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.
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