if it were fiction no one would find any merit in it.  History, therefore, once a man has begun to know it, becomes a necessary food for the mind, without which it cannot sustain its new dimension.  It is an aggregate of universal experience, nor, other things being equal, is any man’s judgment so thin and weak as the judgment of a man who knows nothing of the past.  But history, if it is to be kept just and true and not to become a set of airy scenes, fantastically coloured by our later time, must be continually corrected and moderated by the seeing and handling of things.

If the West of Europe be one place and one people separate from all the rest of the world, then that unity is of the last importance to us; and that it is so, the wider our learning the more certain we are.  All our religion and custom and mode of thought are European.  A European State is only a State because it is a State of Europe; and the demarcations between the ever-shifting States of Europe are only dotted lines, but between the Christian and the non-Christian the boundary is hard and full.

Now, a man who recognises this truth will ask, “Where could I find a model of the past of that Europe?  In what place could I find the best single collection of all the forms which European energy has created, and of all the outward symbols in which its soul has been made manifest?  To such a man the answer should be given, ’You will find these things better in the town of Arles than in any other place.’” A man asking such a question would mean to travel.  He ought to travel to Arles.

Long before men could write, this hill (which was the first dry land at the head of the Rhone delta, beyond the early mud-flats which the river was pushing out into the sea) was inhabited by our ancestors.  Their barbaric huts were grouped round the shelving shore; their axes and their spindles remain.

When thousands of years later the Greeks pushed northward from Massilia, Arles was the first great corner in their road and the first halting-place after the useless deserts that separated their port from the highway of the Rhone valley.

At the close of Antiquity Rome came to Arles in the beginning of her expansion, and the strong memories of Rome which Arles still holds are famous.  Every traveller has heard of the vast unbroken amphitheatre and the ruined temple in a market square that is still called the Forum; they are famous—­but when you see them it seems to you that they should be more famous still.  They have something about them so familiar and yet so unexpected that the centuries in which they were built come actively before you.

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