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 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 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.