You come into these cloisters from a little side street and a neglected yard, which give you no hint of what you are going to see.  You find yourself cut off at once and put separately by.  Silence inhabits the place; you see nothing but the sky beyond the border of the low roofs.  One old man there, who cannot read or write and is all but blind, will talk to you of the Rhone.  Then as you go round the arches, “withershins” against the sun (in which way lucky progression has always been made in sacred places), there pass you one after the other the epochs of the Middle Ages.  For each group of arches come later than the last in the order of sculpture, and the sculptors during those 300 years went withershins as should you.

You have first the solemn purpose of the early work.  This takes on neatness of detail, then fineness; a great maturity dignifies all the northern side.  Upon the western you already see that spell beneath which the Middle Ages died.  The mystery of the fifteenth century; none of its wickedness but all its final vitality is there.  You see in fifty details the last attempt of our race to grasp and permanently to retain the beautiful.

When the circuit is completed the series ends abruptly—­as the medieval story itself ended.

There is no way of writing or of telling history which could be so true as these visions are.  Arles, at a corner of the great main road of the Empire, never so strong as to destroy nor so insignificant as to cease from building, catching the earliest Roman march into the north, the Christian advance, the full experience of the invasions; retaining in a vague legend the memory of St. Paul; drawing in, after the long trouble, the new life that followed the Crusades, can show such visions better, I think, than Rome herself can show them.

THE GRIFFIN

A specialist told me once in Ealing that no inn could compare with the Griffin, a Fenland inn.  “It is painted green” he said, “and stands in the town of March.  If you would enjoy the Griffin, you must ask your way to that town, and as you go ask also for the Griffin, for many who may not have heard of March will certainly have heard of the Griffin.”

So I set out at once for the Fens and came at the very beginning of them to a great ditch, which barred all further progress.  I wandered up and down the banks for an hour thinking of the inn, when I met a man who was sadder and more silent even than the vast level and lonely land in which he lived.  I asked him how I should cross the great dyke.  He shook his head, and said he did not know.  I asked him if he had heard of the Griffin, but he said no.  I broke away from him and went for miles along the bank eastward, seeing the rare trees of the marshes dwindling in the distance, and up against the horizon a distant spire, which I thought might be the Spire of March.  For March and the Griffin were not twenty miles away.  And still the great ditch stood between me and my pilgrimage.