all over the world every kind of man has had for the high places of his country, or for the high places that he has seen in travel (though these last have made upon him a lesser impression), a sentiment closely allied to religion and difficult to fit in with common words. it is upon such sites that sacrifice upon special occasion has been offered. it is here that you will find rare, unvisited, but very holy shrines to-day, and even in its last and most degraded form the men of our modern societies, who are atrophied in such things, spur themselves to a special emotion by distant voyages in which they can satisfy this adoration of a summit over a plain. it is not capable of analysis; but how marvellously it fills the mind. it is not difficult to understand that monk of the dark ages—to be accurate, of the early eleventh century—who, having doubtless seen paris a hundred times from the height of montmartre, could not believe that the martyrdom of st. denis had taken place on the plain. something primal in him demanded the high and lonely place as the scene of the foundation of the church of lutetia, and he would have it that st. denis was martyred there. all the popular stories were with him, and the legend arose. up and down europe, wherever[210] there are hills, you will find upon conspicuous crags or little peaks, upon the loneliest ridges, a chapel. there is one such on a hill near remiremont; there is another at roncesvalles; there is another on the high platform at portofino; there is another on the very height called holy cross above urgel. in its way, st. martha’s in surrey is of that kind. there are hundreds everywhere throughout christendom, and they witness to this need of man for which, i say, there is no name.
i have heard of a mountain in ireland, in the west of that country, to the summit of which upon a certain day of the year the people and the priests will go together, and mass will be said in the open air upon that height. and so it is in several places of the vosges and of the pyrenees, and in one or two, i believe, of the foothills of the alps. everywhere men associate the exaltation of the high places with worship.
it is to be noticed that where men cannot satisfy this emotion by the spectacle of distant hills, or by the presence of nearer ones which they can climb upon occasion, they remedy the defect either in their architecture or with their trees. the people of northern france lacked height in their landscape, and in their forests the trees were neither of the sort nor stature which commonly satisfy the need of which i speak. their architecture supplies it. it has reached its most tremendous expression in beauvais, its most stately in flanders. no man well understands[211] what height can be in architecture unless he has watched one of the great flemish steeples from a vantage point upon another. they are sufficiently amazing when you see them, as they were meant to be seen, from the flat pastures outside the city walls. but where most you can appreciate the way in which they make up the impression of the netherlands is from a platform such as that of delft, halfway up the tower just below the bells. you look out to an horizon which is that of a misty sea, land absolutely level, and here and there the line between earth and sky is cut by these shafts of human effort whose purpose it is—and they achieve it—to give high places to a plain. so also strasburg stands up in that great river plain of which it is the centre, and so salisbury towers above the central upland of south england. and so chichester over the deep loam of the sea plain of sussex. you will further note that as you approach the mountains this attempt grows less in human effort, and is replaced by something else. at bordeaux on the great flat sweep of the river, with the level vineyards all round about, you have a mighty spire, sprung probably from english effort and looking down the river as a landmark and a feature in the sky. but close against the pyrenees, nay when, two days’ walking south of the city, you first begin to see those mountains, height fails you in architecture. you have not got it at dax, nor in the splendid and deserted aisles of auch, nor in the complicated detail of st. bertrand;[212] nor is there any example of it in perpignan; but at narbonne again, where what you have to look at are the flat approaches of the sea, height comes in in a peculiar way; it is the height not of towers, but of walls. it has been remarked by many that effect of this kind is lacking in italy; but in italy, wherever you may be, you have the mountains. south of the sierra guadarama there in no attempt to diversify the line of the horizon in this fashion. there is nothing in madrid to which a man looks up in order to satisfy this need for the high places, nor in the churches of the villages round about. the millions spent upon the escorial were spent with no such object; but then, south of those mountains, the range stands up in a steep escarpment and everywhere is master of the plain. to the north, where they sink away more gradually and form no crest upon which the eye can repose, at once man supplies for himself the uplifting of the face which his soul must have, and the glorious vision of segovia is proof of it. the castle and the cathedral of that famous city are like a tall ship riding out to sea; or they are like a man preaching from a rock with uplifted hands; or they are like the miraculous appearance of some divine messenger standing facing one above the steeps of the hill.
it is so in all the places i can remember; it is so in the valley of the ebro, where saragossa raises a tall nave and the tall columns of the pilar, whereas, if you go northward and begin to see the[213] hills this feature fails. it is not apparent in huesca; jaca, right under the high pyrenees, has none of it. i can remember exceptions; one place, among the most famous in europe, which was built for a mountain kingdom and under the influence of mountaineers, though it stands in a plain. and that is brou, which seems to be made for mountains rather than for the plain. and there are many modern errors in the matter due to the copying of some style pedantically and to the absence of native inspiration. the chief of these is lourdes, whose hideous basilica ought never to have attempted height in the midst of those solemn hills. but the history of man when he is dealing with his shrines is a history of perpetual betterment, and some day lourdes will be replaced by a much worthier thing. the crypt is already excellent, and many good changes in european building have begun with the crypt. there are errors, i say, of this sort due to the modern divorce between personality and production, and there are accidents, though rare, like that of brou, where a mountain building is set in a plain, though hardly ever a building of the plains in the mountains. but for the most part, and taking europe as a whole, the rule holds good. consider the church called l’epine. it is not high, but every line of it is designed to give the effect of height, and the farther you are from it the more it seems to soar, and the greyer it gets the more finely is it drawn upwards. it stands in the roll of those vast[214] catalaunian plains where twice the fate of europe has been decided; where first attila was rolled backwards, and where more than a thousand years after the armies destined to destroy the revolution failed. it is the mark and the centre of that plain. but as you get towards the mountain of rheims on the north, the argonne upon the east, the note of height in stone is withdrawn. the argonne is low, the mountain of rheims, though high and noble, is hardly a true mountain, but each uplifts the face.
among the many misfortunes of men confined to this island, in the great cities of it, it may be counted a good fortune that they have, more than most men bound by modern industry, the opportunity of the high places. lancashire especially has them at its doors, and anyone who will talk much to lancashire folk will find how greatly the presence of the moors still enters into their lives. notably is this true of the peak just to the east of the great industrial plain, and the sense of height and the satisfaction of it is perhaps nowhere more splendidly met than by the spectacle of that plain beneath a winter sunset as one sees it from the height of the road above glossop, if it be a sunday evening when the smoke is not dense, because for twenty-four hours the factories have been silent. the smoke then hangs in wreaths like light clouds against the sunset and one perceives in a very marvellous and sudden fashion beneath one the life of industrial england. it is an aspect of the country not easily forgotten.[215] and everywhere englishmen have presented to them this effect of height within a smaller compass than the men of other european nations. for in the other nations men are either of the mountains or of the plains. but here the isolated and numerous masses of old rocks in wales, in cumberland, and just north of the midlands, and the sharp escarpments of the five ranges of the chalk that radiate from salisbury plain, and the isolated ridge of the malverns, and the wall of the cotswolds over the vale of severn, make it so that nearly all those who live on this island, and especially those who live in the busiest part of it, have their line of hills before them. east anglia and the fens are an exception, and much of the valley of the thames as well. and here comes in the lack of london. london has no high places. it is the chief misfortune in the aspect of the city. it was not always so. popular instinct was very powerful here. since the surrey hills had not their escarpment turned towards the thames, and since looking nowhere round could the londoner get height, he made it for himself, and the gothic london of the middle ages was a mass of spires, chief and glorious above which was the highest spire in all europe, higher than strasburg and higher than cologne, old st. paul’s. it stood up on its hill above the river, and gave unity to all that scheme of spires below. neglect began the ruin, the great fire did the rest, and height in london has disappeared. the tall houses[216] and narrow gorges of streets that are the characteristic of paris and of edinburgh are unknown to london. here and there the sense of which i speak is satisfied. coming up ludgate hill, for instance, and seeing the mass of st. paul’s above it, or in one place where, as you come out of a narrow westminster street, the upshooting of the repetitive lines of victoria tower suddenly strike you. but as a whole height is lacking here. nor in so vast a place, now fixed in certain traditions, can it be supplied. it is a pity.
