Revival: Provence from Minstrels to the Machine (1938)

Book excerpt: "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.