all countries are built in vast inclined planes which lean up against one another and have ridges between. the great rivers run in the hollows where these planes meet at their lowest, and the watersheds are the lines along which their top edges come together—and there, you might think, was the end of it: but there is much more.
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.
[pg 80]
you feel what you have come to when you drink your first cup of wine on the southward slope of the hill, for the wine of every country is the soul of it. no romans taught these men to plant the vine, it was surely native here. here the vine grudges nothing; the god who inhabits it is not here a guest or a prisoner. its juice is full and admirable. it needs no age. in burgundy, where an iron works in the earth, they need nine years to breed perfection in their wine, but here, in the air of the dordogne, though so far south, they need not seven. within twelve months of the vintage a stranger can hardly tell its age, and for my part i would drink it gladly in november with the people there.
god forbid that any one should blaspheme the wines of the loire, the cherished and difficult vineyards of touraine. great care and many friends protect them, and an infinite labour brings them to maturity. the wine of chinon, which made rabelais, the wine of vouvray, which is good for the studying of mathematics, the wine of saumur, which teaches men how to leap horses over gates—all these wines are of the north, and yet it would be treason to malign them.
i will not be tempted to such a treason, but could i be tempted i should be tempted by the generous invitation which, when one comes down the southward slope and feels the air of the dordogne, proceeds and gathers from the vineyards of that delightful land. you may have seen on bottles the[pg 81] word "st. emilion," and if what was within was from st. emilion indeed, then you saw a great name upon the label; for you must know that st. emilion is built in a sacred hollow. there guadet, "who could not forgive," was born. thence the noblest blood of the revolution proceeded. in its vineyards died by their own hand the best of the republicans, and this place still keeps, as in a kind of chalice, the spirit of the gironde. if you doubt it, drink the wine. and st. emilion is, as it were, the centre and navel of the country of the dordogne. here there stands or stood a church built all out of one rock. st. martin, or some such person, beginning the monastic habit, was pestered (i have heard) by the grand nobles whom he had persuaded to monkishness in a fit of piety, for they said: "this life of yours is all very well, but what is there to do?"
then st. martin, lifting up his eyes, saw a large rock, and said to the youngest of them—
"here is a great rock. hack it about and chisel it until it has the shape of a church outside, and then cut doors and windows and hack away into it until it has the shape of a church inside, and you will have plenty to do."
the story as it was told to me goes on to say that they lived to be so old and so very old at their labour that they saw charlemagne go riding by before the first mass was sung in that rock church; and that that great soldier, coming in to their first[pg 82] mass, thought the workers in their extreme old age to be the spirits of another world.
now the church of st. emilion is a symbol of the air of the dordogne on account of its strength, its homogeneity, its legend, and its virtue of delicate but profound age.
you have drunk barsac—and in so drinking you drank (you thought) april woods and the first flowers. barsac would not be barsac but for the dordogne, which helps to make the great gironde. and you have drunk entremer, which is the name for a host of wines, but the kernel of the whole thing is the full blood that dreams and ripens, and as it were procreates, where the slope of the dordogne is most the dordogne, although the dordogne is not there: at st. emilion.
the pen has the power to describe, not general, but particular things. though it may define what is general, it can call up only what is particular, and in that extended province which is ruled by the dordogne st. emilion has moved me to a particular description.
