On Everything

by Hilaire Belloc

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.

St. Trophime is all the Middle Ages. You may walk quietly round its cloister and see those ten generations of men, from the hugeness of the Crusades to the last delicacies of the fifteenth century. The capitals of the columns go in order, the very earliest touch on that archaic grotesque which underlies every civilisation, the latest in their exact realism and their refinement, prove the decline of a whole period of the soul. Lest Arles should take up too much of this short space, I would remind the reader only of this ironical and striking thing: that on its gates as you go out of the city northward, you may see sculptured in marble what the Revolution—but a century ago—took to be a primal truth common to all mankind. It concerns the sanctity of property. Consider that doctrine to-day!

But not Arles, though it is so particular an example, not Delft, not the old English seaports which so perfectly enshrine our past, not Coutances which everyone should know, alone explain what the Old Towns are, but rather a knowledge of them all together explains it.

The Old Towns are ourselves; they are mankind. In their contortion, in their ruined regularity, in their familiar oddities, and in their awful corners of darkness, in their piled experience of the soul which has soaked right into their stone and their brick and their lime, they are the caskets of man. Note how the trees that grow by licence from the crevices of their battlements are a sort of sacramental saving things, exceptional to the fixed lines about them, and note how the grass which grows between the setts of their paving stones comes up ashamedly and yet universally, as good memories do in the oldness of the human mind, and as purity does through the complexity of living.

Which reminds me: Once there was a band of men, foolish men, Bohemian men, indebted men, who went down to paint in a silly manner, and chose a town of this sort which looked to them very old and wonderful; and there they squatted for a late summer month and talked the detestable jargon of their trade. They talked of tones and of values and of the Square Touch, and Heaven knows what nonsense, the meanwhile daubing daub upon daub on to the canvas; praising Velasquez (which after all was right) and ridiculing the Royal Academy. They ridiculed the Royal Academy.

Well, now, these men were pleased to see in autumn grass growing between the setts of the street, especially in one steep street where they lived. It rejoiced their hearts; they said within themselves, “This is indeed an Old Town!” But the Town Council of that town had said among themselves, “What if it become publicly known that grass grows in our streets? We shall be thought backward; the rich will not come to visit us. We shall not make so much money, and our brothers-in-law and others indebted to us will also grow impoverished. Come! Let us pull up this grass.”

So they paid a poor man, who would otherwise have starved, the amount of his food on the condition that he should painfully pull up all the grass, which he did.

Then the artists, seeing him at work, paid him more not to pull it up. Then the Town Council, finding out this, dismissed him from their employ, and put upon the job a distant man from some outlandish county, and had him watched, and he pulled up all the grass, every blade of it, by night, but thoroughly. The next morning the artists saw what had been done, and they went out by train to another town, and bought grass seed and also a little garden soil, and the next night they scattered the soil carefully between the stones and sowed the grass seed; and the comedy is not yet ended.

There is a moral to this, but I will not write it down, for in the first place it may not be a good moral, and in the second place I have forgotten what it was.