Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture by Julian Barnes

cathedral, wittily castigates the “hairless pink monster” at Albi; when she decries the work of Viollet-le-Duc without being so doctrinaire as to ignore his occasional coups; when she praises the benign neglect of buildings, which allows them to show their “scars and hues of age” rather than appearing as spruce old ladies; when she invokes the aesthetic centrality of the Italian hill-town whose architecture embellishes and completes the contours of the landscape—on such occasions we attend to an authority, not to a mere motorist.
    At the same time—and this is part of what makes her close to us—she is not content to treat the successive edifices before her like some version of wine-tasting, an occasion for fine minds with fine purses to display their fine discriminations. What does it, can it, should it mean for a person of a later, swifter civilization to examine these remnants of an earlier, slower yet surer civilization? Can we view them imaginatively, or only solipsistically? What sort of pleasure, what rousing to reverence can we legitimately expect? She addresses such questions at the start of the book, at Amiens, and returns to them near its close, at Reims. She was skilled at focusing them because—like James—she was aware of coming from “a land which has undertaken to get on without a past,” whose citizen-tourists at large in Europe were inclined to treat the architectural expression of vast historical forces as a mere aesthetic diversion. This approach is even commoner nowadays, and we should all be rebuked and enlightened by Wharton's example.
    She is, indeed, that rare and oxymoronic thing, the wise tourist; one eager to give an account of “what he sees, and feels beneath the thing seen” (the italics, as well as the masculine pronoun, are hers). She has great powers of mental comparison: leaving Beauvais, she finds that she has not really quitted it because she is still—and her phrase is scentedly Jamesian—“imprisoned in that tremendous memory.” She treasures buildings that carry the imagination back in a direct flight, to a time when “piety still walked with art.” Tourism for her is thus not passive but constructive, re-creative.
    There is a completeness as well as a wisdom to her: she moves easily between landscape, architecture, and humanity, treating them as overlapping rather than self-contained areas of study; she can do that hardest of art-critical jobs, which is to make tapestries sound interesting; and just when you think she might be coasting she will be startlingly evocative. The carved mermaids on the choir-stalls of Saint Savin leap out at us as “creatures of bale and beauty, who seem to have brought from across the Alps their pagan eyes and sidelong Lombard smile”; the Pyrenees, when viewed from the taming distance of the terrace at Pau, are “subjected to a kind of indignity of inspection, like caged carnivora in a zoo.”
    But it would be a mistake to represent her either as an automatic praiser—she is robustly dismissive of Toulouse and the vulgarity of Lourdes, of false decoration and meretricious bedizening—or as a mere building-broker. Her landscapes are vivid, and peopled with a peasantry she attends to carefully, if lyrically. When she writes of Pyrenean hill-country men “so disciplined by industry, yet so romantically free,” or of the French provincial face provoking “the same kind of interest as a work of art,” she is not just another rich urban foreigner charmed by local colour. What she finds in these glimpsed physiognomies is what she also seeks and celebrates in old buildings: something that carries the imagination back in a direct flight. She is aware that the motorist who arrives in the uttermost parts of France with an expectation of modern plumbing and Maple furniture is also finally a menace to the “independence and simplicity of living,” the “thriftily compact traditional life” which has over centuries formed and defined