You must not only say: "I have left the valley of the Thames, I have found the valley of the Itchen," nor only: "I have come over St. Leonards Forest; I am no longer among the Surrey rivers, I am on the headwaters of the Sussex Weald," nor only: "I have left the great fields of the Yonne and the Seine and I have come down on to the Plain of Burgundy and the Eastern Rivers"—it is much more than that.
The slope that looks northward is one thing, the slope that looks southward another. The slope that has been conquered or ordered by the foreigner, or civilised from without, or in any way rearranged, may march with, but will contrast violently against,[Pg 78] the slope that has been protected or isolated or left desert.
The very storms of Nature treat one and the other differently; the rivers do a different work according to the treatment of forests by men within their watershed; the soil sometimes, the air always, changes. Above all, the houses of men change.
The accent of speech changes, if not the form of speech; nay, in the transition from one such region to another I can believe that the daylight seems to change.
All those subtle, permanent, and masterly things which we cannot measure, but which are infinitely important compared with what we can measure, are grouped in groups in those great depressions which look to one sea or to one city, and the regions of Europe and its patriotisms run ultimately with the valleys. So it is with the Loire, and the Dordogne.
Whatever feeds the Loire is one. There are large uncultivated heaths the size of a country; there are very quiet pastures, very rich and silent, stretching for a hundred miles and as broad as a man would care to walk in a day; and in the highlands of the watershed there are rocks, and the trees of rocks, and at last sterile and savage mountains. And the upper courses of all the rivers of the Loire are torrents foaming in glens. Nevertheless, whatever feeds the Loire has a unity. The Allier, the Vienne, the Creuse, the Loire itself (which is only one stream out of many) are bound together.
[Pg 79]
Well, you go up into the sources of the watershed, you cross a confused land of rounded hills and knobs of crested rock and short, sturdy, sparse wood and heather and broom, and at last you see at your feet, trickling southward, not northwards, a stream that knows its way. And this at last, when it has worked its way through little waterfalls and past the gates it knows, will be the River Isle. If you knew it only from the map you would think it a stream like any other stream, but when you go downwards with it upon your feet, and when you see it with your eyes, tumbling and hurrying there, you know that everything has changed—you are in the air of the Dordogne.
There is a louder noise in the village streets; the habit of summer clings to them late into the winter time and re-arises in them early with the spring—though the cold is sharp in all the hills of the Limousin, whether to the north or to the south of that watershed, yet the south of it has a tradition very different from the north, and the sun is more kind or more worshipped. Here are lodges built beside or over the humblest houses; the vine is not so disciplined; it has a simpler and a more natural growth, it is an ornament and a shade. The churches have flat roofs such as Italy and Spain will use. Their Gothic is an attempt, their Romanesque is native.
The children and the birds are careless. Wealth is not spent in luxury but in externals, and property is contented. All this is the air of the Dordogne.
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