NARBONNE

Upon a Whitsunday I found myself returning from the Balearics, through Spain, to that luxuriant warm plain between the mountains and the sea, which the Romans knew as the “Narbonnese.” It was the wealthiest district of their Gaul; grouped round its great central port; the pole of so much energy, superb achievement and tradition.

I had spent these spring weeks, from April onward, in passing through the recovered countries of Sicily, North Africa and Spain, drawing and writing upon the towns in which our civilisation has re-established itself, so gradually, recovering them from the flood of Mohammedanism in which they had been for centuries drowned.

Here, in the Narbonnese, I was at the end of that excursion and back again in the unbroken tradition of our people and of the Faith. For though the Saracen flood had indeed beaten upon the walls of this place, and though sundry small garrisons of Islam had lingered on between the Pyrenees and the central mountains of France, yet they had not here occupied, ruined or transformed, as they occupied, ruined and transformed elsewhere. And Narbonne catches on back through 2000 years to its origin without interruption, and has, stored up within itself, the very essence of Rome. It was in these fields that the great landed family, the highest name in whose lineage was that of Charlemagne, had its origin and root.

For Charlemagne was, on his father’s side and by direct descent, the head of the Ferreoli, Roman nobles of the Narbonnese.

The place is better suited for the conservation of the past and for the handing on of most ancient memories to us, the modern passers-by, from the fact that it is decayed. Those great centres of Europe which have been continuously active from the Pagan days to our own, have largely destroyed, with rebuilding and with the change of fashion, the material objects of their inheritance. But towns which have been arrested at some moment and fossilised, as it were, present the remote past, and we can live it again within their walls.

It is so with Narbonne. The great port which had been filled for so many centuries with all the shipping of the Mediterranean, which had been greater than Marseilles or Genoa, had rivalled Naples opposite, and was the queen of all that coast between Tarragona and the Atione, slowly filled. The land rose in one of those imperceptible movements which change political geography, and the great land-locked bay turned, as the centuries proceeded, into a shallow lagoon, with but one issue, where a small port called the New Port continued to carry on perhaps one-hundredth of the trade that the mother city had once conducted. That mother city slowly turned to a shrunken, inland place, its ancient function lost.

And the date of the turning point, when at last the narrows had become too difficult, and the harbour too shoal for a continued life, is well fixed by the enormous cathedral and palace of the Bishop, which stand like a fortress, and are yet uncompleted, halted at mid-building in the very midst of the Middle Ages.

The Palace of the Popes at Avignon, nearly contemporary, is larger and even more solid in effect, but it does not pretend to combine church and stronghold. Here in Narbonne both the ideas are commingled and form one thing. Coming upon it from the outer streets, if you approach by the palace side, you see indeed the buttresses and the ogives of a Gothic church, but there is a strength and bigness, a massiveness of stone, a reduction of ornament, which still suggests the fortress and the keep.

Next you notice that the huge thing is incomplete. It was never finished. It has an apse with transepts only begun, and where the nave should be are only the unconnected juttings of great stones squared for the builder and uncontinued.

But this effect of power and of resistance, this character of standing for a siege, which is the chief mark of the cathedral of Narbonne, disappears in a sort of magic and a transformation when one passes the door and gets within. Then all is suddenly changed into a place of coloured light. And that which externally was all shoulders and masonry, seeming to allow but small open spaces between, from within is one great round of those solemn and soaring windows which turn the greater glories of the thirteenth century into a vision.

When I thus came to Narbonne, it being yet long before noon in the mid-morning, a strong May sun poured through that glass and made the whole airy cavern celestially alive. It seemed to have (though it had not actually the measurement) the height of Beauvais, the majesty of Paris, and something of the magic of Chartres.

For the thirteenth century learned to work this miracle of contrasts: so to arrange the external stonework that its characteristics to the onlooker from without was the strength of this world, but so to devise the interior with the least proportion of fine, long-drawn supports, that the lights were its universal mark, and that the building itself seemed half air.

I came to the town just in time for the Great High Mass of Pentecost, and going straight to the palace and past it into the cathedral, I took my place in what were once the stalls of the canons (for, as I have said, there is no nave, and only the choir is roofed), till the procession entered, and the Sacrifice began.

It was an experience such as I shall not have again, I suppose, in this life; such as I had not had before in all the many years and towns of my travels. For there met in combination there, by some divine chance, certain streams of emotion, their combination all enhanced by the quality of the place. What I had just seen in Barbary, the several crossings of the Mediterranean Sea, the town under the strong light, the mountains to the south and to the north, far away, the richness of the plain, the great story of activity and of decay, all this combined to give an immense significance to this which I was about to follow, this Act, repeated daily upon ten thousand altars, which is also more significant than anything else in the world.

It was as though this High Mass which was about to open had something about it especial; catching up the spirit of the myriad others which in succession were rising to meet the sun in the progress of morning light around the world; and I was filled with the recollection that I had chanced, by the best of fortunes, to find myself here upon the Feast of the Holy Ghost. It was a little after nine o’clock of the morning of that Whitsunday.

Men are often blamed (and more often justly blamed) for permitting the sensual to invade the intellectual; that is, for allowing their judgment (which is our highest faculty, after love) to be warped by the appetitive in man.

On this account it is that the detestable Manicheans (for whom the modern name is ‘Puritans’) reject the proper glories of public worship and the unison of the whole of man into the act of God’s praise and of God’s service. Without considering their unhappy malformation, it remains true that a man must never misinterpret his mere emotion for faith, nor his mere mood for intellectual assent and conviction; still less must he ever substitute intention for act, and a feeling, however strong, for achievement. Faith is of the will. He would be a poor heir of the Catholic Church who would consider the splendours of her most noble pageantry in the greatest Mass, as in some way adding to the inward values and to the unseen glory of a low Mass said hurriedly in some chapel of a hamlet.

Nevertheless, I would advance it to be true that the soul is supported by all sacramental things; that is, by all unison of the mind and the body upon a proper object; and that when great architecture and glorious colour and solemn music, and the profound rhythms of the Latin tongue, and the ritual of many centuries, and the uncommunicable atmosphere of age, all combine to exalt a man in his worship, he is made greater and not less. He is supported. He is fed.

Well do I know that the greatest of visions have come to men in small rough huts of stone, round in shape, piled by their own hands above the Western seas of Ireland or in the Hebrides. And I know very well that these men scaled heaven.

I know also that men similarly isolated in the deserts between the Nile and the Red Sea perceived our final inheritance and were admitted into divine company.

There is no necessity of any aid from the senses; and the greatest of those who were adepts in the search for heaven did, upon the contrary, withdraw themselves from all influence of the senses when they most desired the satisfaction of the _prægustatum_—the foretaste of that for which we were designed: our home.

But I cannot boast myself to be of such a kind, and on my own poor level it is landscape, the sea, human love, music, and the rest, that help to make me understand: and in their absence I am very empty indeed.

Now here in the cathedral of Narbonne, upon the Whitsunday of 1925, having so come in with one companion in the morning of a hot summer’s day, after so much exploration of the heights of Africa, so much watching of the conflict between Islam and ourselves, so much content in the glories of Spain and in the peace and wealth and good manners of Palma, of Majorca, so much breathing of the Mediterranean air in long nights upon the decks at sea, certainly all the support requisite, all the augmentations valuable to a man of my kind, came very fortunately together; and I received, at this Whitsunday High Mass in the cathedral of Narbonne, what I had desired to receive: a great good.

The over-cautious heretics who misunderstand the end of dignity do not confess these things to their fellow beings. But I am willing to confess them, well knowing, first, that dignity is of another kind; secondly, that whatever has done oneself good should be communicated to others; and, thirdly, that the whole affair lasts only for a little time, and that we are bound upon a very different journey from that of this world.

Well then, the Mass began. They bore above the head of the celebrant priest that round shade of silk which had also come centuries and centuries ago from Rome. They had their particular rites of the bishopric, and of their tradition. They read the Gospel, not from the altar steps, but from high up near the roof, above the heads of the whole people; from the organ loft, in splendid fashion. And when they sang the _Veni Creator_, I could swear that the spring sunlight which fell coloured on the stone floors took on another quality.

And I remembered the singing of that same song on the great day when St. Dominic sang it upon the scaling ladder, and our people stormed the wall and destroyed the mortal Albigensian peril, and restored Europe.

I must tell you that all this time the Blessed Sacrament was exposed above the altar on a very high place in a blaze of light. The Mass proceeded; the final prayers were said; the thing was over.

If I could have got into that nave of Narbonne all the starved, unbelieving men cut off from the past in the dissolution of our modern world, there would have come out some reasonable proportion restored to the traditions of Europe.