This volume can hardly be said to have been written: it came about. The little tour in the South of France which is responsible for its existence, happened some years ago, and was undertaken for various reasons, health and rest among others, and the very last idea which served as a motive for the journey was that of writing about the country whose history is so voluminous and so incalculably ancient. Nobody but a historian and a scholar already deeply versed in the subject could dream of attempting to treat it in any serious or complete fashion. But this fact did not prevent the country from instantly making a profound and singular impression upon a mind entirely unprepared by special study or knowledge to be thus stirred. The vividness of the impression, therefore, was not to be accounted for by associations of facts and scenes already formed in the imagination. True, many an incident of history and romance now found its scene and background, but before these corresponding parts of the puzzle had been fitted together the potent charm had penetrated, giving that strange, baffling sense of home-coming which certain lands and places have for certain minds, remaining for ever mysterious, yet for ever familiar as some haunt of early childhood.

An experience of that sort will not, as a rule, allow itself to be set aside. It works and troubles and urges, until, sooner or later, some form of transmutation must take place, some condensing into form of the formless, some passing of impulse into expression, be it what it may.

And thus the first stray notes and sketches were made without ultimate intention. But the charm imposed itself, and the notes grew and grew. Then a more definite curiosity awoke and gradually the scene widened: history and imagination took sisterly hands and whispered suggestions, explanations of the secret of the extraordinary magic, till finally the desultory sketches began to demand something of order in their undrilled ranks. The real toil then began.

The subject, once touched upon, however slightly, is so unendingly vast and many-sided, so entangled with scholarly controversy, that the few words possible to say in a volume of this kind seem but to cause obscurity, and worst of all, to falsify the general balance of impression because of the innumerable other things that must perforce be left unsaid. An uneasy struggle is set up in the mind to avoid, if possible, that most fatal sort of misrepresentation, viz., that which contains a certain proportion of truth.

And how to choose among varying accounts and theories, one contradicting the other? Authorities differ on important points as radically and as surely as they differ about the spelling of the names of persons and places. There is conflict even as to the names in use at the present day, as, for instance, the little mountain range of the Alpilles, which some writers persistently spell Alpines, out of pure pigheadedness or desire to make themselves conspicuous, as it seems to the weary seeker after textual consistency. Where doctors disagree what can one do who is not a doctor, but try to give a general impression of the whole matter and leave the rest to the gods?

As for dates——!

Now there are two things with which no one who has not been marked out by Providence by a special and triumphant gift ought to dream of attempting to deal, namely, dates and keys—between which evanescent, elusive and fundamentally absurd entities there is a subtle and deep-seated affinity. If meddled with at all, they must be treated in a large spirit: no meticulous analysis; no pursuit of a pettifogging date sharpening the point of accuracy down to a paltry twelve months. And correspondingly, as regards the smaller kind of keys, no one who values length of days should ever touch them! They are the vehicles of demoniac powers. Of course the good, quiet, well-developed cellar or stable-door key is another matter; and thus (to pursue the parallel) dates can be dealt with in a broadly synthetic fashion, in centuries and group of centuries, so that while the author gains in peace of mind, the reader is spared the painful experience of being stalked and hunted from page to page, and confronted round every corner by quartets of dreary figures, minutely defining moments of time which are about as much to him as they are to Hecuba!

The chronology in this volume, therefore, may be described as frugal rather than generous in character, but what there is of it is handled in the "grand manner."

Such, then, is the history of the volume which still retains the character of its irregular origin. Historically it attempts nothing but the roughest outline of the salient points of the story about which a traveller interested in the subject at all is at once curious for information. The one thing on which it lays stress is the quality of the country as distinguished from its outward features. For to many (for example, to our severe critic whose impressions are recorded in Chapter III.) these external features are devoid of all attraction. It is necessary to keep this fact in mind.

A wide plain bounded by mountains of moderate height and an insignificant chain of bare limestone hills (the Alpilles); cities ancient indeed, but small, shabby, not too clean, with dingy old hotels, and no particular advantages of situation—such a description of Provence would be accurate for those who are not among its enthusiasts. To traverse the country in an express train, especially with the eyes still full of the more obvious beauties of the Pyrenees and the Alps, is to see all the wonder of the land of the troubadours reduced to the mere flatness of a map. In a few minutes the "rapide" had darted past some of its most ancient and romantic cities—quiet and simple they stand, merged into the very soil, with no large or striking features to catch the eye; only a patch of grey masonry in the landscape and a few towers upon the horizon, easily missed in the quick rush of the train.

A deeper sound in the rumble of the flying wheels for a couple of minutes announces the crossing of some river: long stretches of waste land, covered for miles and miles with sunburnt stones, and again stretches of country, low-lying, God-forsaken, scarcely cultivated, with a few stunted, melancholy trees, a farmstead on the outskirts here and there: these are the "features of the country," as they might be described without departure from bare, literal, all-deceiving fact.

How many travellers of the thousands who pass along this line every year are interested in such a scene or guess its profound and multitudinous experiences? How many realise as they rattle past, that in this arid land of the vine and the cypress were born and fostered the sentiments, the unwritten laws and traditions on which is built all that we understand by civilised life? How many say to themselves as they pass: "But for the men and women who dreamt and sang and suffered in this Cradle of Chivalry, the world that I live in would never have been born, the thoughts I think and the emotions to which I am heir would never have arisen out of the darkness?"

But, indeed, the strange, many-sided country gives little aid or suggestion for such realisations: it has reticently covered itself with a mantle; it seems to crouch down out of sight while the monster engine thunders by with its freight of preoccupied passengers.

A bare, flat, sun-scorched land.

Yes, these are the "facts," but ah! how different from the magic truth!

With facts, therefore, this volume has only incidentally to do. It is a "true and veracious history," but by no means a literal one. As to the mere accidents of travel, these are treated lightly. Exactly in which order the cities were visited no reader need count upon certainly knowing—and indeed it concerns him nothing—when and where the observations were made by "Barbara," or the "severe critic," or the landlady of the Hotel de Provence and so forth, the following pages may or may not accurately inform him (with the exception, indeed, of the curious, self-revelation of Raphael of Tarascon, which is given almost word for word as it occurred, for here accident and essence chanced to coincide); but he may be sure that though Barbara possibly did not speak or act as represented then and there, she did or might have so spoken or acted elsewhere and at another time. The irrelevancies of chance and incident have been ignored in the interests of the essential. Barbara may not recognise all her observations when she sees them. Tant pis pour Barbara! They are true in the spirit if not in the letter. And so throughout.

From the moment that the original "notes" began to be written, the one and sole impulse and desire has been to suggest, to hint to the imagination that which can never be really told of the poetry, the idealism, the glory, the sadness, and the great joy of this wondrous land of Sun and Wind and Dream.