BELLOC-HILLS AND THE SEA - THE PYRENEAN HIVE
Delft is the most charming town in the world. It is one of the neat
cities: trim, small, packed, self-contained. A good woman in early
middle age, careful of her dress, combined, orderly, not without a sober
beauty--such a woman on her way to church of a Sunday morning is not
more pleasing than Delft. It is on the verge of monotony, yet still
individual; in one style, yet suggesting many centuries of activity.
There is a full harmony of many colours, yet the memory the place leaves
is of a united, warm, and generous tone. Were you suddenly put down in
Delft you would know very well that the vast and luxuriant meadows of
Holland surrounded it, so much are its air, houses, and habits those of
men inspired by the fields.
Delft is very quiet, as befits a town so many of whose streets are
ordered lanes of water, yet one is inspired all the while by the voices
of children, and the place is strongly alive. Over its sky there follow
in stately order the great white clouds of summer, and at evening the
haze is lit just barely from below with that transforming level light
which is the joy and inspiration of the Netherlands. Against such an
expanse stands up for ever one of the gigantic but delicate belfries,
round which these towns are gathered. For Holland, it seems, is not a
country of villages, but of compact, clean towns, standing scattered
over a great waste of grass like the sea.
This belfrey of Delft is a thing by itself in Europe, and all these
truths can be said of it by a man who sees it for the first time: first,
that its enormous height is drawn up, as it were, and enhanced by every
chance stroke that the instinct of its slow builders lit upon; for
these men of the infinite flats love the contrast of such pinnacles, and
they have made in the labour of about a thousand years a landscape of
their own by building, just as they have made by ceaseless labour a rich
pasture and home out of those solitary marshes of the delta.
Secondly, that height is inhanced by something which you will not see,
save in the low countries between the hills of Ardennes and the yellow
seas--I mean brick Gothic; for the Gothic which you and I know is built
up of stone, and, even so, produces every effect of depth and distance;
but the Gothic of the Netherlands is often built curiously of bricks,
and the bricks are so thin that it needs a whole host of them in an
infinity of fine lines to cover a hundred feet of wall. They fill the
blank spaces with their repeated detail; they make the style (which even
in stone is full of chances and particular corners) most intricate,
and--if one may use so exaggerated a metaphor--"populous." Above all,
they lead the eye up and up, making a comparison and measure of their
tiny bands until the domination of a buttress or a tower is exaggerated
to the enormous. Now the belfry of Delft, though all the upper part is
of stone, yet it stands on a great pedestal (as it were) of brick--a
pedestal higher than the houses, and in this base are pierced two
towering, broad, and single ogives, empty and wonderful and full of that
untragic sadness which you may find also in the drooping and wide eyes
of extreme old age.
Thirdly, the very structure of the thing is bells. Here the bells are
more than the soul of a Christian spire; they are its body too, its
whole self. An army of them fills up all the space between the delicate
supports and framework of the upper parts; for I know not how many feet,
in order, diminishing in actual size and in the perspective also of that
triumphant elevation, stand ranks on ranks of bells from the solemn to
the wild, from the large to the small; a hundred or two hundred or a
thousand. There is here the prodigality of Brabant and Hainaut and the
Batavian blood, a generosity and a productivity in bells without stint,
the man who designed it saying: "Since we are to have bells, let us
have bells: not measured out, calculated, expensive, and prudent bells,
but careless bells, self-answering multitudinous bells; bells without
fear, bells excessive and bells innumerable; bells worthy of the
ecstasies that are best thrown out and published in the clashing of
bells. For bells are single, like real pleasures, and we will combine
such a great number that they shall be like the happy and complex life
of a man. In a word, let us be noble and scatter our bells and reap a
harvest till our town is famous for its bells." So now all the spire is
more than clothed with them; they are more than stuff or ornament; they
are an outer and yet sensitive armour, all of bells.
Nor is the wealth of these bells in their number only, but also in their
use; for they are not reserved in any way, but ring tunes and add
harmonies at every half and quarter and at all the hours both by night
and by day. Nor must you imagine that there is any obsession of noise
through this; they are far too high and melodious, and, what is more,
too thoroughly a part of all the spirit of Delft to be more than a
perpetual and half-forgotten impression of continual music; they render
its air sacred and fill it with something so akin to an uplifted silence
as to leave one--when one has passed from their influence--asking what
balm that was which soothed all the harshness of sound about one.
Round that tower and that voice the town hangs industrious and
subdued--a family. Its waters, its intimate canals, its boats for
travel, and its slight plashing of bows in the place of wheels, entered
the spirit of the traveller and gave him for one long day the Right of
Burgess. In autumn, in the early afternoon--the very season for those
walls--it was easy for him to be filled with a restrained but united
chorus, the under-voices of the city, droning and murmuring perpetually
of Peace and of Labour and of the wild rose--Content....
Peace, labour, and content--three very good words, and summing up,
perhaps, the goal of all mankind. Of course, there is a problem
everywhere, and it would be heresy to say that the people of Delft have
solved it. It is Matter of Breviary that the progress of our lives is
but asymptotic to true joy; we can approach it nearer and nearer, but we
can never reach it.
Nevertheless, I say that in this excellent city, though it is outside
Eden, you may, when the wind is in the right quarter, receive in distant
and rare appeals the scent and air of Paradise; the soul is filled.
To this emotion there corresponds and shall here be quoted a very noble
verse, which runs--or rather glides--as follows:--
Satiety, that momentary flower
Stretched to an hour--
These are her gifts which all mankind may use,
And all refuse.
Or words to that effect. And to think that you can get to a place like
that for less than a pound!
Time was, and that not so long ago, when the Two Men had revealed to
them by their Genius a corner of Europe wherein they were promised more
surprises and delights than in any other.
It was secretly made known to them that in this place there were no
pictures, and no one had praised its people, and further that no Saint
had ever troubled it; and the rich and all their evils (so the Two Men
were assured) had never known the place at all.
It was under the influence of such a message that they at once began
walking at a great speed for the river which is called the River of
Gold, and for the valleys of Andorra; and since it seemed that other men
had dared to cross the Pyrenees and to see the Republic, and since it
seemed also, according to books, records, and what not, that may have
been truth or may have been lies, that common men so doing went always
by one way, called the Way of Hospitalet, the Two Men determined to go
by no such common path, but to march, all clothed with power, in a
straight line, and to take the main range of the mountains just where
they chose, and to come down upon the Andorrans unexpectedly and to
deserve their admiration and perhaps their fear.
They chose, therefore, upon the map the valley of that torrent called
the Aston, and before it was evening, but at an hour when the light of
the sun was already very ripe and low, they stood under a great rock
called Guie, which was all of bare limestone with façades as bare as the
Yosemite, and almost as clean. They looked up at this great rock of Guie
and made it the terminal of their attempt. I was one and my companion
was the other: these were the Two Men who started out before a sunset
in August to conquer the high Pyrenees. Before me was a very deep valley
full of woods, and reaching higher and higher perpetually so that it
reminded me of Hyperion, but as for my companion, it reminded him of
nothing, for he said loudly that he had never seen any such things
before and had never believed that summits of so astonishing a height
were to be found on earth. Not even at night had he imagined such
appalling upward and upward into the sky, and this he said though he had
seen the Alps, of which it is true that when you are close to them they
are very middling affairs; but not so the Pyrenees, which are not only
great but also terrible, for they are haunted, as you shall hear. But
before I begin to write of the spirits that inhabit the deserts of the
Aston, I must first explain, for the sake of those who have not seen
them, how the awful valleys of the Pyrenees are made.
All the high valleys of mountains go in steps, but those of the Pyrenees
in a manner more regular even than those of the Sierra Nevada out in
California, which the Pyrenees so greatly resemble. For the steps here
are nearly always three in number between the plain and the main chain,
and each is entered by a regular gate of rock. So it is in the valley of
the Ariege, and so it is in that of the Aston, and so it is in every
other valley until you get to the far end where live the cleanly but
incomprehensible Basques. Each of these steps is perfectly level,
somewhat oval in shape, a mile or two or sometimes five miles long, but
not often a mile broad. Through each will run the river of the valley,
and upon either side of it there will be rich pastures, and a high plain
of this sort is called a jasse, the same as in California is called a
"flat": as "Dutch Flat," "Poverty Flat," and other famous flats.
First, then, will come a great gorge through which one marches up from
the plain, and then at the head of it very often a waterfall of some
kind, along the side of which one forces one's way up painfully through
a narrow chasm of rock and finds above one The great green level of the
first jasse with the mountains standing solemnly around it. And then
when one has marched all along this level one will come to another gorge
and another chasm, and when one has climbed over the barrier of rock and
risen up another 2000 feet or so, one comes to a second jasse, smaller
as a rule than the lower one; but so high are the mountains that all
this climbing into the heart of them does not seem to have reduced their
height at all. And then one marches along this second jasse and one
comes to yet another gorge and climbs up just as one did the two others,
through a chasm where there will be a little waterfall or a large one,
and one finds at the top the smallest and most lonely of the jasses.
This often has a lake in it. The mountains round it will usually be
cliffs, forming sometimes a perfect ring, and so called cirques, or, by
the Spaniards, cooking-pots; and as one stands on the level floor of one
such last highest jasse and looks up at the summit of the cliffs, one
knows that one is looking at the ridge of the main chain. Then it is
one's business, if one desires to conquer the high Pyrenees, to find a
sloping place up the cliffs to reach their summits and to go down into
the further Spanish valleys. This is the order of the Pyrenean dale, and
this was the order of that of the Aston.
Up the gorge then we went, my companion and I; the day fell as we
marched, and there was a great moon out, filling the still air, when we
came to the first chasm, and climbing through it saw before us, spread
with a light mist over its pastures, the first jasse under the
moonlight. And up we went, and up again, to the end of the second jasse,
having before us the vast wall of the main range, and in our hearts a
fear that there was something unblessed in the sight of it. For though
neither I told it to my companion nor he to me, we had both begun to
feel a fear which the shepherds of these mountains know very well. It
was perhaps midnight or a little more when we made our camp, after
looking in vain for a hut which may once have stood there, but now stood
no longer. We lit a fire, but did not overcome the cold, which tormented
us throughout the night, for the wind blew off the summits; and at last
we woke from our half-sleep and spent the miserable hours in watching
the Great Bear creeping round the pole, and in trying to feed the dying
embers with damp fuel. And there it was that I discovered what I now
make known to the world, namely, that gorse and holly will burn of
themselves, even while they are yet rooted in the ground. So we sat
sleepless and exhausted, and not without misgiving, for we had meant
that night before camping to be right under the foot of the last cliffs,
and we were yet many miles away. We were glad to see the river at last
in the meadows show plainly under the growing light, the rocks turning
red upon the sky-line, and the extinction of the stars. As we so looked
north and eastward the great rock of Guie stood up all its thousands of
feet enormous against the rising of the sun.
We were very weary, and invigorated by nothing but the light, but,
having that at least to strengthen us, we made at once for the main
range, knowing very well that, once we were over it, it would be
downhill all the way, and seeing upon our maps that there were houses
and living men high in the further Andorran valley, which was not
deserted like this vale of the Aston, but inhabited: full, that is, of
Catalans, who would soon make us forget the inhuman loneliness of the
heights, for by this time we were both convinced, though still neither
of us said it to the other, that there was an evil brooding over all
this place.
It was noon when, after many hours of broken marching and stumbling,
which betrayed our weakness, we stood at last beside the tarn in which
the last cliffs of the ridge are reflected, and here was a steep slope
up which a man could scramble. We drank at the foot of it the last of
our wine and ate the last of our bread, promising ourselves refreshment,
light, and peace immediately upon the further side, and thus lightened
of our provisions, and with more heart in us, we assaulted the final
hill; but just at the summit, where there should have greeted us a great
view over Spain, there lowered upon us the angry folds of a black cloud,
and the first of the accidents that were set in order by some enemy to
ruin us fell upon my companion and me.
For a storm broke, and that with such violence that we thought it would
have shattered the bare hills, for an infernal thunder crashed from one
precipice to another, and there flashed, now close to us, now vividly
but far off, in the thickness of the cloud, great useless and blinding
glares of lightning, and hailstones of great size fell about us also,
leaping from the bare rocks like marbles. And when the rain fell it was
just as though it had been from a hose, forced at one by a pressure
instead of falling, and we two on that height were the sole objects of
so much fury, until at last my companion cried out from the rock beneath
which he was cowering, "This is intolerable!" And I answered him, from
the rock which barely covered me, "It is not to be borne!" So in the
midst of the storm we groped our way down into the valley beneath, and
got below the cloud; and when we were there we thought we had saved the
day, for surely we were upon the southern side of the hills, and in a
very little while we should see the first roofs of the Andorrans.
For two doubtful hours we trudged down that higher valley, but there
were no men, nor any trace of men except this, that here and there the
semblance of a path appeared, especially where the valley fell rapidly
from one stage to another over smooth rocks, which, in their least
dangerous descent, showed by smooth scratches the passage of some lost
animal. For the rest, nothing human nor the memory of it was there to
comfort us, though in one place we found a group of cattle browsing
alone without a master. There we sat down in our exhaustion and
confessed at last what every hour had inwardly convinced us of with
greater strength, that we were not our own masters, that there was
trouble and fate all round us, that we did not know what valley this
might be, and that the storm had been but the beginning of an unholy
adventure. We had been snared into Fairyland.
We did not speak much together, for fear of lowering our hearts yet more
by the confession one to the other of the things we knew to be true. We
did not tell each other what reserve of courage remained to us, or of
strength. We sat and looked at the peaks immeasurably above us, and at
the veils of rain between them, and at the black background of the sky.
Nor was there anything in the landscape which did not seem to us
unearthly and forlorn.
It was, in a manner, more lonely than had been the very silence of the
further slope: there was less to comfort and support the soul of a man;
but with every step downward we were penetrated more and more with the
presence of things not mortal and of influences to which any desolation
is preferable. At one moment voices called to us from the water, at
another we heard our names, but pronounced in a whisper so slight and so
exact that the more certain we were of hearing them the less did we dare
to admit the reality of what we had heard. In a third place we saw twice
in succession, though we were still going forward, the same tree
standing by the same stone: for neither tree nor stone were natural to
the good world, but each had been put there by whatever was mocking us
and drawing us on.
Already had we stumbled twice and thrice the distance that should have
separated us from the first Andorran village, but we had seen nothing,
not a wall, nor smoke from a fire, let alone the tower of a Christian
church, or the houses of men. Nor did any length of the way now make us
wonder more than we had already wondered, nor did we hope, however far
we might proceed, that we should be saved unless some other influence
could be found to save us from the unseen masters of this place. For by
this time we had need of mutual comfort, and openly said it to one
another--but in low tones--that the valley was Faëry. The river went on
calling to us all the while. In places it was full of distant cheering,
in others crowded with the laughter of a present multitude of tiny
things, and always mocking us with innumerable tenuous voices. It grew
to be evening. It was nearly two days since we had seen a man.
There stood in the broader and lower part of the valley to which we had
now come, numerous rocks and boulders; for our deception some one of
them or another would seem to be a man. I heard my companion call
suddenly, as though to a stranger, and as he called I thought that he
had indeed perceived the face of a human being, and I felt a sort of
sudden health in me when I heard the tone of his voice; and when I
looked up I also saw a man. We came towards him and he did not move.
Close up beside his form we put out our hands: but what we touched was a
rough and silent stone.
After that we spoke no more. We went on through the gathering twilight,
determined to march downwards to the end, but knowing pretty well what
the end would be. Once only did we again fall into the traps that were
laid about us, when we went and knocked at the hillside where we thought
we had seen a cottage and its oaken door, and after the mockery of that
disappointment we would not be deceived again, nor make ourselves again
the victims of the laughter that perpetually proceeded from the torrent.
The path led us onwards in a manner that was all one with the plot now
woven round our feet. We could but follow the path, though we knew with
what an evil purpose it was made: that it was as phantom as the rest. At
one place it invited us to cross, upon two shaking pine trunks, the
abyss of a cataract; in another it invited us to climb, in spite of our
final weariness, a great barrier of rock that lay between an upper and a
lower jasse. We continued upon it determinedly, with heads bent, barely
hoping that perhaps at last we should emerge from this haunted ground,
but the illusions which had first mocked us we resolutely refused. So
much so, that where at one place there stood plainly before us in the
gathering darkness a farm-house with its trees and its close, its
orchard and its garden gate, I said to my companion, "All this place is
cursed, and I will not go near." And he applauded me, for he knew as
well as I that if we had gone a few steps towards that orchard and that
garden close, they would have turned into the bracken of the hillside,
bare granite and unfruitful scree.
The main range, where it appeared in revelations behind us through the
clouds, was far higher than mountains ever seem to waking men, and it
stood quite sheer as might a precipice in a dream. The forests upon
either side ran up until they were lost miles and miles above us in the
storm.
Night fell and we still went onward, the one never daring to fall far
behind the other, and once or twice in an hour calling to each other to
make sure that another man was near; but this we did not continue,
because as we went on each of us became aware under the midnight of the
presence of a Third.
There was a place where the path, now broad and plain, approached a sort
of little sandy bay going down towards the stream, and there I saw, by a
sudden glimpse of the moon through the clouds, a large cave standing
wide. We went down to it in silence, we gathered brushwood, we lit a
fire, and we lay down in the cave. But before we lay down I said to my
companion: "I have seen the moon--she is in the north. Into what place
have we come?" He said to me in answer, "Nothing here is earthly," and
after he had said this we both fell into a profound sleep in which we
forgot not only cold, great hunger, and fatigue, but our own names and
our very souls, and passed, as it were, into a deep bath of
forgetfulness.
When we woke at the same moment, it was dawn.
We stood up in the clear and happy light and found that everything was
changed. We poured water upon our faces and our hands, strode out a
hundred yards and saw again the features of a man. He had a kind face of
some age, and eyes such as are the eyes of mountaineers, which seem to
have constantly contemplated the distant horizons and wide plains
beneath their homes. We heard as he came up the sound of a bell in a
Christian church below, and we exchanged with him the salutations of
living men. Then I said to him: "What day is this?" He said "Sunday,"
and a sort of memory of our fear came on us, for we had lost a day.
Then I said to him: "What river are we upon, and what valley is this?"
He answered: "The river and the valley of the Aston." And what he said
was true, for as we rounded a corner we perceived right before us a
barrier, that rock of Guie from which we had set out. We had come down
again into France, and into the very dale by which we had begun our
ascent.
But what that valley was which had led us from the summits round
backward to our starting-place, forcing upon us the refusal of whatever
powers protect this passage of the chain, I have never been able to
tell. It is not upon the maps; by our description the peasants knew
nothing of it. No book tells of it. No men except ourselves have seen
it, and I am willing to believe that it is not of this world.
There are two ways by which a man may acquire any kind of learning or
profit, and this is especially true of travel.
Everybody knows that one can increase what one has of knowledge or of
any other possession by going outwards and outwards; but what is also
true, and what people know less, is that one can increase it by going
inwards and inwards. There is no goal to either of these directions, nor
any term to your advantage as you travel in them.
If you will be extensive, take it easy; the infinite is always well
ahead of you, and its symbol is the sky.
If you will be intensive, hurry as much as you like you will never
exhaust the complexity of things; and the truth of this is very evident
in a garden, or even more in the nature of insects; of which beasts I
have heard it said that the most stolid man in the longest of lives
would acquire only a cursory knowledge of even one kind, as, for
instance, of the horned beetle, which sings so angrily at evening.
You may travel for the sake of great horizons, and travel all your life,
and fill your memory with nothing but views from mountain-tops, and yet
not have seen a tenth of the world. Or you may spend your life upon the
religious history of East Rutland, and plan the most enormous book upon
it, and yet find that you have continually to excise and select from the
growing mass of your material.
* * * * *
A wise man having told me this some days before (and I having believed
it), it seemed to me as though a new entertainment had been invented for
me, or rather as though I had found a bottomless purse; since by this
doctrine there was manifestly no end to the number of my pleasures, and
to each of this infinite number no possibility of exhaustion; but I
thought I would put it to the test in this way: putting aside but three
days, I determined in that space to explore a little corner of this
country.
Now, although I saw not one-hundredth of the buildings or the people in
this very small space, and though I knew nothing of the birds or the
beasts or the method of tillage, or of anything of all that makes up a
land, yet I saw enough to fill a book. And the pleasure of my thoughts
was so great that I determined to pick out a bit here and a bit there,
and to put down the notes almost without arrangement, in order that
those who cannot do these things (whether from lack of leisure or for
some other reason) may get some part of my pleasure without loss to me
(on the contrary, with profit); and in order that every one may be
convinced of what this little journey finally taught me, and which I
repeat--that there is an inexhaustible treasure everywhere, not only
outwards, but inwards.
I had known the Ouse--(how many years ago!)--had looked up at those
towers of Ely from my boat; but a town from a river and a town from the
street are two different things. Moreover, in that time I speak of, the
day years ago, it was blowing very hard from the south, and I was
anxious to be away before it, and away I went down to Lynn at one
stretch; for in those days the wind and the water seemed of more moment
than old stones. Now (after how many years!) it was my business to go up
by land, and as I went, the weight of the Cathedral filled the sky
before me.
Impressions of this sort are explained by every man in his own way--for
my part I felt the Norman.
I know not by what accident it was, but never had I come so nearly into
the presence of the men who founded England. The isolation of the hill,
the absence of clamour and false noise and everything modern, the
smallness of the village, the solidity and amplitude of the homes and
their security, all recalled an origin.
I went into the door of the Cathedral under the high tower. I noted the
ponderous simplicity of the great squat pillars, the rough
capitals--plain bulges of stone without so much as a pattern cut upon
them--the round arch and the low aisles; but in one corner remaining
near the door--a baptistery, I suppose--was a crowd of ornament which
(like everything of that age) bore the mark of simplicity, for it was an
endless heap of the arch and the column and the zigzag ornament--the
broken line. Its richness was due to nothing but the repetition of
similar forms, and everywhere the low stature, the muscles, the broad
shoulders of the thing, proved and reawoke the memory of the Norman
soldiers.
They have been written of enough to-day, but who has seen them from
close by or understood that brilliant interlude of power?
The little bullet-headed men, vivacious, and splendidly brave, we know
that they awoke all Europe, that the first provided settled financial
systems and settled governments of land, and that everywhere, from the
Grampians to Mesopotamia, they were like steel when all other Christians
were like wood or like lead.
We know that they were a flash. They were not formed or definable at all
before the year 1000; by the year 1200 they were gone. Some odd
transitory phenomenon of cross-breeding, a very lucky freak in the
history of the European family, produced the only body of men who all
were lords and who in their collective action showed continually nothing
but genius.
We know that they were the spear-head, as it were, of the Gallic spirit:
the vanguard of that one of the Gallic expansions which we associate
with the opening of the Middle Ages and with the crusades. ... We know
all this and write about it; nevertheless, we do not make enough of the
Normans in England.
Here and there a man who really knows his subject and who disdains the
market of the school books, puts as it should be put their conquest of
this island and their bringing into our blood whatever is still
strongest in it. Many (descended from their leaders) have remarked
their magical ride through South Italy, their ordering of Sicily, their
hand in Palestine. As for the Normans in Normandy, of their exchequer
there, of what Rouen was--all that has never been properly written down
at all. Their great adventure here in England has been most written of
by far; but I say again no one has made enough of them; no one has
brought them back out of their graves. The character of what they did
has been lost in these silly little modern quarrels about races, which
are but the unscholarly expression of a deeper hypocritical quarrel
about religion.
Yet it is in England that the Norman can be studied as he can be studied
nowhere else. He did not write here (as in Sicily) upon a palimpsest. He
was not merged here (as in the Orient) with the rest of the French. He
was segregated here; he can be studied in isolation; for though so many
that crossed the sea on that September night with William, the big
leader of them, held no Norman tenure, yet the spirit of the whole thing
was Norman: the regularity the suddenness, the achievement, and, when
the short fighting was over the creation of a new society. It was the
Norman who began everything over again--the first fresh influence since
Rome.
The riot of building has not been seized. The island was conquered in
1070. It was a place of heavy foolish men with random laws, pale eyes,
and a slow manner; their houses were of wood: sometimes they built (but
how painfully, and how childishly!) with stone. There was no height,
there was no dignity, there was no sense of permanence. The Norman
Government was established. At once rapidity, energy, the clear object
of a united and organised power followed. And see what followed in
architecture alone, and in what a little space of the earth, and in what
a little stretch of time--less than the time that separates us to-day
from the year of Disraeli's death or the occupation of Egypt.
The Conquest was achieved in 1070. In that same year they pulled down
the wooden shed at Bury St Edmunds, "unworthy," they said, "of a great
saint," and began the great shrine of stone. Next year it was the
castle at Oxford, in 1075 Monkswearmouth, Jarrow, and the church at
Chester; in 1077 Rochester and St Albans; in 1079 Winchester. Ely,
Worcester, Thorney, Hurley, Lincoln, followed with the next years; by
1089 they had tackled Gloucester, by 1092 Carlisle, by 1093 Lindisfarne,
Christchurch, tall Durham.... And this is but a short and random list of
some of their greatest works in the space of one boyhood. Hundreds of
castles, houses, village churches are unrecorded.
Were they not indeed a people?... And all that effort realised itself
before Pope Urban had made the speech which launched the armies against
the Holy Land. The Norman had created and founded all this before the
Mass of Europe was urged against the flame of the Arab, to grow fruitful
and to be transformed.
One may say of the Norman preceding the Gothic what Dante said of Virgil
preceding the Faith: Would that they had been born in a time when they
could have known it! But the East was not yet open. The mind of Europe
had not yet received the great experience of the Crusades; the Normans
had no medium wherein to express their mighty soul, save the round arch
and the straight line, the capital barbaric or naked, the sullen round
shaft of the pillar--more like a drum than like a column. They could
build, as it-were, with nothing but the last ruins of Rome. They were
given no forms but the forms which the fatigue and lethargy of the Dark
Ages had repeated for six hundred years. They were capable, even in the
north, of impressing even these forms with a superhuman majesty.
* * * * *
Was I not right in saying that everywhere in the world one can look in
and in and never find an end to one's delight? I began to explore but a
tiny corner of England, and here in one corner of that corner, and in
but one thought arising from this corner of a corner, I have found these
things.
* * * * *
But England is especially a garden of this sort, or a storehouse; and
in nothing more than in this matter of the old architecture which
perpetuates the barbaric grandeur of the eleventh century--the time
before it was full day.
When the Gothic came the whole of northern Europe was so enamoured of it
that common men, bishops, and kings pulled down and rebuilt everywhere.
Old crumbling walls of the Romanesque fell at Amiens; you can still see
them cowering at Beauvais; only an accident of fire destroyed them in
Notre Dame. In England the transition survived; nowhere save in England
is the Northern Romanesque triumphant, not even at Caen. Elsewhere the
Gothic has conquered. Only here in England can you see the Romanesque
facing, like an equal, newer things, because here only was there a great
outburst of building--a kind of false spring before the Gothic came,
because here only in Europe had a great political change and a great
flood of wealth come in before the expansion of the twelfth century
began.
There is one little corner of England; here is another.
The Isle of Ely lying on the fens is like a starfish lying on a flat
shore at low tide. Southward, westward, and northward from the head or
centre of the clump (which is where the Cathedral stands) it throws out
arms every way, and these arms have each short tentacles of their own.
In between the spurs runs the even fen like a calm sea, and on the crest
of the spurs, radiating also from Ely, run the roads. Long ago there was
but one road of these that linked up the Isle with the rest of England.
It was the road from the south, and there the Romans had a station; the
others led only to the farms and villages dependent upon the city. Now
they are prolonged by artifice into the modern causeways which run over
the lower and new-made land.
The Isle has always stood like a fortress, and has always had a title
and commandership, which once were very real things; the people told me
that the King of England's third title was Marquis of Ely, and I knew of
myself that just before the civil wars the commandership of the Isle
gave the power of raising men.
The ends of many wars drifted to this place to die. Here was the last
turn of the Saxon lords, and the last rally of the feudal rebellions of
the thirteenth century.
Not that the fens were impassable or homeless, but they were difficult
in patches; their paths were rare and laid upon no general system. Their
inhabited fields were isolated, their waters tidal, with great banks of
treacherous mud, intricate and unbridged; such conditions are amply
sufficient for a defensive war. The flight of a small body in such a
land can always baffle an army until that small body is thrust into some
one refuge so well defended by marsh or river that the very defence cuts
off retreat: and a small body so brought to bay in such a place has this
further advantage, that from the bits of higher land, the "Islands," one
of the first requirements of defence is afforded--an unbroken view of
every avenue by which attack can come. There is no surprising such
forts.
So much is in Ely to-day and a great deal more. For instance (a third
and last idea out of the thousand that Ely arouses), Ely is dumb and yet
oracular. The town and the hill tell you nothing till you have studied
them in silence and for some considerable time. This boast is made by
many towns, that they hold a secret. But Ely, which is rather a village
than a town, has alone a true claim, the proof of which is this, that no
one comes to Ely for a few hours and carries anything away, whereas no
man lives in Ely for a year without beginning to write a book. I do not
say that all are published, but I swear that all are begun.
BELLOC-HILLS AND THE SEA - THE PYRENEAN HIVE