So much for Puritanism!
No one can be in the South, above all in Provence, knowing of its ancient festivals, its music, its farandoles and Saracenic dances, and fail to be startled into new realisation of this element that has passed out of our life, the menace that lies in the pervading dullness, that benumbed worship of sorrow, of "work" and "duty" without understanding and without freshness, that absence of fantasy and outcry that binds the modern world in a terrible and unnatural silence. Of what avail is it that the people are law-abiding at the cost of the very spring and essence of being? There is a Nemesis that follows this sort of virtue: and it visits the virtues of the fathers upon the children for many a hapless generation. There is a curious example of this in the experience of the Society of Friends who took upon themselves to banish colour and music from their lives, for righteousness' sake, and have now succeeded—according to the testimony of one of their number—in also destroying all response to those artistic appeals, so that whole realms of being are shut off from the children of a race that was afraid to accept their complete inheritance as human beings. It is to be hoped that the heart too has been atrophied, for it is difficult to imagine a hotter hell than that must be for a man or woman capable of the full tide of emotional life and yet unable to find expression for it in heaven or earth!
For the vast majority of mankind there are now no recurrent pleasures worthy of the name, no balance to the dead weight of mere toil and ennui, no taste of that mysterious magnetism that dwells in throngs bent on the same object, inspired by the same joyous idea. With the world of to-day has come a dulling of the aspect of things, a loss of élan and fire; a perilous deprivation of the primitive form of artistic outpouring. And it is more than doubtful whether mankind can exist without it. Is there indeed any object in trying that dangerous experiment?
Why are the majority of moralists, who are so much concerned for the "good of humanity," so terrified at the sight of humanity a little happy and spontaneous?
It is at Tarascon, for some unknown Provençal reason, that the famous Arles sausages are made. We wondered if the accomplished city also provided Arles with its beautiful women.
There is some difficulty in persuading oneself of the great antiquity of the cheerful, sleepy little town. It looks indeed by no means new, but the wear and tear seems rather that of the life of to-day than of centuries ago. Yet Strabo (says Paul Mariéton) mentions ταραςκον as much frequented in his time. Moreover, at Beaucaire, just across the Rhone, there is a quarter called Rouanesse, which is said to be a corruption of Rhodanusia, an ancient Greek colony.
For some reason or other we happened, in our wanderings, to return and return again to the place till at last all strangeness seemed to depart from it. It was beginning to have for us more or less the aspect that it probably had for the natives, allowing, of course, always for the effect upon them of never having seen much besides the sunny main street and broad square, with their hotels and homely houses, and the plane-trees whose thin shade is grateful even on a November morning. To see a place too much is never to see it at all.
We grew familiar even with the faces of the people as they came and went along the ample pavement which sets back the houses pleasantly far from the road.
In the middle of this spreading, easy-going, desultory main street a row of carriages for hire stand waiting under a few small trees for the chance traveller who descends to see the sights of Tarascon between trains.
"Voulez-vous une voiture, Mesdames, pour voir la ville? l'Église de Ste. Marthe, le Château du Roi René, la tarasque, et Beaucaire; tout dans une heure et quart, ou vingt minutes sans Beaucaire."