VIZEU

It has been said of England that if a foreign traveller, having but a few days in which to see the place, were to travel through the South from Dover through Salisbury to Devon, he would have seen a certain country. If he were to land in the Humber, and travel through the Yorkshire industrial towns and the Lancashire ones to Liverpool, he would have seen one so different that he could hardly believe himself to have been in the same State as that of which the first was a part.

The contrast in Portugal between the sea plain and the hills is nothing like so strong, for in England we have our world sharply divided between that old traditional aspect, dating back at least to the fifteenth century, and the monstrous ash and black ruin of the nineteenth-century industrialism.

Nevertheless, of Portugal it may be said that if a man only knows the sea plain he cannot judge the country. If he only knew the hills he might hardly suspect the towns and the sea plain. Of the hills it would seem (from what those who have long known the country tell me) Vizeu is the typical, small, dignified market town, bishopric, and the rest. I suppose that if a man had but one place to visit in which he should desire to see what the hill country of Portugal and its people were like, he could not do better than choose this one example of Vizeu for his experiment.

Whether it be climate, or some preservation of race through difficulty of access, the hill country of Portugal far more resembles in people and habit (and somewhat even in natural exterior) certain parts of France and England, than that belt along the Atlantic upon which was poured in the past the sudden new wealth of the country during its great adventure of the late Middle Ages. There is in Vizeu (that typical town of the Portuguese hills) a calm and a recollection, a sober way of living, a neatness and an evidence of active toil which we of the North do not connect with the culture of the South. I came into Vizeu through Mondalgue, and there were moments on the road when one might have thought oneself in the Parisis: moments of old walls and close villages and tall trees, thick grass, all of which made one think of Northern homes rather than of the South.

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And, indeed, this approach to Portugal clearly explains to the traveller how the country came to be separate in its modern history from the rest of the Peninsula, and why an intense national feeling arose which defied the artificial union with Spain three hundred years ago, and welcomed the restoration of a national dynasty as strongly as any of the far more recalcitrant nationalities of the North have welcomed their freedom.

For one drops off from the hot arid plateaux of Castille (steppes stretching for two or three days’ journey before the eye, beneath the distant and barren ridges of their Sierras), on to the well-watered, fertile, tree-clad slopes of the Portuguese hills, through a distinct belt of something very like stony desert.

The main road, the railway, each goes through more than a day’s journey—more than thirty miles, indeed more than fifty—of huge granite boulders and sparse cracked oak groves—such groves getting rarer and rarer, with little or no water, rare scrubby tufts of grass, few huts, no fields.

This belt of quasi-desert forms, as it were, the edge of the tableland, and is carried on over the edge to the beginning of the Atlantic slope.

Then one comes, quite rapidly, on a change. Vineyards appear. The woods cascade, one wave below the other, down the hillsides, and there is flowing water at their feet. You see below you ridge upon ridge of dense forest-land falling far and steeply towards the ocean, and you begin to pass into places of wealth and security, and the well-founded habitations of men.

It is a very striking contrast. Every borderland in Europe explains itself and has its geographical meaning (the borderland between England and Scotland always seems to me when I cross it to explain the different historical directions of the two countries); but the marshes of Portugal, as you enter them from the high plains of old Castille, the desert of rock boulders on the edge of that two thousand foot tableland as you fall rapidly from it into the warm and damp Atlantic belt below, are a more visible natural frontier than you may find elsewhere, save in the great mountain ranges.

Of that foot-hill country Vizeu, as I have said, is a natural, though small, capital. It seems to have come into existence as a fortress on a tiny scale. Even the modern town (of the humble size of one of our smaller cathedral towns), stretches far beyond the quadrilateral of huge primitive stones which was the original stronghold. It got its name perhaps as a ‘look-out,’ for to the north it covers a wide landscape. It got its use undoubtedly from its possibilities for defence.

Of this past, the remaining stamp here, as in most of the older towns of Europe, is the cathedral. It is on the scale of all the rest of the place, quite small; built, one would say, for a township of not five hundred families, but having about it in its overlooking of the steeps to the north and east, in the thickness of its walls, in the airy height of its upper cloister walk, the marks of a mountain citadel.

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On that building a man might spend ten days, examining its spirit. Here, as in the great sister far away, Narbonne, the choir sings from a stage high above the people; not a choir of special singers, but the choir of the Chapter itself, the Canons. Here, as in certain other towns of the South, strong wood is married with stone, and the wood impresses upon the stone itself a certain quality. For instance, the ornaments to the roof, though stone, are carved with the freedom of wood, and ropes (in stone) are carried everywhere throughout the vaults, carved into knots.

The people of the place have gathered into the cloisters and the rooms adjoining curiosities, a few treasures which the bishopric retained. One very fine _Tu es Petrus_ of the early Flemish Renaissance and half a dozen others—good pictures which nobody knows; a mass of earthenware statuary and the more remarkable carved wooden statuary. Indeed, the glory of Portugal is its mass of luxuriant wood carving, and nowhere will you see this better, though on a small scale, than at Vizeu.

More than the town itself is the land about it, deep forest valleys and their streams; and any one wishing to find the true life of Portugal, apart from the coast (which does not sufficiently represent the country), should seek it here, in the hills.