Motor-Flight Through France

II. Beauvais and Rouen

n BEAUVAlB AND ROUEN THE same wonderful white road, flinging itself in great coils and arrow-Bights across the same spacious landscape, swept us on the next day to Beauvais. If there seemed to be fewer memorable incidents by the way-if the villages had less individual character, over and above their general charm of northern thrift and cosiness-it was perhaps because the first impression had lost its edge; but we caught fine distant reaches of field and orchard and wooded hillside, giving a general sense that it would be a good land to live in-till all these minor sensations were swallowed up and lost in the overwhelming impression of Beauvais. The town itself-almost purposely, as we felt afterward-failed to put itself forward, to arrest us by any of the minor arts which Arras, for instance, had so seductively exerted. It main- [ 15] A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE tained an attitude of calm aloofness, of affected ignorance of the traveller's object in visiting itsuffering its little shuttered non-committal streets to lead us up, tortuously, to the drowsiest little provincial place, with the usual lime-arcades, and the usual low houses across the way; where suddenly there soared before us the great mad broken dream of Beauvais choir-the cathedral without a nave-the Kubla Khan of architecture ... It seems in truth like some climax of mystic vision, miraculously caught in visible form, and arrested, broken off, by the intrusion of the Person from Porlock-in this case, no doubt, the panic-stricken mason, crying out to the entranced creator: "We simply can't keep it up!" And because it literally couldn't be kept up-as one or two alarming collapses soon attested-it had to check there it1:l great wave of stone, hold itself for ever back from breaking into the long ridge of the nave and Hying crests of buttress, spire and finial. It is easy for the critic to point out its structural defects, and to cite them in illustration of the fact that your true artist never seeks to wrest from their proper uses the materials in [16] BEAUVAIS AND ROUEN which he works-does not, for instance, try to render metaphysical abstractions in stone and glass and lead; yet Beauvais has at least none of the ungainliness of failure: it is like a great hymn interrupted, not one in which the voices have flagged; and to the desultory mind such attempts seem to deserve a place among the fragmentary glories of great art. It is, at any rate, an example of what the Gothic spirit, pushed to its logical conclusion, strove for: the utterance of the unutterable; and he who condemns Beauvais has tacitly condemned the whole theory of art from which it issued. But shall we not have gained greatly in our enjoyment of beauty, as well as in serenity of spirit, if, instead of saying "this is good art," or "this is bad art," we say " this is classic" and " that is Gothicto-this transcendental, that rational-using neither term as an epithet of opprobrium or restriction, but content, when we have performed the act of discrimination , to note what forms of expression each tendency has worked out for itself? Beyond Beauvais the landscape became more deeply Norman-more thatched and green and orchard-smothered-though, as far as the noting [17 ] A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE of detail went, we did not really get beyon4 Beauvais at all, but travelled on imprisoned in that tremendous memory till abruptly, from the crest of a hill, we looked down a long green valley to Rouen shining on its river-belfries, spires and great arched bridges drenched with a golden sunset that seemed to shoot skyward from the long illuminated reaches of the Seine. I recall only two such magic descents on famous towns: that on Orvieto, from the last hill of the Viterbo road, and the other-pitched in a minor key, but full of a small ancient majesty-the view of Wells in its calm valley, as the Bath road gains the summit of the Mendip hills. The poetry of the descent to Rouen is, unhappily , dispelled by the long approach through sordid interminable outskirts. Orvieto and Wells, .being less prosperous, do not subject the traveller to this descent into prose, which leaves one reflecting mournfully on the incompatibility, under our present social system...