Routledge Revivals
2 total works
"Provence" may perhaps be described as the crystallisation of the main idea running through the Great Trade Route, which we published a year ago. Of that book Mr A.G. McDonnell wrote in the Observer: "It is an Indictment, a Philipic....I know of no books to compare with this since Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man" But if "The Great Trade Route" was the destructive onslaught on dubious aspects of contemporary civilisation, "Provence" is the celebration of what might have been and what, according to Mr. Ford, may still yet be - contrasted with what is. For in that triangle of sun-baked , wind-swept, austere yet generous land, bounded as to its base by the Mediterranean and as to its sides, by the Rhone and the Alps, Mr Ford sees all the pride of past European splendour, the small healthy core of Europe's ailing present, the only promise for her future. How and why he sees all this his book alone can reveal, with its history, its moralisings, its descriptions vitalised and clarified by art.
It is the book of an old man mad about writing - in the sense that Hokusai called himself an old man mad about painting. So it is an attempt to induce a larger and always larger number of may fellows to taste the pleasure that comes from always more and more reading. But that imposes on me certain limitations - the first being that, contrary to the habits of the learned, I must write only about the books that I have found attractive: because if I lead my reader up to unreadable books I risk giving him a distaste for all literature. Too many of the classics that the learned still mechanically ram down the throats of their pupils or their readers have lost the extra-literary attractions that once they had and so have become but dry bones, the swallowing of which can only inculcate into the coerced ingurgitators a distaste for all books. At the same time, I have such a distaste for writing injuriously about my fellow of the pen, though they may have been dead a thousand years, that I have, as you would say, panned hardly any writer, except for one to take care of themselves. So there may well be here certain omissions that may astonish you until you reflect upon the matter.