After that century there is so little of distinction, and so much of average merit, that my story languishes beneath a load of bricks and mortar.Įach chapter in this book which describes an advance in time or a different phase of life and feeling will be found to be connected with the buildings that are either contemporaneous with that phase or most suggestive of it. Up to the beginning of the sixteenth century I have been more careful to explain the scattered relics of an earlier time than during the years when Rouen was filled with exquisite examples of the builder's art. While moats and ramparts still sever a city from its surrounding territory, the space within the walls preserves many of those sharply defined characteristics which grow fainter when town and country merge one into the other the modern suburb gradually destroys the personality both of what it sprang from and of what it viiimeets. To these three kinds of architecture I have attached this story of Rouen, because even in its remotest syllables there are some traces left that are still visible and these traces increase as the story approaches modern times. It is to be found first in the geographical laws of permanent or slowly changed surroundings, and secondly in the outward aspect of the dwellings built by man, for his personal comfort or for the good of the material community, or for his spiritual needs. In all this slow development a character that is individual and inseparable is gradually formed. But a town is like one face picked out of a crowd, a face that shows not merely the experience of our human span, but the traces of centuries that go backward into unrecorded time.
No single phrase can fairly sum up the characteristics of a people. THE story of a town must differ from the history of a nation in that it is concerned not with large issues but with familiar and domestic details. "Est enim benignum et plenum ingenui pudoris fateri per quos profeceris." The Story of Rouen by Theodore Andrea Cook Illustrated by Helen M.
0 kommentar(er)
