Romantic Cities of Provence

by Mona Caird

At Arles, by comparing the faces of those who wear the costume with those who have abandoned it for modern garb, one can clearly realise that beauty—which consists in relations of line and tint—is not made but revealed by its setting. One sees, too, how, on the other hand, it can, by the same means, be disguised and hidden, just as it would be easy to disguise the symmetry of some fine freehand design by tacking on to its outline a random selection of octahedrons or oblate spheroids. This, be it added, is too often the sort of process pursued by the designer of modern costume.

The beauty of the Arlésiennes is attributed to their Greek descent from the original founders of the city. Judging by appearance, one would say there was a strong touch of Saracen blood mingling with the clearer current of the classic.

The hair is generally black, the eyes dark, the features regular and often noble in character.

Arles is a place of narrow streets, of ruins, of tombs. It stands in a wilderness of vast lagoons at the mouths of the Rhone, and in ancient times it could only be reached by water, for the land was all covered with these meres to the foot of the Alpilles. In the time of the Romans and during the Middle Ages these great waters were navigated by the utriculares, or raftsmen, whose flat craft were made of extended skins.

Merchandise from Central Gaul had to come to Arles to be transshipped on its way to the East or elsewhere, viâ the Mediterranean. The raftsmen carried it over the shallow water round the city, and plied a roaring local trade as well.

At Arles all interested in architecture will be apt to linger before the very remarkable church of St. Trophime.

The interest lies in the characteristic Provençal blending of the pure Roman style with its offshoot, the Romanesque, an architecture which forms a curious analogue to the Romance languages, formed during the same period when things Roman were falling to pieces, yet were still the only standards and models, the type of all possible achievements in human life and art.

The Romanesque is the patois of the classic architecture (with a history singularly analogous to that of the language), developing finally into the eloquent Gothic of our great cathedrals. But it was in the north, not in the south—just as in the language—that the more evolved form established itself. That leaves to the southern speech and architecture a primitive charm all their own.

Of the porch of St. Trophime the engaged pillars are classic as to their capitals, Romanesque in the half barbaric carving of their bases. The figures in the niches formed by the pillars are Roman in general type, yet with a touch of Byzantine, which may be described as the architectural Romance dialect of the East.

The interior was a surprise. The half-barbaric richness of the porch had disappeared. The choir had something of the northern Gothic, but the nave was severe, and indeed rigid in character, yet with none of the massiveness that makes the Norman version of Romanesque so fine. In another country one would have concluded that the interior was of earlier date than the highly decorated porch; but in Provence this rigid manner belongs to the second period of architecture, when the Cistercians—afraid, apparently, lest imaginative decoration might make things too pleasant and beautiful for sinful mortals—introduced a new style in which such irrelevancies were sternly banished: hence even the piers of the nave are merely square blocks of masonry. One must hope that the worshippers of St. Trophime received commensurate spiritual benefit for the deprivation thus imposed upon them.