Arles (city)

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Title:     Arles (city)
Author: Hilaire Belloc [More Titles by Belloc]

The use and the pleasure of travel are closely mingled, because the use of it is fulfilment, and in fulfilling oneself a great pleasure is enjoyed. Every man bears within him not only his own direct experience, but all the past of his blood: the things his own race has done are part of himself, and in him also is what his race will do when he is dead. This is why men will always read _records_, and why, even when letters are at their lowest, _records_ still remain. Thus, if a diary be known to be true, then it seems vivid and becomes famous where if it were fiction no one would find any merit in it. History, therefore, once a man has begun to know it, becomes a necessary food for the mind, without which it cannot sustain its new dimension. It is an aggregate of universal experience, nor, other things being equal, is any man's judgment so thin and weak as the judgment of a man who knows nothing of the past. But history, if it is to be kept just and true and not to become a set of airy scenes, fantastically coloured by our later time, must be continually corrected and moderated by the seeing and handling of _things_.

If the West of Europe be one place and one people separate from all the rest of the world, then that unity is of the last importance to us; and that it is so, the wider our learning the more certain we are. All our religion and custom and mode of thought are European. A European State is only a State because it is a State of Europe; and the demarcations between the ever-shifting States of Europe are only dotted lines, but between the Christian and the non-Christian the boundary is hard and full.

Now, a man who recognises this truth will ask, "Where could I find a model of the past of that Europe? In what place could I find the best single collection of all the forms which European energy has created, and of all the outward symbols in which its soul has been made manifest? To such a man the answer should be given, 'You will find these things better in the town of _Arles_ than in any other place.'" A man asking such a question would mean to travel. He ought to travel to _Arles_.

Long before men could write, this hill (which was the first dry land at the head of the Rhone delta, beyond the early mud-flats which the river was pushing out into the sea) was inhabited by our ancestors. Their barbaric huts were grouped round the shelving shore; their axes and their spindles remain.

When thousands of years later the Greeks pushed northward from Massilia, Arles was the first great corner in their road and the first halting-place after the useless deserts that separated their port from the highway of the Rhone valley.

At the close of Antiquity Rome came to Arles in the beginning of her expansion, and the strong memories of Rome which Arles still holds are famous. Every traveller has heard of the vast unbroken amphitheatre and the ruined temple in a market square that is still called the Forum; they are famous--but when you see them it seems to you that they should be more famous still. They have something about them so familiar and yet so unexpected that the centuries in which they were built come actively before you.

* * * * *

The city of Arles is small and packed. A man may spend an hour in it instead of a day or a year, but in that hour he can receive full communion with antiquity. For as you walk along the tortuous lane between high houses, passing on either hand as you go the ornaments of every age, you turn some dirty little corner or other and come suddenly upon the titanic arches of Rome. There are the huge stones which appal you with the Roman weight and perpetuate in their arrangement an order that has modelled the world. They lie exact and mighty; they are unmoved, clamped with metal, a little worn, enduring. They are none the less a domestic and native part of the living town in which they stand. You pass from the garden of a house that was built in your grandfather's time, and you see familiarly before you in the street a pedestal and a column. They are two thousand years old. You read a placard idly upon the wall; the placard interests you; it deals with the politics of the place or with the army, but the wall might be meaningless. You look more closely, and you see that that wall was raised in a fashion that has been forgotten since the Antonines, and these realities still press upon you, revealed and lost again with every few steps you walk within the limited circuit of the town.

Rome slowly fell asleep. The sculpture lost its power; something barbaric returned. You may see that decline in capitals and masks still embedded in buildings of the fifth century. The sleep grew deeper. There came five hundred years of which so little is left in Europe that Paris has but one doubtful tower and London nothing. Arles still preserves its relics. When Charlemagne was dead and Christendom almost extinguished the barbarian and the Saracen alternately built, and broke against, a keep that still stands and that is still so strong that one might still defend it. It is unlit. It is a dungeon; a ponderous menace above the main street of the city, blind and enormous. It is the very time it comes from.

When all that fear and anarchy of the mind had passed, and when it was discovered that the West still lived, a dawn broke. The medieval civilisation began to sprout vigorously through the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as an old tree sprouts before March is out. The memorials of that transition are common enough. We have them here in England in great quantity; we call them the "Norman" architecture. A peculiarly vivid relic of that springtime remains at Arles. It is the door of what was then the cathedral--the door of St. Trophimus. It perpetuates the beginning of the civilisation of the Middle Ages. And of that civilisation an accident which has all the force of a particular design has preserved here, attached to this same church, another complete type. The cloisters of this same Church of St. Trophimus are not only the Middle Ages caught and made eternal, they are also a progression of that great experiment from its youth to its sharp close.

You come into these cloisters from a little side street and a neglected yard, which give you no hint of what you are going to see. You find yourself cut off at once and put separately by. Silence inhabits the place; you see nothing but the sky beyond the border of the low roofs. One old man there, who cannot read or write and is all but blind, will talk to you of the Rhone. Then as you go round the arches, "withershins" against the sun (in which way lucky progression has always been made in sacred places), there pass you one after the other the epochs of the Middle Ages. For each group of arches come later than the last in the order of sculpture, and the sculptors during those 300 years went withershins as should you.

You have first the solemn purpose of the early work. This takes on neatness of detail, then fineness; a great maturity dignifies all the northern side. Upon the western you already see that spell beneath which the Middle Ages died. The mystery of the fifteenth century; none of its wickedness but all its final vitality is there. You see in fifty details the last attempt of our race to grasp and permanently to retain the beautiful.

When the circuit is completed the series ends abruptly--as the medieval story itself ended.

There is no way of writing or of telling history which could be so true as these visions are. Arles, at a corner of the great main road of the Empire, never so strong as to destroy nor so insignificant as to cease from building, catching the earliest Roman march into the north, the Christian advance, the full experience of the invasions; retaining in a vague legend the memory of St. Paul; drawing in, after the long trouble, the new life that followed the Crusades, can show such visions better, I think, than Rome herself can show them.

[The end]
Hilaire Belloc's essay: Arles (city)

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