The city of Arles is small and packed.  A man may spend an hour in it instead of a day or a year, but in that hour he can receive full communion with antiquity.  For as you walk along the tortuous lane between high houses, passing on either hand as you go the ornaments of every age, you turn some dirty little corner or other and come suddenly upon the titanic arches of Rome.  There are the huge stones which appal you with the Roman weight and perpetuate in their arrangement an order that has modelled the world.  They lie exact and mighty; they are unmoved, clamped with metal, a little worn, enduring.  They are none the less a domestic and native part of the living town in which they stand.  You pass from the garden of a house that was built in your grandfather’s time, and you see familiarly before you in the street a pedestal and a column.  They are two thousand years old.  You read a placard idly upon the wall; the placard interests you; it deals with the politics of the place or with the army, but the wall might be meaningless.  You look more closely, and you see that that wall was raised in a fashion that has been forgotten since the Antonines, and these realities still press upon you, revealed and lost again with every few steps you walk within the limited circuit of the town.

Rome slowly fell asleep.  The sculpture lost its power; something barbaric returned.  You may see that decline in capitals and masks still embedded in buildings of the fifth century.  The sleep grew deeper.  There came five hundred years of which so little is left in Europe that Paris has but one doubtful tower and London nothing.  Arles still preserves its relics.  When Charlemagne was dead and Christendom almost extinguished the barbarian and the Saracen alternately built, and broke against, a keep that still stands and that is still so strong that one might still defend it.  It is unlit.  It is a dungeon; a ponderous menace above the main street of the city, blind and enormous.  It is the very time it comes from.

When all that fear and anarchy of the mind had passed, and when it was discovered that the West still lived, a dawn broke.  The medieval civilisation began to sprout vigorously through the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as an old tree sprouts before March is out.  The memorials of that transition are common enough.  We have them here in England in great quantity; we call them the “Norman” architecture.  A peculiarly vivid relic of that springtime remains at Arles.  It is the door of what was then the cathedral—­the door of St. Trophimus.  It perpetuates the beginning of the civilisation of the Middle Ages.  And of that civilisation an accident which has all the force of a particular design has preserved here, attached to this same church, another complete type.  The cloisters of this same Church of St. Trophimus are not only the Middle Ages caught and made eternal, they are also a progression of that great experiment from its youth to its sharp close.