A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE
tained an attitude of calm aloofness, of affected ignorance of the traveller's object in visiting it—suffering its little shuttered non-committal streets to lead us up, tortuously, to the drowsiest little provincial place, with the usual lime-arcades, and the usual low houses across the way; where suddenly there soared before us the great mad broken dream of Beauvais choir—the cathedral without a nave—the Kubla Khan of architecture. . .
It seems in truth like some climax of mystic vision, miraculously caught in visible form, and arrested, broken off, by the intrusion of the Person from Porlock—in this case, no doubt, the panic-stricken mason, crying out to the entranced creator: "We simply can't keep it up!" And because it literally couldn't be kept up—as one or two alarming collapses soon attested—it had to check there its great wave of stone, hold itself for ever back from breaking into the long ridge of the nave and flying crests of buttress, spire and finial. It is easy for the critic to point out its structural defects, and to cite them in illustration of the fact that your true artist never seeks to wrest from their proper uses the materials in
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