rushes, speckled with stunted, moss-bearded, heather-bedded hawthorns, between the great grim lifeless mountain walls? Did he feel no pleasant creeping of the flesh that day at the sound of his own horse-hoofs, as they swept through the long ling with a sound as soft as the brushing of a woman's tresses, and then rang down on the spongy, black, reverberating soil, chipping the honey-laden fragrant heather blossoms, and tossing them out in a rosy shower? Or, if that were really too slight a thing for the observation of an average sportsman, surely he must recollect the dying away of the hounds'

voices, as the woodland pa.s.ses engulfed them, whether it were Brendon or at Badger-worthy, or any other place; how they brushed through the narrow forest paths, where the ashes were already golden, while the oaks still kept their sombre green, and the red leaves and berries of the mountain-ash showed bright beneath the dark forest aisles; and how all of a sudden the wild outcry before them seemed to stop and concentrate, thrown back, louder and louder as they rode, off the same echoing crag; till at a sudden turn of the road there stood the stag beneath them in the stream, his back against the black rock with its green cushions of dripping velvet, knee-deep in the clear amber water, the hounds around him, some struggling and swimming in the deep pool, some rolling and tossing and splashing in a mad, half- terrified ring, as he reared into the air on his great haunches, with the sparkling beads running off his red mane, and dropping on his knees, plunged his antlers down among them, with blows which would have each brought certain death with it if the yielding water had not broken the shock. Do you think that he does not remember the death?

The huge carca.s.s dragged out of the stream, followed by dripping, panting dogs; the blowing of the mort, and the last wild halloo, when the horn-note and the voices rang through the autumn woods, and rolled up the smooth flat mountain sides; and Brendon answered Countisbury, and Countisbury sent it on to Lynmouth hills, till it swept out of the gorge and died away upon the Severn sea? And then, does he not remember the pause, and the revulsion, and the feeling of sadness and littleness, almost of shame, as he looked up for the first time--one can pardon his not having done so before--and saw where he was, and the beauty of the hill-sides, with the lazy autumn clouds crawling about their tops, and the great sheets of screes, glaciers of stone covering acres and acres of the smooth hill-side, eating far into the woods below, bowing down the oak scrubs with their weight, and the circular sweeps of down, flecked with innumerable dark spots of gorse, each of them guarded where they open into the river chasm by two fortresses of "giant-snouted crags,"-- delicate pink and grey sandstone, from which blocks and crumbling boulders have been toppling slowly down for ages, beneath the frost and the whirlwind, and now lie in long downward streams upon the slope, as if the mountain had been weeping tears of stone? And then, as the last notes of the mort had died away, did not there come over him an awe at the silence of the woods, not broken, but deepened, by the unvarying monotone of the roaring stream beneath, which flashed and glittered, half-hidden in the dark chasm, in clear brown pools reflecting every leaf and twig, in boiling pits and walls of foam, ever changing, and yet for ever the fleeting on past the poor dead reeking stag and the silent hounds lying about on the moss- embroidered stones, their lolling tongues showing like bright crimson sparkles in the deep rich Venetian air of the green sombre shades; while the startled water-ousel, with his white breast, flitted a few yards and stopped to stare from a rock's point at the strange intruders; and a single stock-dove, out of the bosom of the wood, began calling sadly and softly, with a dreamy peaceful moan? Did he not see and hear all this, for surely it was there to see and hear?'

'Not he. The eye only sees that which it brings within the power of seeing; and all I shall say of him is, that a certain apparition in white leathers was at one period of its appearance dimly conscious of equestrian motion towards a certain brown two-horned phenomenon, and other spotted phenomena, at which he had been taught by habit to make the articulate noises "stag" and "hounds," among certain grey, and green, and brown phenomena, at which the same habit and the example of his fellows had taught him to say, "Rock, and wood, and mountain,"

and perhaps the further noises of "Lovely, splendid, majestic."'

'As usual, sir! You dwellers in Babylon fancy that you have the monopoly of all the intellect, and all the taste, because you earn your livings by talking about pretty things, and painting pretty things: little do you suspect, shut up together in your little literary worlds, and your artistic worlds, how many thousands of us outside barbarians there are who see as clearly, and enjoy as deeply as you do: but hold their tongues about their own feelings, simply because they have never been driven by emptiness of pocket to look round for methods of expressing them. And, after all--how much of nature can you express? You confest yourself yesterday baffled by all the magnificence around you.'

'Yes! to paint it worthily one would require to be a Turner, a Copley Fielding, and a Creswick, all in one.'

'And did you ever remark how such scenes as this gorge of the "Watersmeet" stir up a feeling of shame, almost of peevishness, before the sense of a mysterious meaning which we ought to understand and cannot?'

He smiled.

'Our torments do by length of time become our elements; and painful as that sensation is to the earnest artist, he will feel it, I fancy, at last sublime itself into an habitually gentle, reverent, almost melancholy tone of mind, as of a man bearing the burden of an infinite and wonderful message which his own frivolity and laziness hinder him from speaking out.'

'Then it should beget in him, too, something of merciful indulgence towards the seeming stupidity of those who see, after all, only a very little shallower than he does into the unfathomable depths of nature.'

'Well, sporting books and sportsmen seem to me, by their very object, not to be worth troubling our heads about. Out of nothing, comes nothing. See, my hands are as soft as any lady's in Belgravia. I could not, to save my life, lift a hundredweight a foot off the ground; while you have been a wild man of the woods, a leaper of ditches, a rower of races, and a wanton destroyer of all animal life: and yet--'

'You would hint politely that you are as open as me to all n.o.ble, and chivalrous, and truly manly emotions?'