As I stood in Treves Market Place the other day after an absence of seven years (and the war in between) I could not but wonder whether—since the tide in Europe has turned—the city would not recover what is, if they only knew it, the glory of these German towns: its individual tradition; its private excellence; its pride in antiquity.

Treves as an outer frontier thing is unworthy of its history. Treves was never meant to be a dependency of vulgar Prussia. It is as old as Europe. It has, like all those towns of the Rhine basin—of which it is the last Western example—a faculty for preserving what is old and an active tradition within it of the Roman Empire. It was a provincial capital of that Empire just at the moment of the transition before the central government broke down, and the story of it from that time onwards has never been interrupted. There are many modern authorities who pretend (basing their thesis upon guesswork) that Treves and this lower valley of the Moselle was once Celtic—or, as we say to-day, French—that it was just like Toul, or Metz, or Verdun, but that the district was later overflowed by German speech; that it was invaded. There is no real or certain evidence for any change in the boundaries of German speech towards the West within recorded time. The various German dialects (which were, of course, not original at the beginning of our recorded history, but were already more than half Latin in their wording) reached to a certain limit which they have not overpassed in two thousand years, but from which also they have not receded. Treves, I take it, was what to-day we call German just as much when Priscillian was there condemned as it is to-day.

The stamp of Rome is set upon it very largely, as it is upon everything German west of the central forests and the waste Baltic land. And Treves has the good fortune to have preserved great monuments of that time. The Black Gate is the most famous of them. But I am not sure that the restored Basilica, though most of its bricks are new, does not affect the traveller more.

You might come upon that Basilica of Treves in Ravenna, and it would not be out of place. By a nice irony, its strict, solemn simplicity, its high, blind arches, regular and repetitive, its vast blank of wall, and all that reminds you of the later CÆsars, were given over for use as a garrison church to dull Pomeranium men from hundreds of miles away, a garrison which has now disappeared. By a nice irony, this astounding thing, instinct with Rome, was used for the artificial parade of Prussians who were as little native to Treves as one breed of similarly speaking men could be to another. This great church and the Black Gate at the other end of the town, piled up enormous above the market centre, are the chief standing recollections of that moment when the Empire had just settled into its Christian mould. They saw St. Martin coming in, as Milan had seen him. They saw the crowds that besieged the Imperial Courts when the Spanish bishop was condemned. They saw the procession that moved out to his beheading.

And there is a third point in Treves which arrests one still more, although it is broken to an old ruin, and that is the remaining decayed defence of the old palace. It has been built up, and rebuilt up with rough stone, through the Dark Ages, so that now you look at the rude courses and the rough, half-buried arches as you look at a piece of Pevensey or Richborough. But the very fact of its continuous decline in grandeur recalls its continuous use, and you can stand in a roofless room which held in turn the Apostate and the giant Maximin, and which heard the high, piping voice of Charlemagne, incongruous with his tall presence and dignity.

All that great transition from the pagan to the mediÆval Europe one feels more at Treves even than one does at Aix; and this, I suppose, is because the roots of Treves go deeper; but partly, also, because Treves is more of a border town.

Like every countryside in Europe, this rich pocket in the valley of the Moselle has kept its real spirit, its individual soul, alive underneath the covering of conquest and administration. If Treves were to-morrow to become again, as it was in the past for so many centuries, a State, there would be hardly any change to the eye. The same sharply-cut hills going in succession like cliffs along the valley—the typical hills of Lorraine which Claude loved—would still carry the same terraced vineyards, and the specially Northern cultivation of the grape would show all its accustomed marks.

As one goes up the valley, one may still see upon one of the sandstone slabs of the steep above the river road, a sign marking the limit of the jurisdiction of the Archbishop, a crozier and a cross deeply carved into the smooth rock. It is a symbol of what Treves was in the past, of its strong local character and individuality. Perhaps some later symbol will mark the resurrection of that spirit.

There is also in the heart of the town something which the people may well boast of as a mark of their Western inheritance. It is the first of the Gothic churches of Germany.

It came surprisingly early. Suger had planted, during the Second Crusade, three miles north of the Gate of Paris, the aboriginal pointed arch from which so vast a revolution in architecture was to spring. You get the cathedral of Notre Dame, and the whole movement of the Ile de France. But this little church, right up against the tremendous cathedral of the Dark Ages, this little church here, hundreds of miles away from the Gallic origin of such things, was begun actually within a hundred years of Suger's innovation! St. Louis was still a boy, and so was Henry III of England, when the first stones of the delicate thing were laid here in Treves. How European and civilised a place it was in those days!

And talking of this church, I came upon something there even more astonishing than its early witness to the Western spirit of Treves. Immediately to the left of the choir I also found a witness of the endurance of civilisation in Treves—a thing of, I suppose, the other day—a little statue in freestone, of the most heavenly sort: what the will of an English king prettily called "Mariolam quemdam"—"some little Madonna or other."

It seemed to be unknown. There was no reproduction of it in the town. No one had a photograph of it. No one could tell me who had carved it. It looked quite new. It was as good a thing as even I have seen. And it was here in Treves! It was in a place which finds itself upon the map (as the map still insecurely stands) mixed up with the monstrosities of the monument of Leipsic, the hideous vulgarity of the Hohenzollerns and their palace at Posen (but I forgot—Posen is no longer counted upon the same map; it has been restored to civilisation), the comic streets of Berlin.

Seeing such a noble statue there, I thought to myself of what advantage it would be if the people who write about Europe would really travel. If only they would stop going from one large cosmopolitan hotel to another, and giving us cuttings from newspapers as the expressions of the popular soul! If only they would peer about and walk and see things with their eyes!

This little statue to the left of the choir of Treves would be an education for such men. No longer would they talk of Treves as something identical with strange and distant Koenigsberg or as a cousin to base Frankfort. It would no longer be for them a railway station or a dot upon the map. Even as I looked at that statue I bethought myself of that other statue: the enormity at Metz. For, as we all know, the Prussian Government built, or rather plastered, onto the Western porch of Metz a red statue of the late Emperor and Prussian King. He appears as the Prophet Daniel! The rest of the cathedral is of a marvellous and aged grey, but he is red, carved out of red stone. He is dressed up in a sort of monk's habit with a cowl. His moustaches are turned up fiercely at the end—and yet the statue is solemnly inscribed with that title: "The Prophet Daniel"....

These are the things that our generation has seen and that posterity will not believe.