Impressions and Comments Part 2

No disrespect for Archbishops of Canterbury is involved in this recognition of their public function, and I have no wish to be (as Laud wrote of one of my ancestors) "a very troublesome man" to archbishops.

They act automatically for the measurement of society, merely in the same sense as an individual is automatically acting for the measurement of himself when he states how profoundly he admires Mendelssohn or R. L.

Stevenson. He thereby registers the particular degree of his own spiritual state. And when an Archbishop of Canterbury, with all that sensitiveness to the atmosphere which his supreme office involves, publicly Professes an Opinion, he is necessarily registering a particular degree in the Spiritual State of Society. It is an important function which was never vouchsafed to his Master.

One wonders how many centuries it is since an Archbishop of Canterbury was known to express any public opinion on non-ecclesiastical affairs which was not that of the great majority of Respectable People. Of course in ecclesiastical matters, and in political matters which are ecclesiastical, he is professionally bound, and Beckett and Sudbury and Laud--though one was a victim to the hostility of a King, another to the hostility of the lower cla.s.s, and the third to the middle cla.s.s--were all faithful to the death to their profession and their cla.s.s, as an Archbishop is bound to be even when his profession and his cla.s.s are in a minority; I speak of the things to which he is not so bound. I have no doubt that at some recent period an Archbishop has archiepiscopally blessed the Temperance Movement.

He is opposed to drunkenness, because we all are, even Licensed Victuallers, and because drunkenness is fast dying out. But imagine an Archbishop of Canterbury preaching Temperance in the eighteenth century when nearly every one was liable to be drunk! He would have been mistaken for a Methodist. I must confess it would be to me a great satisfaction to find an Archbishop of Canterbury earnestly pleading in the House of Lords in favour of gambling, or the unrestricted opening of public-houses on Sunday, or some relaxation in the prosecution of p.o.r.nographic literature.

Not by any means that I should agree with his point of view. But the spectacle offered of a morally courageous and intellectually independent Archbishop of Canterbury would be so stimulating, the presence of a Live Person at the head of the Church instead of a glorified Penny-in-the-Slot Machine would be so far-reaching in its results, that all questions of agreement and disagreement would sink into insignificance.

_December_ 5.--I think we under-estimate our ancestors' regard for ease.

Whenever I have occasion to go to my "Jacobean" chest of drawers (chests of this type are said really to belong to the end of the seventeenth century) the softness and ease with which the drawers run always gives me a slight thrill of pleasure. They run on grooves along the side of each drawer, so that they can never catch, and when one examines them one finds that grease, now black with age, had been applied to the grooves. (In chests which have pa.s.sed through the dealers' hands it is not usually easy to find traces of this grease.) The chests of modified "Jacobean"

type--belonging, one may suppose, to the early eighteenth century--still show these grooves for the drawers to run on. And then, as the eighteenth century advances, they are no longer found. But that by no means meant that the eighteenth-century craftsman had resolved to be content with such articles of furniture as millions of our patient contemporaries tug and push and more or less mildly curse at. No, the eighteenth-century craftsman said to himself: I have gone beyond those "Jacobean" fellows; I can make drawers so accurately, so exquisitely fitted, that they no longer need grooves, and move as well as though they had them. And he was justified. A beautiful eighteenth-century chest of drawers really is almost as easy to manipulate as my "Jacobean" chest. One realises that the device of grooves, ingenious and successful as it was, rested on an imperfection; it was evidently an effort to overcome the crude and heavy work of earlier imperfect craftsmen.

There is evolution in the vital progress of furniture as in all other vital progress. The Jacobean chest with its oak substance and its panels and its great depth is apparently ma.s.sive; this is an inherited ancestral trait due to the fact that it developed out of the earlier coffers that really were ma.s.sive; in reality it is rather light. The later modified Jacobean chest shows only an attenuated appearance of ma.s.siveness, and the loss is real, for there are no fresh compensating qualities. But the developed eighteenth-century walnut chest is the unmistakable expression of a new feeling in civilisation, a new feeling of delicacy and refinement, a lovely superficiality such as civilisation demands, alike in furniture and in social intercourse. There is not even the appearance of ma.s.siveness now; the panels have gone and the depth has been notably reduced. The final goal of development was reached, and nothing was left to the nineteenth century but degeneration.

An interesting evolution in details is instructive to note. In the Jacobean chest, while the drooping loops of the handles are small and simple, the keyholes are elaborately adorned with beautiful bra.s.s scroll-work, the hereditary vestige of mediaeval days when the chest was a coffer, and the key, insistently demanded for security, was far more important than handles, which then indeed had no existence. In the unsatisfactory transitional stage of the later Jacobean chest the keyhole is less beautifully adorned, but the handles remain of similar type. Here, again, the eighteenth-century craftsman shows the fine artist he was. He instinctively felt that the handles must be developed, for not only were they more functionally important than the lock had become, but in dispensing with the grooves for the drawers to run on he had made necessary a somewhat firmer grip. So he made his handles more solid and fastened them in with beautifully-cut fingers of bra.s.s. Then he realised that the keyhole with all its fine possibilities must be sacrificed because it clashed with his handles and produced a distracting confusion.

He contented himself with a simple narrow rim of bra.s.s for his keyholes, and the effect is perfectly right.

Furniture is the natural expression of the civilisation producing it. I sometimes think that there is even an intimate relation between the furniture of an epoch and its other art forms, even its literary style.

The people who delighted in Cowley used these Jacobean chests, and in his style there is precisely the same blending of the seemingly ma.s.sive and the really light, a blending perhaps more incongruous in poetry than in furniture. And the eighteenth-century chests were made for people who had been penetrated by the spirit of the _Spectator_; their craftsmen put into furniture precisely that exquisite superficiality, that social amenity, that fine conventionism which Addison and Steele put into their essays. I find it hard not to believe that delicate feminine hands once stored away the _Spectator_ in these drawers, and sometimes think I have seen those hands on the canvases of Gainsborough and Romney.

_December_ 7.--One is perhaps too easily disquieted by the incompetence and disaster of our typically modern things. Rotten aeroplanes for fools to ride to destruction, motorcars for drunkards and imbeciles to use as the ancient war-chariots were used, telephones and a thousand other devices which are always out of order--our civilisation after all is not made up of these. I take up _Le Rire_ and I gaze at its coloured pictures again and again. One realises that these are the things that people will turn to when they think of the twentieth century. Our aeroplanes and our motor-cars and our telephones will no doubt be carefully displayed in a neglected cellar of their museums. But here are things they will cherish and admire, and as one gazes at them one grows more at peace with one's own time.

It is easy to detect the influence of Rowlandson and of Hiros.h.i.+ge and the other j.a.panese designers in the methods of these French artists of to-day, and there could be no better influences. Rowlandson's _Dr. Syntax_ was the delight of my childhood, and is equally a solace to-day when I am better able to understand what that great artist accomplished; Hiros.h.i.+ge's daring and lovely visions of some remote j.a.panese fairyland are always consoling to take out and gaze at when one is weary or depressed or disgusted. There could be no better influences.

But while it is not difficult to detect such influences in _Le Hire's_ best artists at their best moments,--not so very often attained,--they are yet always themselves and true to their own spirit and vision, or they would have no message to deliver. These pictures have their supreme value because, whether or not they are a true picture of French life, they are a true presentation of the essential French spirit, so recklessly gay and so daringly poignant, so happily exquisite in its methods, and so relentlessly direct in its moral. For some people, who take what they are able to receive, the French spirit seems trivial and superficial, merely wanton and gay, chiefly characterised by that Lubricity which worried the pedagogic Matthew Arnold. The French spirit is more specifically distinguished by its profundity and its seriousness. Without profundity and seriousness, indeed, gaiety and wantonness have no significance. If the Seven Sins had not been Deadly, the Christian Church could never have clothed them in garments of tragic dignity. Unless you cut deep into life, wantonness and gaiety lose their savour and are not fit for the ends of art. The French spirit is not only embodied in Rabelais and Montaigne and Moliere--if these are your superficial men!--but also in Pascal. Was there so great a gulf between Pascal and Daumier? And I find not only the spirit of Pascal in some of these pictures in _Le Rire_, but sometimes even his very phrases used as the t.i.tles of them.

_December_ 9.--The Australians, it appears, have been much worried over Chidley. Here was a man who would not fit into their conventional moulds.

He was stern, resolute, inflexible, convinced that he carried a Gospel which Australia and the world at large needed. It was a Gospel so eccentrically related to the accepted scheme of things that only he himself could accept it in its entirety. His method of preaching this gospel, moreover, was as eccentric as the gospel itself. It seemed to him that men need to live closer to Nature, that a simpler diet is necessary to salvation, and less clothing, and greater s.e.xual continence. He approved his gospel by being a model of physical muscular fitness. As I have sometimes seen a Rifian from the hills, with bare magnificent limbs, striding down from the heights carolling a song, to enter the b.a.s.t.a.r.dly-civilised city of Tangier, so, it would seem, Chidley descended on to the city of Sydney. Having written a book in which to contain the pith of his message, he proceeded to clothe himself in a sort of scanty bathing dress, to lecture the public in the most fas.h.i.+onable streets of the city, and to sell his book to those who might desire it.

Three centuries ago a man of the same type as Chidley, the eminent Quaker, Solomon Eccles, who had his gospel too, would now and then come to Westminster Hall, "very civilly tied about the privities to avoid scandal"

(as Pepys, a great stickler for propriety, noted with satisfaction), to call to repentance the wicked generation of Charles II.'s day. But the people of that day were not altogether without wisdom. They let the strenuous Quaker alone. He was doubtless the better, and they were none the worse.

Nowadays, it seems, we need more than a loincloth to protect our hyperaesthetic eyes from the Splendour of Nature. The Australians, afflicted by our modern nervous fussiness, could not leave Chidley alone.

The police moved him on, worried him as well as they could, invented reasons for locking him up now and then, and finally, by what seemed a masterstroke, they persuaded the doctors to shut him up in the Asylum.

That, however, proved to be too much for Australian popular opinion. The voice of the people began to be heard in the press; there were long debates in Parliament; the Premier sent to the Asylum to inquire on what grounds Chidley had been placed there, and the doctors, who really had no evil intent in the matter, though their mental equilibrium had been momentarily disturbed by this unique Chidley, honourably opened the Asylum doors, and Chidley has returned to preach the Gospel in George Street until new reasons can be puzzled out for hara.s.sing him, neurotic, without doubt, but now hall-marked sane.

Like the Athenians of old, the Australians are not averse to hearing some new thing, and they have bought Chidley's book by the thousand. But the Athenians, notwithstanding their love of novelty, offered the cup of hemlock to Socrates. Chidley, if not exactly the Australian Socrates, clearly resembles his disciples, those great Cynics who in the Greek market-places were wont to preach and to practise a philosophy of stern simplicity, often akin to his own. The Athenians killed Socrates, but they produced a Plato to idealise and even to immortalise him. The Australians have drawn the line at killing Chidley. So he still awaits his Plato.

_December_ 15.--Like a Gargantuan _ca.s.serole_ outside, but modelled on a kettle inside, the Albert Hall, more or less filled with people, is often to me a delightful spectacle. It is so at this Sunday afternoon concert, when the lights are blended, and the bottom of the kettle is thickspread with humanity, and sprinkled with splashes of dusky crimson or purple on women's hats, while the sides are more slightly spread with the same humanity up to the galleries. The spectacle so fascinates me sometimes that I cannot listen to the music. At such moments the Albert Hall faintly recalls a miniature Spanish bull-ring. It is a far-off resemblance, even farther than the resemblance of St. Paul's Cathedral, with its enclosed dome and its worrying detail, to the simple and superb strength of the Pantheon, which lives in memory through the years as a great consoling Presence, but it often comes to me and brings with it an inspiring sense of dignity and colour and light before which the actual spectacle grows dim.

_January_ 3, 1913.--I chanced to walk along the village street behind two little girls of the people, evidently sisters, with ribbons round their uncovered heads, filleting the hair which fell in careless ringlets on their backs. It was hair of the bright flaxen sort, which the poets have conventionally called "golden," the hair one sees so often on the angels of the Italian primitive painters--though not so often on living Italians.

It is the hair which always seems to me more beautiful than any other, and I felt as if I wanted to follow these plain commonplace children as the rats followed the Pied Piper.

The vision brought to my mind the fact I have so often had occasion to realise, that aesthetic attraction has nothing to do with erotic attraction, however at their origins, it may have been, the two attractions were identical or sprang from the same source, and though they have constantly reacted on, and sometimes deflected, each other.

Aesthetically this hair fascinates me; it is an exhilarating delight whenever I meet it. But I have never felt any personal attraction in a.s.sociation with this hair, or any great personal interest in the people it belonged to.

What one aesthetically craves is the outcome of one set of influences, due to one's special vision, one's traditions, one's training and environment, influences that are no doubt mainly objective and impersonal, operative on most of one's fellows. But what one personally craves is the outcome of another set of influences, due to one's peculiar and instinctive organic const.i.tution; it is based on one's individual instinctive needs and may not be precisely the same for any two persons.

The Aestheticians are not here indeed altogether in harmony. But it would seem that, while the aesthetic and the s.e.xual must frequently and legitimately overlap, they are definitely separate, that it is possible to distinguish the aesthetically-from the s.e.xually-attractive in different persons and even in different features of the same person, that while it is frequently natural and right to love a "beautiful" woman, to love a woman because she is beautiful is as unreasonable as to fall in love with a beautiful statue. The aesthetically-attractive and the s.e.xually-attractive tend to be held apart. They are two different "substances," as the mediaeval metaphysician would have said. From the standpoint of clear thinking, and also of social well-being, the confusion of them is, in theological language, d.a.m.nable. In so far as Beauty is a personal l.u.s.t it is unfit for wholesome social ends. Only in so far as it is lifted above personal desire is it fitted to become a social inspiration.

_January_ 10.--Yesterday I waited for a friend at a London Underground railway station. She was delayed, and I stood for a quarter of an hour at the bottom of a flight of steps, watching the continuous stream of descending pa.s.sengers, mostly women, and generally young. Some among the less young were swollen, heavy, and awkward; most were slack, drooping, limp, bony, or bent; a few were lithe and lissom; one or two had the emotional vivacity and muscular tone of abounding vitality. Not one plainly indicated that, stripped of her clothing, she would have transformed those Underground steps into the Golden Stairway of Heaven.

"The average civilised woman sags." That is the conclusion lately reached by d.i.c.kinson and Truslow after the examination of a very large number of American women, and it is a conclusion which applies without doubt far beyond the limits of the United States. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s droop down, these investigators a.s.sert, her b.u.t.tocks sweep low, her abdomen protrudes. While these defects are general, the modern woman has cultivated two extreme and opposite defects of physical carriage which d.i.c.kinson and Truslow picturesquely describe as the Kangaroo Type and the Gorilla Type. In the kangaroo type of civilised woman the upper part of the trunk is carried too much in front of the line of gravity, and the lower part too much behind that line. In the gorilla type of woman, on the contrary, the upper part of the body is carried too much behind the line of gravity, and the lower part too much in front. So far d.i.c.kinson and Truslow.

If this were a purely aesthetic matter, though it would still have its importance, it would only intrude to a slight degree into the moral and social sphere. We should simply have to recognise that these defects of the modern woman must be a frequent cause of depression to her more intimate friends, and that that may have its consequences.

There is more in it than that. All such defects of tone and posture (as indeed d.i.c.kinson and Truslow realise) have their inevitable reaction on the nervous system: they produce a constant wearing stress, a perpetual liability to pain. The women who have fallen into these habits are inadequate to life, and their inadequacy is felt in all that they are and in all that they attempt to do. Each of them is a stone flung into the social pool to disperse around it an ever-widening circle of disturbance and irritation.

It may be argued that one has seen women--working women especially--whose b.r.e.a.s.t.s were firm bowls of beauty, whose b.u.t.tocks were exquisitely curved, whose bellies would have satisfied the inspired author of _The Song of Songs_, and yet the women who owned such physical graces have not conspicuously possessed the finer spiritual graces. But we do not enhance one half of human perfection by belittling the other half. And we rarely conceive of any high perfection on one side without some approach to it on the other. Even Jesus--though the whole of his story demands that his visage should be more marred than any man's--is always pictured as beautiful. And do you suppose that the slave girl Blandina would have gone into the arena at Lyons to present her white body as the immortal symbol of the love of Jesus if her b.r.e.a.s.t.s had drooped down, and her b.u.t.tocks swept low, and her abdomen protruded? The human heart is more subtly constructed. Those romantic Christian hagiologists saw to that. And--to come nearer to the point--could her fine tension of soul have been built up on a body as dissolute and weak as a candle in the sun?

We need to-day a great revival of the sense of responsibility, not only in the soul but in the body. We want a new sort of _esprit de corps_. We need it especially for women, for women, under modern conditions, even less than men, have no use for sagging bodies or sagging souls. It is only by the sanction of nakedness that this can be achieved. "Take this hint from the dancer," a distinguished American dancer has said, "the fewer clothes the better; woman is clumsy because she is overweighted with clothes."

With whatever terror we may view any general claim to the right of nakedness, the mere liability to nakedness, the mere freedom to be naked, at once introduces a new motive into life. It becomes a moralising force of the most strenuous urgency. Clothes can no more be put before us as a subst.i.tute for the person. The dressmaker can no longer arrogate the functions of a Creator. The way is opened for the appearance in civilisation of a real human race.

_January_ 11.--There seem to be two extreme and opposed styles of writing: the liquid style that flows, and the bronze or marmoreal style that is moulded or carved. Thus there is in English the style of Jeremy Taylor and Newman and Ruskin, and there is the style of Bacon and Landor and Pater, the lyrically-impetuous men and the artistically-deliberate men.

One may even say that a whole language may fall into one or the other of these two groups, according to the temper of the people which created it.

There is the Greek tongue, for instance, and there is the Latin tongue.

Greek is the embodiment of the fluent speech that runs or soars, the speech of a people which could not help giving winged feet to its G.o.d of art. Latin is the embodiment of the weighty and concentrated speech which is hammered and pressed and polished into the shape of its perfection, as the ethically-minded Romans believed that the soul also should be wrought.

Virgil said that he licked his poems into shape as a she-bear licks her cubs, and Horace, the other supreme literary artist of Rome, compared the writing of poems to working in bronze. No Greek could have said these things. Whether Plato or Aristophanes or even Thucydides, the Greek's feet touched the earth, touched it lovingly, though it might only be with the pressure of a toe, but there were always wings to his feet, he was always the embodiment of all that he symbolised in Hermes. The speech of the Greek flies, but the speech of the Roman sinks. The Roman's word in art, as in life, was still _gravitas_, and he contrived to infuse a shade of contempt into the word _levis_. With the inspired Greek we rise, with the inspired Roman we sink. With the Greek poet, it may be any poet of the Anthology, I am uplifted, I am touched by the breath of rapture. But if it is a Latin poet--Lucretius or Catullus, the quintessential Latin poets--I am hit by something pungent and poignant (they are really the same word, one notes, and that a Latin word) which pierces the flesh and sinks into the heart.

One resents the narrow and defective intelligence of the spirit embodied in Latin, its indifference to Nature, its refusal to hallow the freedom and beauty and gaiety of things, its ever-recurring foretaste of Christianity. But one must not refuse to recognise the superb and eternal morality of that spirit, whether in language or in life. It consecrates struggle, the conquest of brute matter, the perpetual and patient effort after perfection. So Rome is an everlasting challenge to the soul of Man, and the very stones of its city the mightiest of inspirations.

_January_ 13.--An American physician, we are told, paid a visit to the famous dog-kennels on the Vanderbilt estate. He was surprised at the intelligence and gentleness of the animals. "Have you no vicious animals at all?" he asked. And the keeper in surprise answered him: "Do you suppose we would be so foolish as to permit vicious animals to breed?"

Human beings ought surely to be worth more to us than dogs. Yet here in England-and I do not know in what "civilised" country any different order prevails--we gather together all our physical and moral defectives, we bring them into our Workhouses to have babies, under the superintendence of Boards of Guardians, and every one knows that these babies are born in the image of their parents, and will perpetuate the same cycle of misery.

Yet, so far as I know, not one of these "Guardians" ever so much as attempts to make clear to those hapless mothers why and how they should avoid having other children. And no one proposes to shut up as dangerous lunatics these precious Guardians of Private Misery and Public Incapacity!

We look down with lofty moral superiority on our ancestors in these islands who were accustomed to eat their fellow-creatures. We do not eat them. We only torture them. That is what we call Progress. At all events we are laying up a bountiful supply of moral superiority for our own descendants. It is not probable that they will be able to read in their newspaper (if newspaper they will still possess) as we can in ours: "At an inquest at Dudley yesterday on a woman who was fatally scalded whilst in a fit, it was stated that she had been an epileptic for years, and that her seven children had all been epileptics, and all had died when young."

_January_ 14.--There are few things that make one so doubtful about the civilising power of England as our indifference to the smoke problem in London. If we were Neapolitan ragam.u.f.fins, who could lie in the sun with bare limbs, sucking oranges, there would be nothing to say; under such conditions indolence might be pardonable, almost justified. But we English are feverishly active, we run over the whole world, and we utilise all this energy to build up the biggest and busiest city in the world. Yet we have never created an atmosphere for our great city. Mist is beautiful, with its power of radiant transformation, and London could never, under any circ.u.mstances, and need never, be absolutely without mist; it is part of the physical genius of our land, and even perhaps of the spiritual genius of our people. But the black fogs of London are mist soaked with preventable coal smoke; their evils have been recognised from the first.

Evelyn protested against this "h.e.l.lish and dismal cloud of sea-coal," and Charles II. desired Evelyn to prepare a Bill on this nuisance to put before Parliament. But there the matter rested. For three centuries we have been in the position of the Russian gentleman who could not prevent his dilapidated roof from letting in the rain; for, as he pointed out, in wet weather it was quite impossible to effect any repairs, and in dry weather there was really nothing to complain of. In the meanwhile this "cloud of sea-coal" has continued to produce not only actual death and injury in particular cases, but a general diminution of human vitality and the wholesale destruction of plant life. It eats away our most beautiful public buildings; it covers everything and everybody with soot; it is responsible, directly and indirectly, for a financial loss so vast and manifold as to be incalculable.

Yesterday Lord Curzon delivered an address at the Mansion House on the Beautiful London of the Future. He dwelt eloquently on its n.o.ble buildings and its long embankments, and its wide streets and its finely placed statues. But of the smoke which nullifies and destroys all these things, not a word! Yet, as he was speaking, outside the Mansion House the people of London were almost feeling their way about, scarce knowing where they were, timidly crawling across motor-infested roads with their hearts in their mouths, all the time permanently ingraining their lungs with black filth. An able man, Lord Curzon, skilful to gauge the British Idealist, ever so absorbed in his own dream of comfort or of cash that he is even blind to the world he lives in, "pinnacled dim in the intense inane" in another sense than the poet intended.

If we were mediaeval monks, who spent our time chanting the rhyme of Bernard of Morlaix, there might seem to be a reason in our madness. To make a h.e.l.l of earth is doubtless a useful method of rendering more joyous the transition to Heaven, and less overwhelming the transition to Purgatory. Yet the mediaeval monks burnt no coal and were careful to live in beautiful sites and fine air. The prospect of Purgatory made them epicures in the fine things of Earth. Now we, apparently, care not a snap for any Hereafter. It is therefore a curious psychological problem why we should have chosen to take up our cross in this peculiarly repulsive shape. Apparently our traditions are too strong for us, we cannot dispense with h.e.l.l; if robbed of it in the future we must have it Here and Now.

_January_ 15.--When English days are dark and dreary, and the rain falls, and cold winds blow, then it is that memory brings back the full joy of ancient beauty and suns.h.i.+ne. (How could Dante have written "Nessun maggior dolore"! But he had to write of h.e.l.l, and h.e.l.l were no longer h.e.l.l if the lovely memory of Earth still cheered its inmates.) Especially I love to think of that two days' brief journey-the most delightful journey there can be in the world, it sometimes seems--which separates me from Spain. I think of it as it is in early Spring, in the April month, when Browning longed to be in England and most people long to be out of it. I think of the swift pa.s.sage across the Channel, of the ever-new impression of the light-toned greenery of France and the subtle difference of the beautiful trees, of Paris, of the Quai d'Orsay early next morning, of the mediaeval cities that flash into view on their ancient hills, of the vast stretch of beautiful and varied French land, of Limoges, the last outpost of the Northern French, whom it is sad to leave even when one is bound for Spain, of Rocamadour (and I think of that fantastic old-world shrine, with the legendary blade of Roland's Durandel still struck into its walls, and of the long delicious day on the solitary brooding height over the exquisite ravine), the night at Toulouse at the Hotel Bayard, and the sour bread that marks the Puritanic Southern French, the keen winds and the dreary rain that comes from Provence,--delicious to leave behind. Then Carca.s.sonne and the momentary vision of its turrets, the embodiment of one's dream of the past; lunch at Narbonne with the unfailing cold asparagus of the south, Perpignan, where now at last one is haunted by the fragrance of a city that once was Spanish. Then creeping along by the broken coast, and the rocky creeks up to the outermost edge of the Pyrenees, leaving to the north the ancient path which Pompey and Caesar climbed, and feeling the winds that descend mysteriously from its gorges:

Le vent qui vient a travers la montagne Me rendra fou.