Impressions and Comments | Page 3

afar and awakens one at night. The sanitary and mechanical age
we are now entering makes up for the mercy it grants to our sense of
smell by the ferocity with which it assails our sense of hearing. As
usual, what we call "Progress" is the exchange of one Nuisance for
another Nuisance.
_August 5._--It is an idea of mine that a country with a genius for
architecture is only able to show that genius supremely in one style, not
in all styles. The Catalans have a supreme genius for architecture, but
they have only achieved a single style. The English have attempted all
styles of architecture, but it was only in Perpendicular that we attained
a really free and beautiful native style in our domestic buildings and
what one might call our domestic churches. Strassburg Cathedral is
thoroughly German and acceptable as such, but Cologne Cathedral is
an exotic, and all the energy and the money of Germany through a
thousand years can never make it anything but cold, mechanical, and
artificial. When I was in Burgundy I felt that the Burgundians had a
genius for Romanesque, and that their Gothic is for the most part feeble
and insipid. Now, how about the Normans? One cannot say their
Romanesque is not fine, in the presence of William the Conqueror's
Abbaye aux Hommes, here at Caen. But I should be inclined to ask
(without absolutely affirming) whether the finest Norman Romanesque
can be coupled with the finest Burgundian Romanesque. The Norman
genius was, I think, really for Gothic, and not for what we in England
call "Norman" because it happened to come to us through Normandy.
Without going to Rouen it is enough to look at many a church here.
The Normans had a peculiar plastic power over stone which Gothic
alone could give free scope to. Stone became so malleable in their
hands that they seem as if working in wood. Probably it really was the
case that their familiarity with wood-carving influenced their work in
architecture. And they possessed so fine a taste that while they seem to
be freely abandoning themselves to their wildest fantasies, the outcome

is rarely extravagant (Flaubert in his Tentation is a great Norman
architect), and at the best attains a ravishing beauty of flowing and
interwoven lines. At its worst, as in St. Sauveur, which is a monstrosity
like the Siamese twins, a church with two naves and no aisles, the
general result still has its interest, even apart from the exquisite beauty
of the details. It is here in Gothic, and not in Romanesque, that the
Normans attained full scope. We miss the superb repose, the majestic
strength, of the Romanesque of Burgundy and the south-west of France.
There is something daring and strange and adventurous in Norman
Romanesque. It was by no accident, I think, that the ogive, in which lay
the secret of Gothic, appeared first in Norman Romanesque.
_August 8._--I have sometimes thought when in Spain that in ancient
university towns the women tend to be notably beautiful or attractive,
and I have imagined that this might be due to the continuous influence
of student blood through many centuries in refining the population, the
finest specimens of the young students proving irresistible to the
women of the people, and so raising the level of the population by
sexual selection. At Salamanca I was impressed by the unusual charm
of the women, and even at Palencia to some extent noticed it, though
Palencia ceased to be the great university of Spain nearly eight
centuries ago. At Fécamp I have been struck by the occasional
occurrence of an unusual type of feminine beauty, not, it seems to me,
peculiarly Norman, with dark, ardent, spiritual eyes, and a kind of
proud hierarchical bearing. I have wondered how far the abbots and
monks of this great and ancient abbey of Benedictines were
occupied--in the intervals of more supra-mundane avocations--in
perfecting, not only the ancient recipe of their liqueur, but also the
physical type of the feminine population among which they laboured.
The type I have in mind sometimes rather recalls the face of Baudelaire,
who, by his mother's family from which he chiefly inherited, the
Dufays, belonged, it is held probable, to Normandy.
_August 9._--Typical women of Normandy often have a certain
highly-bred air. They are slender when young, sometimes inclined to be
tall, and the face--of course beautiful in complexion, for they dwell
near the sea--is not seldom refined and distinguished. See the proud,

sensitive nostrils of that young woman sweeping the pavement with her
broom in front of the house this morning; one can tell she is of the
same race as Charlotte Corday. And I have certainly never found
anywhere in France women who seem to me so naturally charming and