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 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 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 Arenæ. The Dark Ages, which
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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