every man who has a civilised backing behind him, every man, that is, born to a citizenship which has history to nourish it, knows, loves, desires to inhabit, and returns to, the old towns; but the more one thinks of it the more difficult one finds it to determine in what this appetite consists.
the love of a village, of a manor, is one thing. you may stand in some place where you were born or brought up, especially if it be some place in which you passed those years in which the soul is formed to the body, between, say, seven years of age and seventeen, and you may look at the landscape of it from its height, but you will not be able to determine how much in your strong affection is of man and how much of god. true, nearly everything in a good european landscape has been moulded, touched, coloured, and in a sense made by christian men. it is like a sort of tapestry which man has worked upon the stuff that god gave him; but, still, any such landscape from the height of one of our villages has surely more in it of god than of man. for one thing there is the sky; and then it must be admitted that the lines of the hills were there before man touched them, and though the definite outline[188] of the woods, the careful thinning of them which allows great trees to grow, the noble choice and contrast of foliage, the sharp edge of cultivated against forest land, the careful planting of the tallest kinds of things, pine trees and elms, are all man’s work; and though the sights of water in between are usually man’s work also, yet in the air that clothes the scene and in all its major lines, man did not make it at all: he has but used it and improved it under the inspiration of that which made the whole.
but with the old towns it is not so. they please us in proportion to their apparent intensity of effort; the more man has worked the more can we embed ourselves within them. the more different is every stone from another, and the more that difference is due to the curious spirit of man the more are we pleased. we stand in little lanes where every single thing about us, except the strip of sky overhead, is man’s work, and the strip of sky overhead becomes what all skies are in all pictures—something subordinate to man, an ornament.
one could make a list of the old towns and go on for ever: the sea-light over the red brick of king’s lynn from the east, and the other sea-light from the south over that other king’s town, lyme regis; the curious bunch of rye; the hill of poitiers all massed up with history, and in whose uneven alleys all the armies go by, from the armies of the gauls to the army that makes a noise about them to-day: the hill of lincoln, where one looks up[189] from the roman gate to the towers completing the steep hill; the two hills of cassel and of montreuil, similarly packed with all that men are, have been, and remain; the quadrated towns, some surely roman, some certainly so; chichester, winchester, horsham, oxford, chester, and a hundred others—england is most fruitful in these; the towns that draw their life from rivers and have high steep walls of stone or brick going right down into the waters, albi, newcastle as it once was; in its own small way arundel as it still is; the towns of the great flats, where men for some reason can best give rein to their fancy, delft, antwerp (that part of it which counts), bruges, louvain; ypres also where the cooking is so vile.
one might continue for ever this futile list of towns—this is in common to them all, that wherever men come across them in travel they have a sense of home and the soul reposes.
nowhere have i found this more than in the curious and to some the disappointing town of arles. arles has about it, more than any other town i know, the sentiment of protracted human experience. they dig and find stone tools and weapons. they dig again and find marks of log huts, bronze pins, and the arms of the gauls. and then, apparent to the eye and still living as it were, and still breathing, as it were, the upper air which is also ours, not buried away like dead things, but surviving, is greece, is rome, is the dark ages, is the middle ages, is the[190] renaissance, is the religious quarrel, is the eighteenth century, is the revolution, is to-day. i have sometimes thought that if a man should go to arles with the desire deliberately to subject himself at once to the illusion and to the reality of the past, here he could do so. he could look curiously for a day at the map and see how the rhone had swept the place for thousands upon thousands of years, making it a sort of corner at the head of its great estuary, and later of its delta; then he might spend the day wondering at the flints and the way they were chipped, and getting into the minds of the men that made them. then he should spend a day with bronze, and then a day with the gaulish iron. after that, for as many weeks as he chose, let him study the stones which greece and which rome have still left in the public places of the city; the half of the frontal of the great temple built into his hotel; the amphitheatre upon which he suddenly comes as he wanders up a narrow modern street; the aren?. the dark ages, which have left so little in europe, have here left massive towers in which the echoes of the fighting linger, and huge rough stones which the dark ages did not quarry but which they moved from the palaces of the romans to their own fortresses, and which by their very presence so removed bring back to one the long generations in which europe slept healthily and survived.
st. trophime is all the middle ages. you may walk quietly round its cloister and see those ten[191] generations of men, from the hugeness of the crusades to the last delicacies of the fifteenth century. the capitals of the columns go in order, the very earliest touch on that archaic grotesque which underlies every civilisation, the latest in their exact realism and their refinement, prove the decline of a whole period of the soul. lest arles should take up too much of this short space, i would remind the reader only of this ironical and striking thing: that on its gates as you go out of the city northward, you may see sculptured in marble what the revolution but a century ago—took to be a primal truth common to all mankind. it concerns the sanctity of property. consider that doctrine to-day!
but not arles, though it is so particular an example, not delft, not the old english seaports which so perfectly enshrine our past, not coutances which everyone should know, alone explain what the old towns are, but rather a knowledge of them all together explains it.
the old towns are ourselves; they are mankind. in their contortion, in their ruined regularity, in their familiar oddities, and in their awful corners of darkness, in their piled experience of the soul which has soaked right into their stone and their brick and their lime, they are the caskets of man. note how the trees that grow by licence from the crevices of their battlements are a sort of sacramental saving things, exceptional to the fixed lines[192] about them, and note how the grass which grows between the setts of their paving stones comes up ashamedly and yet universally, as good memories do in the oldness of the human mind, and as purity does through the complexity of living.
which reminds me: once there was a band of men, foolish men, bohemian men, indebted men, who went down to paint in a silly manner, and chose a town of this sort which looked to them very old and wonderful; and there they squatted for a late summer month and talked the detestable jargon of their trade. they talked of tones and of values and of the square touch, and heaven knows what nonsense, the meanwhile daubing daub upon daub on to the canvas; praising velasquez (which after all was right) and ridiculing the royal academy. they ridiculed the royal academy.
well, now, these men were pleased to see in autumn grass growing between the setts of the street, especially in one steep street where they lived. it rejoiced their hearts; they said within themselves, “this is indeed an old town!” but the town council of that town had said among themselves, “what if it become publicly known that grass grows in our streets? we shall be thought backward; the rich will not come to visit us. we shall not make so much money, and our brothers-in-law and others indebted to us will also grow impoverished. come! let us pull up this grass.”
[193]so they paid a poor man, who would otherwise have starved, the amount of his food on the condition that he should painfully pull up all the grass, which he did.
then the artists, seeing him at work, paid him more not to pull it up. then the town council, finding out this, dismissed him from their employ, and put upon the job a distant man from some outlandish county, and had him watched, and he pulled up all the grass, every blade of it, by night, but thoroughly. the next morning the artists saw what had been done, and they went out by train to another town, and bought grass seed and also a little garden soil, and the next night they scattered the soil carefully between the stones and sowed the grass seed; and the comedy is not yet ended.
there is a moral to this, but i will not write it down, for in the first place it may not be a good moral, and in the second place i have forgotten what it was.
