Hills and the Sea - Hilaire Belloc

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      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!

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      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

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