The chronology in this volume, therefore, may be described as frugal rather than generous in character, but what there is of it is handled in the "grand manner."
Such, then, is the history of the volume which still retains the character of its irregular origin. Historically it attempts nothing but the roughest outline of the salient points of the story about which a traveller interested in the subject at all is at once curious for information. The one thing on which it lays stress is the quality of the country as distinguished from its outward features. For to many (for example, to our severe critic whose impressions are recorded in Chapter III.) these external features are devoid of all attraction. It is necessary to keep this fact in mind.
A wide plain bounded by mountains of moderate height and an insignificant chain of bare limestone hills (the Alpilles); cities ancient indeed, but small, shabby, not too clean, with dingy old hotels, and no particular advantages of situation--such a description of Provence would be accurate for those who are not among its enthusiasts. To traverse the country in an express train, especially with the eyes still full of the more obvious beauties of the Pyrenees and the Alps, is to see all the wonder of the land of the troubadours reduced to the mere flatness of a map. In a few minutes the "rapide" had darted past some of its most ancient and romantic cities--quiet and simple they stand, merged into the very soil, with no large or striking features to catch the eye; only a patch of grey masonry in the landscape and a few towers upon the horizon, easily missed in the quick rush of the train.
A deeper sound in the rumble of the flying wheels for a couple of minutes announces the crossing of some river: long stretches of waste land, covered for miles and miles with sunburnt stones, and again stretches of country, low-lying, God-forsaken, scarcely cultivated, with a few stunted, melancholy trees, a farmstead on the outskirts here and there: these are the "features of the country," as they might be described without departure from bare, literal, all-deceiving fact.
How many travellers of the thousands who pass along this line every year are interested in such a scene or guess its profound and multitudinous experiences? How many realise as they rattle past, that in this arid land of the vine and the cypress were born and fostered the sentiments, the unwritten laws and traditions on which is built all that we understand by civilised life? How many say to themselves as they pass: "But for the men and women who dreamt and sang and suffered in this Cradle of Chivalry, the world that I live in would never have been born, the thoughts I think and the emotions to which I am heir would never have arisen out of the darkness?"