The Collected Works of Hilaire Belloc. Hilaire Belloc

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СКАЧАТЬ I saw a tunnel across the valley, and I guessed by the trend of the higher hills that the river was about to make a very sharp angle. Both these signs, I had been told, meant that I was quite close to the town; so I took a short cut up through the forest over a spur of hill--a short cut most legitimate, because it was trodden and very manifestly used--and I walked up and then on a level for a mile, along a lane of the woods and beneath small, dripping trees. When this short silence of the forest was over, I saw an excellent sight.

      There, below me, where the lane began to fall, was the first of the German cities.

      LECTOR. How 'German'?

      AUCTOR. Let me explain. There is a race that stretches vaguely, without defined boundaries, from the Baltic into the high hills of the south. I will not include the Scandinavians among them, for the Scandinavians (from whom we English also in part descend) are long-headed, lean, and fierce, with a light of adventure in their pale eyes. But beneath them, I say, there stretches from the Baltic to the high hills a race which has a curious unity. Yes; I know that great patches of it are Catholic, and that other great patches hold varying philosophies; I know also that within them are counted long-headed and round-headed men, dark and fair, violent and silent; I know also that they have continually fought among themselves and called in Welch allies; still I go somewhat by the language, for I am concerned here with the development of a modern European people, and I say that the Germans run from the high hills to the northern sea. In all of them you find (it is not race, it is something much more than race, it is the type of culture) a dreaminess and a love of ease. In all of them you find music. They are those Germans whose countries I had seen a long way off, from the Ballon d'Alsace, and whose language and traditions I now first touched in the town that stood before me.

      LECTOR. But in Porrentruy they talk French!

      AUCTOR. They are welcome; it is an excellent tongue. Nevertheless, they are Germans. Who but Germans would so preserve--would so rebuild the past? Who but Germans would so feel the mystery of the hills, and so fit their town to the mountains? I was to pass through but a narrow wedge of this strange and diffuse people. They began at Porrentruy, they ended at the watershed of the Adriatic, in the high passes of the Alps; but in that little space of four days I made acquaintance with their influence, and I owe them a perpetual gratitude for their architecture and their tales. I had come from France, which is full of an active memory of Rome. I was to debouch into those larger plains of Italy, which keep about them an atmosphere of Rome in decay. Here in Switzerland, for four marches, I touched a northern, exterior, and barbaric people; for though these mountains spoke a distorted Latin tongue, and only after the first day began to give me a Teutonic dialect, yet it was evident from the first that they had about them neither the Latin order nor the Latin power to create, but were contemplative and easily absorbed by a little effort.

      The German spirit is a marvel. There lay Porrentruy. An odd door with Gothic turrets marked the entry to the town. To the right of this gateway a tower, more enormous than anything I remembered to have seen, even in dreams, flanked the approach to the city. How vast it was, how protected, how high, how eaved, how enduring! I was told later that some part of that great bastion was Roman, and I can believe it. The Germans hate to destroy. It overwhelmed me as visions overwhelm, and I felt in its presence as boys feel when they first see the mountains. Had I not been a Christian, I would have worshipped and propitiated this obsession, this everlasting thing.

      As it was I entered Porrentruy soberly. I passed under its deep gateway and up its steep hill. The moment I was well into the main street, something other of the Middle Ages possessed me, and I began to think of food and wine. I went to the very first small guest-house I could find, and asked them if they could serve me food. They said that at such an early hour (it was not yet ten) they could give me nothing but bread, yesterday's meat, and wine. I said that would do very well, and all these things were set before me, and by a custom of the country I paid before I ate. (A bad custom. Up in the Limousin, when I was a boy, in the noisy valley of the Torrent, on the Vienne, I remember a woman that did not allow me to pay till she had held the bottle up to the light, measured the veal with her finger, and estimated the bread with her eye; also she charged me double. God rest her soul!) I say I paid. And had I had to pay twenty or twenty-three times as much it would have been worth it for the wine.

      I am hurrying on to Rome, and I have no time to write a georgic. But, oh! my little friends of the north; my struggling, strenuous, introspective, self-analysing, autoscopic, and generally reentrant friends, who spout the 'Hue! Pater, oh! Lenae!' without a ghost of an idea what you are talking about, do you know what is meant by the god? Bacchus is everywhere, but if he has special sites to be ringed in and kept sacred, I say let these be Brule, and the silent vineyard that lies under the square wood by Tournus, the hollow underplace of Heltz le Maurupt, and this town of Porrentruy. In these places if I can get no living friends to help me, I will strike the foot alone on the genial ground, and I know of fifty maenads and two hundred little attendant gods by name that will come to the festival.

      What a wine!

      I was assured it would not travel. 'Nevertheless,' said I, 'give me a good quart bottle of it, for I have to go far, and I see there is a providence for pilgrims.'

      So they charged me fourpence, and I took my bottle of this wonderful stuff, sweet, strong, sufficient, part of the earth, desirable, and went up on my way to Rome.

      Could this book be infinite, as my voyage was infinite, I would tell you about the shifty priest whom I met on the platform of the church where a cliff overhangs the valley, and of the anarchist whom I met when I recovered the highroad--- he was a sad, good man, who had committed some sudden crime and so had left France, and his hankering for France all those years had soured his temper, and he said he wished there were no property, no armies, and no governments.

      But I said that we live as parts of a nation, and that there was no fate so wretched as to be without a country of one's own--what else was exile which so many noble men have thought worse than death, and which all have feared? I also told him that armies fighting in a just cause were the happiest places for living, and that a good battle for justice was the beginning of all great songs; and that as for property, a man on his own land was the nearest to God.

      He therefore not convinced, and I loving and pitying him, we separated; I had not time to preach my full doctrine, but gave him instead a deep and misty glass of cool beer, and pledged him brotherhood, freedom, and an equal law. Then I went on my way, praying God that all these rending quarrels might be appeased. For they would certainly be appeased if we once again had a united doctrine in Europe, since economics are but an expression of the mind and do not (as the poor blind slaves of the great cities think) mould the mind. What is more, nothing makes property run into a few hands but the worst of the capital sins, and you who say it is 'the modern facilities of distribution' are like men who cannot read large print without spectacles; or again, you are like men who should say that their drunkenness was due to their drink, or that arson was caused by matches.

      But, frankly, do you suppose I came all this way over so many hills to talk economics? Very far from it! I will pray for all poor men when I get to St Peter's in Rome (I should like to know what capital St Peter had in that highly capitalistic first century), and, meanwhile, do you discuss the margin of production while I go on the open way; there are no landlords here, and if you would learn at least one foreign language, and travel but five miles off a railway, you town-talkers, you would find how much landlordism has to do with your 'necessities' and your 'laws'.

      LECTOR. I thought you said you were not going to talk economics?

      AUCTOR. Neither am I. It is but the backwash of a wave ... Well, then, I went up the open way, and came in a few miles of that hot afternoon to the second ridge of the Jura, which they call 'the Terrible Hill', or 'the Mount Terrible'--and, in truth, it is very jagged. A steep, long crest of very many miles lies here between the vale of Porrentruy and the deep gorge of the Doubs. The highroad goes off a СКАЧАТЬ