Consequently the danger is constantly increased by the very means they have taken to avert it.
"C'est comme une grande passion. Le Rhone a toujours été audessus des forces de l'homme."
So must have thought the poor woman and her husband, guardians of the shattered bridge of St. Bénézet at Avignon, for they told us that the flood had risen to the second storey of their house. And this happened, and was bound to happen at intervals, when the ice broke up in the mountains. The Government might raise the dykes at vast expense till it was tired; the river rose too. Better let it spread quietly over the land and enrich it. But now the system was begun it could not be abandoned. Very dangerous it would seem, a big river—or a big passion! And if ever there was a big passion that river is possessed by it!
No dream too lovely, no joy too perfect to be within the scope of human destiny while the spirit is held by the incantation of those waters.
All things are possible! That is the song of the Rhone.
It knows so much, this child of the mountains, born to all the secrets of solitary places, and laden now with the sad, strange lore of its journeyings by city and strand, by quiet lands where the plough traces glistening furrows in the slant morning light, and the vines throw their arms to the sun with all the grace and all the enchantment that made men drunk in the old days when not one of them was afraid to be happy.
The race lived in communion with the things of the soil and the heavens, so that their religion was an ecstatic sense of life and beauty; "that tingling in the veins sympathetic with the yearning life of the earth, which apparently in all times and places prompted some mode of wild dancing."
Of the Bacchanalia we still have the fury and the terror, hidden in dark places, poisoning existence, but the splendour and the grace, the sweet freshness of those wild festivals are banished from the earth. How much of beauty they have given to the world only an artist or a poet here and there understands.
"It is from this fantastic scene," says one of the fraternity, "that the beautiful wind-touched draperies, the rhythm, the heads suddenly thrown back, of many a Pompeian wall-painting and sarcophagus frieze are originally derived." And the same eye sees in the figure of Dionysus the "mystical and fiery spirit of the earth—the aroma of the green world is retained in the fair human body." "Sweet upon the mountains" is the presence of the far-wandering god "who embodies all the voluptuous abundance of Asia, its beating sun, its fair-towered cities."
To see the sun shining through the classic vine-leaves in a southern land, is to begin to understand the emotions of the people who gave birth to the myth of Dionysus; and we may "think we see the green festoons of the vine dropping quickly from foot-place to foot-place down the broken hill-side in the spring."