The church gives one a sense of chill, of hardness; an atmosphere from which all the inspiration and intuition of religious feeling has been driven out, and only the intolerance and cold-blooded pieties remain.
It is exceedingly interesting none the less, for it is so fine an example of the emotionless Cistercian style of the twelfth century—the twelfth century, strange to relate, when the troubadours were singing their loudest and best, when the great castles were overflowing with gaiety, and all the land was full of dance and song.
The cloisters belong to the earlier and richer period, the pillars being carved with real Romanesque beasts and birds of the most aggrieved and untamed character, with vigorous foliage and volutes, and every variety of ornament; yet all balanced with that perfect instinct of the mediæval carver, never afraid to let himself go, to plunge into a profusion almost riotous, while always some sane inner guidance builds up the richness into a beautiful whole, wherein the quality of reserve which seemed so recklessly broken down in the spendthrift detail reappears as by miracle to bind all into one. There is no lack of emotion here. It informs every rampant beast and indignant bird, every living curve of leaf and swirl of volute; but it is like the clamour of tumultuous music, all welded together into harmony.
In this city of the lagoons there are endless associations of Roman days and of days far earlier, as well as tangible relics of those dim ages that, at best, remain so profound a mystery even to the most learned. Of the Greek colony a few marbles remain, and a few words. The Provençal herdsmen in the mountains call their bread arto, from the Greek αρτος. The sea also is pelagre (πελαγος), and there are a few more as obviously or more indirectly derived.
It was to Arles, among other Provençal places, that St. Martha came to convert the people to Christianity. With a little company of saints, she arrived one day in the gay pagan city just when they were all celebrating the festival of Venus. And forthwith St. Trophimus—the beloved friend of St. Paul—lifted up his voice and addressed the laughing, dancing crowd, and suddenly, with a great crash, the statue of the goddess fell to the earth, and the people were converted. Encouraged by this rapid discomfiture of one of the most powerful of the Olympians, the little band dispersed through the country—St. Eutropius to Orange, St. Saturnin to Toulouse, and St. Martha to Tarascon to reform the Tarasque, with what success we shall presently know.
Perhaps it was because the weather had lost its brilliance that Arles seemed to us a little sad. Its beautiful, poplar-bordered Aliscamps, the famous avenue of tombs, was scarcely a cheering place to loiter in at the close of a winter afternoon. It brought home too clearly the Roman idea of death: sombre, cold, grim, merciless. Sometimes, not very often, the tombs revealed regret for the dead that appeared more than conventional; sometimes one seemed to discern, breathing out of the damp-stained marble, a passion of grief that was unbearably hopeless; human love beating, beating for ever, with bleeding hands, against a hateful, unyielding doorway. One had to hurry past those tombs....
LES ALISCAMPS, ARLES.
By Joseph Pennell.
This avenue is the sole remains of what was once a very large Roman cemetery, destroyed when the railway came to the city. Among the tombs was found one of Julia, daughter of Lucius Tyrannus, proudly representing in sculpture all the musical instruments on which she could play, among them an organ, said to be the earliest example known. Marble sarcophagi are ranged in rows beneath the poplars, leading the eye along the solemn glade to the church of St. Honorat, another fine example of Provençal Romanesque, with a bell tower built on lines almost purely Roman.