This is, after all, a big fact, and it disposes once and for ever of the depressing doctrine that there is nothing new under the sun. If the twelfth century produced a new and beautiful fact in human history, so can the twentieth.
CHAPTER VIII
ORANGE AND MARTIGUES
"Beauty gives men the best hint of ultimate good which their experience as yet can offer."
"The Life of Reason"—George Santayana.
CHAPTER VIII
ORANGE AND MARTIGUES
Every one who has travelled in mountain regions has been puzzled by the curious fact that the more peaks his journeyings reveal to him the more there are to reveal. The number of the mountains seems to increase in geometrical proportion and the traveller has presently to learn that, in spite of all appearances, the last towering summit that moves into view will presently become the platform from which he must crane his neck to contemplate a still more towering wooer of the clouds and a still grander scene of desolation and primæval silence.
The traveller in Provence receives a similar impression in relation not to material but to historical immensities. No sooner has one spot been explored, than another mountain-peak of tradition comes into sight, luring ever farther afield.