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 ............