THE NEW JERUSALEM by G. K. CHESTERTON PREFACE This book is only an uncomfortably large note-book; and it hasthe disadvantages, whether or no it has the advantages, of notes that weretaken on the spot. Owing to the unexpected distraction of other duties, the notes were published in a newspaper as they were made on the spot;and are now reproduced in a book as they were published in the newspaper. The only exception refers to the last chapter on Zionism; and eventhere the book only reverts to the original note-book. A differenceof opinion, which divided the writer of the book from the politicsof the newspaper, prevented the complete publication of that chapterin that place. I recognise that any expurgated form of it wouldhave falsified the proportions of my attempt to do justice in a verydifficult problem; but on re-reading even my own attempt in extenso, I am far from satisfied that the proper proportions are kept. I wrote these first impressions in Palestine, where everybodyrecognises the Jew as something quite distinct from the Englishmanor the European; and where his unpopularity even moved me in thedirection of his defence. But I admit it was something of a shockto return to a conventional atmosphere, in which that unpopularityis still actually denied or described as mere persecution. It was more of a shock to realise that this most obscurantist of all typesof obscurantism is still sometimes regarded as a sort of liberalism. To talk of the Jews always as the oppressed and never as theoppressors is simply absurd; it is as if men pleaded for reasonablehelp for exiled French aristocrats or ruined Irish landlords, and forgot that the French and Irish peasants had any wrongs at all. Moreover, the Jews in the West do not seem so much concerned to ask, as I have done however tentatively here, whether a larger and lesslocal colonial development might really transfer the bulk of Israelto a more independent basis, as simply to demand that Jews shallcontinue to control other nations as well as their own. It might beworth while for England to take risks to settle the Jewish problem;but not to take risks merely to unsettle the Arab problem, and leave the Jewish problem unsolved. For the rest, there must under the circumstances be only toomany mistakes; the historical conjectures, for they can be no more, are founded on authorities sufficiently recognised for me to be permittedto trust them; but I have never pretended to the knowledge necessaryto check them. I am aware that there are many disputed points;as for instance the connection of Gerard, the fiery Templar, with the English town of Bideford. I am also aware that some aresensitive about the spelling of words; and the very proof-readerswill sometimes revolt and turn Mahomet into Mohammed. Upon this point, however, I am unrepentant; for I never could seethe point of altering a form with historic and even heroic fame in ourown language, for the sake of reproducing by an arrangement of ourletters something that is really written in quite different letters, and probably pronounced with quite a different accent. In speakingof the great prophet I am therefore resolved to call him Mahomet;and am prepared, on further provocation, to call him Mahound. G. K. C. CONTENTS CHAPTER I THE WAY OF THE CITIES CHAPTER II THE WAY OF THE DESERT CHAPTER III THE GATES OF THE CITY CHAPTER IV THE PHILOSOPHY OF SIGHT-SEEING CHAPTER V THE STREETS OF THE CITY CHAPTER VI THE GROUPS OF THE CITY CHAPTER VII THE SHADOW OF THE PROBLEM CHAPTER VIII THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DESERT CHAPTER IX THE BATTLE WITH THE DRAGON CHAPTER X THE ENDLESS EMPIRE CHAPTER XI THE MEANING OF THE CRUSADE CHAPTER XII THE FALL OF CHIVALRY CHAPTER XIII THE PROBLEM OF ZIONISM CONCLUSION CHAPTER I THE WAY OF THE CITIES It was in the season of Christmas that I came out of my little gardenin that "field of the beeches" between the Chilterns and the Thames, and began to walk backwards through history to the place from whichChristmas came. For it is often necessary to walk backwards, as a manon the wrong road goes back to a sign-post to find the right road. The modern man is more like a traveller who has forgotten the nameof his destination, and has to go back whence he came, even to find outwhere he is going. That the world has lost its way few will now deny;and it did seem to me that I found at last a sort of sign-post, of a singular and significant shape, and saw for a moment in my mindthe true map of the modern wanderings; but whether I shall be ableto say anything of what I saw, this story must show. I had said farewell to all my friends, or all those with my own limitednumber of legs; and nothing living remained but a dog and a donkey. The reader will learn with surprise that my first feeling of fellowshipwent out to the dog; I am well aware that I lay open my guard to a lungeof wit. The dog is rather like a donkey, or a small caricature of one, with a large black head and long black ears; but in the mood of themoment there was rather a moral contrast than a pictorial parallel. For the dog did indeed seem to stand for home and everything I wasleaving behind me, with reluctance, especially that season of the year. For one thing, he is named after Mr. Winkle, the Christmas guestof Mr. Wardle; and there is indeed something Dickensian in his unionof domesticity with exuberance. He jumped about me, barking likea small battery, under the impression that I was going for a walk;but I could not, alas, take him with me on a stroll to Palestine. Incidentally, he would have been out of place; for dogs have nottheir due honour in the East; and this seemed to sharpen my senseof my own domestic sentinel as a sort of symbol of the West. On the other hand, the East is full of donkeys, often verydignified donkeys; and when I turned my attention to the othergrotesque quadruped, with an even larger head and even longer ears, he seemed to take on a deep shade of oriental mystery. I know not why these two absurd creatures tangled themselves upso much in my train of thought, like dragons in an illuminated text;or ramped like gargoyles on either side of the gateway of my adventure. But in truth they were in some sense symbols of the West and the Eastafter all. The dog's very lawlessness is but an extravaganceof loyalty; he will go mad with joy three times on the same day, at going out for a walk down the same road. The modern worldis full of fantastic forms of animal worship; a religion generallyaccompanied with human sacrifice. Yet we hear strangely little ofthe real merits of animals; and one of them surely is this innocenceof all boredom; perhaps such simplicity is the absence of sin. I have some sense myself of the sacred duty of surprise;and the need of seeing the old road as a new road. But I cannotclaim that whenever I go out for a walk with my family and friends, I rush in front of them volleying vociferous shouts of happiness;or even leap up round them attempting to lick their faces. It is in thispower of beginning again with energy upon familiar and homely thingsthat the dog is really the eternal type of the Western civilisation. And the donkey is really as different as is the Eastern civilisation. His very anarchy is a sort of secrecy; his very revolt is a secret. He does not leap up because he wishes to share my walk, but to follow his own way, as lonely as the wild ass of Scripture. My own beast of burden supports the authority of Scriptureby being a very wild ass. I have given him the name of Trotsky, because he seldom trots, but either scampers or stands still. He scampers all over the field when it is necessary to catch him, and stands still when it is really urgent to drive him. He also breaks fences, eats vegetables, and fulfills other functions;between delays and destructions he could ruin a really poor manin a day. I wish this fact were more often remembered, in judgingwhether really poor men have really been cruel to donkeys. But I assure the reader that I am not cruel to my donkey; the crueltyis all the other way. He kicks the people who try to catch him;and again I am haunted by a dim human parallel. For it seems to methat many of us, in just detestation of the dirty trick of crueltyto animals, have really a great deal of patience with animals;more patience, I fear, than many of us have with human beings. Suppose I had to go out and catch my secretary in a fieldevery morning; and suppose my secretary always kicked me by wayof beginning the day's work; I wonder whether that day's workwould resume its normal course as if nothing had happened. Nothing graver than these grotesque images and groping speculationswould come into my conscious mind just then, though at the backof it there was an indescribable sense of regret and parting. All through my wanderings the dog remained in my memory as aDickensian and domestic emblem of England; and if it is difficultto take a donkey seriously, it ought to be easiest, at least, for a man who is going to Jerusalem. There was a cloud of Christmas weather on the great grey beech-woodsand the silver cross of the cross-roads. For the four roads that meetin the market-place of my little town make one of the largest andsimplest of such outlines on the map of England; and the shape as itshines on that wooded chart always affects me in a singular fashion. The sight of the cross-roads is in a true sense the sign of the cross. For it is the sign of a truly Christian thing; that sharp combinationof liberty and limitation which we call choice. A man is entirelyfree to choose between right and left, or between right and wrong. As I looked for the last time at the pale roads under the load of cloud, I knew that our civilisation had indeed come to the cross-roads. As the paths grew fainter, fading under the gathering shadow, I felt rather as if it had lost its way in a forest. It was at the time when people were talking about some menaceof the end of the world, not apocalyptic but astronomical;and the cloud that covered the little town of Beaconsfield mighthave fitted in with such a fancy. It faded, however, as I leftthe place further behind; and in London the weather, though wet, was comparatively clear. It was almost as if Beaconsfield hada domestic day of judgment, and an end of the world all to itself. In a sense Beaconsfield has four ends of the world, for itsfour corners are named "ends" after the four nearest towns. But I was concerned only with the one called London End;and the very name of it was like a vision of some vain thing atonce ultimate and infinite. The very title of London End soundslike the other end of nowhere, or (what is worse) of everywhere. It suggests a sort of derisive riddle; where does London End? As Icame up through the vast vague suburbs, it was this sense of Londonas a shapeless and endless muddle that chiefly filled my mind. I seemed still to carry the cloud with me; and when I looked up, I almost expected to see the chimney-pots as tangled as the trees. And in truth if there was now no material fog, there was any amountof mental and moral fog. The whole industrial world symbolisedby London had reached a curious complication and confusion, not easy to parallel in human history. It is not a questionof controversies, but rather of cross-purposes. As I wentby Charing Cross my eye caught a poster about Labour politics, with something about the threat of Direct Action and a demandfor Nationalisation. And quite apart from the merits of the case, it struck me that after all the direct action is very indirect, and the thing demanded is many steps away from the thing desired. It is all part of a sort of tangle, in which terms and things cutacross each other. The employers talk about "private enterprise, "as if there were anything private about modern enterprise. Its combines are as big as many commonwealths; and things advertisedin large letters on the sky cannot plead the shy privileges of privacy. Meanwhile the Labour men talk about the need to "nationalise" the minesor the land, as if it were not the great difficulty in a plutocracyto nationalise the Government, or even to nationalise the nation. The Capitalists praise competition while they create monopoly;the Socialists urge a strike to turn workmen into soldiers andstate officials; which is logically a strike against strikes. I merely mention it as an example of the bewildering inconsistency, and for no controversial purpose. My own sympathies arewith the Socialists; in so far that there is something to besaid for Socialism, and nothing to be said for Capitalism. But the point is that when there is something to be said for one thing, it is now commonly said in support of the opposite thing. Never since the mob called out, "Less bread! More taxes!"in the nonsense story, has there been so truly nonsensicala situation as that in which the strikers demand Governmentcontrol and the Government denounces its own control as anarchy. The mob howls before the palace gates, "Hateful tyrant, we demand that youassume more despotic powers"; and the tyrant thunders from the balcony, "Vile rebels, do you dare to suggest that my powers should be extended?"There seems to be a little misunderstanding somewhere. In truth everything I saw told me that there was a largemisunderstanding everywhere; a misunderstanding amounting to a mess. And as this was the last impression that London left on me, so itwas the impression I carried with me about the whole modern problemof Western civilisation, as a riddle to be read or a knot to be untied. To untie it it is necessary to get hold of the right end of it, and especially the other end of it. We must begin at the beginning;we must return to our first origins in history, as we must returnto our first principles in philosophy. We must consider how wecame to be doing what we do, and even saying what we say. As it is, the very terms we use are either meaningless or somethingmore than meaningless, inconsistent even with themselves. This applies, for instance, to the talk of both sidesin that Labour controversy, which I merely took in passing, because it was the current controversy in London when I left. The Capitalists say Bolshevism as one might say Boojum. It is merely a mystical and imaginative word suggesting horror. But it might mean many things; including some just and rational things. On the other hand, there could never be any meaning atall in the phrase "the dictatorship of the proletariat. "It is like saying, "the omnipotence of omnibus-conductors. "It is fairly obvious that if an omnibus-conductor were omnipotent, he would probably prefer to conduct something else besides an omnibus. Whatever its exponents mean, it is clearly something differentfrom what they say; and even this verbal inconsistency, this merewelter of words, is a sign of the common confusion of thought. It is this sort of thing that made London seem like a limboof lost words, and possibly of lost wits. And it is here we findthe value of what I have called walking backwards through history. It is one of the rare merits of modern mechanical travel that itenables us to compare widely different cities in rapid succession. The stages of my own progress were the chief cities ofseparate countries; and though more is lost in missing the countries, something is gained in so sharply contrasting the capitals. And again it was one of the advantages of my own progress that itwas a progress backwards; that it happened, as I have said, to retrace the course of history to older and older things;to Paris and to Rome and to Egypt, and almost, as it were, to Eden. And finally it is one of the advantages of such a return that itdid really begin to clarify the confusion of names and notionsin modern society. I first became conscious of this when Iwent out of the Gare de Lyon and walked along a row of cafes, until I saw again a distant column crowned with a dancing figure;the freedom that danced over the fall of the Bastille. Here at least, I thought, is an origin and a standard, such as I missed in the mere muddle of industrial opportunism. The modern industrial world is not in the least democratic; but it issupposed to be democratic, or supposed to be trying to be democratic. The ninth century, the time of the Norse invasions, was not saintlyin the sense of being filled with saints; it was filled with piratesand petty tyrants, and the first feudal anarchy. But sanctitywas the only ideal those barbarians had, when they had any at all. And democracy is the only ideal the industrial millions have, when they have any at all. Sanctity was the light of the Dark Ages, or if you will the dream of the Dark Ages. And democracy is the dreamof the dark age of industrialism; if it be very much of a dream. It is this which prophets promise to achieve, and politicians pretendto achieve, and poets sometimes desire to achieve, and sometimesonly desire to desire. In a word, an equal citizenship is quitethe reverse of the reality in the modern world; but it is stillthe ideal in the modern world. At any rate it has no other ideal. If the figure that has alighted on the column in the Place de laBastille be indeed the spirit of liberty, it must see a million growthsin a modern city to make it wish to fly back again into heaven. But our secular society would not know what goddess to put onthe pillar in its place. As I looked at that sculptured goddess on that classical column, my mind went back another historic stage, and I asked myselfwhere this classic and republican ideal came from, and the answerwas equally clear. The place from which it had come was the placeto which I was going; Rome. And it was not until I had reached Romethat I adequately realised the next great reality that simplifiedthe whole story, and even this particular part of the story. I know nothing more abruptly arresting than that sudden steepness, as of streets scaling the sky, where stands, now cased in tile and brickand stone, that small rock that rose and overshadowed the whole earth;the Capitol. Here in the grey dawn of our history sat the strongRepublic that set her foot upon the necks of kings; and it was fromhere assuredly that the spirit of the Republic flew like an eagleto alight on that far-off pillar in the country of the Gauls. For it ought to be remembered (and it is too often forgotten)that if Paris inherited what may be called the authority of Rome, it is equally true that Rome anticipated all that is sometimescalled the anarchy of Paris. The expansion of the Roman Empirewas accompanied by a sort of permanent Roman Revolution, fully asfurious as the French Revolution. So long as the Roman system wasreally strong, it was full of riots and mobs and democratic divisions;and any number of Bastilles fell as the temple of the victories rose. But though I had but a hurried glance at such things, there wereamong them some that further aided the solution of the problem. I saw the larger achievements of the later Romans; and the lessonthat was still lacking was plainly there. I saw the Coliseum, a monument of that love of looking on at athletic sports, which is noted as a sign of decadence in the Roman Empire andof energy in the British Empire. I saw the Baths of Caracalla, witnessing to a cult of cleanliness, adduced also to prove the luxuryof Ancient Romans and the simplicity of Anglo-Saxons. All itreally proves either way is a love of washing on a large scale;which might merely indicate that Caracalla, like other Emperors, was a lunatic. But indeed what such things do indicate, if only indirectly, is something which is here much more important. They indicate not only a sincerity in the public spirit, but a certain smoothness in the public services. In a word, while there were many revolutions, there were no strikes. The citizens were often rebels; but there were men who were not rebels, because they were not citizens. The ancient world forced a numberof people to do the work of the world first, before it allowedmore privileged people to fight about the government of the world. The truth is trite enough, of course; it is in the single word Slavery, which is not the name of a crime like Simony, but rather of a schemelike Socialism. Sometimes very like Socialism. Only standing idly on one of those grassy mounds under one ofthose broken arches, I suddenly saw the Labour problem of London, as I could not see it in London. I do not mean that I saw which sidewas right, or what solution was reliable, or any partisan pointsor repartees, or any practical details about practical difficulties. I mean that I saw what it was; the thing itself and the whole thing. The Labour problem of to-day stood up quite simply, like apeak at which a man looks back and sees single and solid, though when he was walking over it it was a wilderness of rocks. The Labour problem is the attempt to have the democracy of Pariswithout the slavery of Rome. Between the Roman Republic and theFrench Republic something had happened. Whatever else it was, it wasthe abandonment of the ancient and fundamental human habit of slavery;the numbering of men for necessary labour as the normal foundationof society, even a society in which citizens were free and equal. When the idea of equal citizenship returned to the world, it foundthat world changed by a much more mysterious version of equality. So that London, handing on the lamp from Paris as well as Rome, is faced with a new problem touching the old practice of gettingthe work of the world done somehow. We have now to assume notonly that all citizens are equal, but that all men are citizens. Capitalism attempted it by combining political equality witheconomic inequality; it assumed the rich could always hire the poor. But Capitalism seems to me to have collapsed; to be not onlya discredited ethic but a bankrupt business. Whether we shallreturn to pagan slavery, or to small property, or by guildsor otherwise get to work in a new way, is not the question here. The question here was the one I asked myself standing on that greenmound beside the yellow river; and the answer to it lay ahead of me, along the road that ran towards the rising sun. What made the difference? What was it that had happenedbetween the rise of the Roman Republic and the rise of theFrench Republic? Why did the equal citizens of the first take itfor granted that there would be slaves? Why did the equal citizensof the second take it for granted that there would not be slaves?How had this immemorial institution disappeared in the interval, so that nobody even dreamed of it or suggested it? How was it thatwhen equality returned, it was no longer the equality of citizens, and had to be the equality of men? The answer is that this equalityof men is in more senses than one a mystery. It is a mystery which Ipondered as I stood in the corridor of the train going south from Rome. It was at daybreak, and (as it happened) before any one elsehad risen, that I looked out of the long row of windows acrossa great landscape grey with olives and still dark against the dawn. The dawn itself looked rather like a row of wonderful windows;a line of low casements unshuttered and shining under the eavesof cloud. There was a curious clarity about the sunrise;as if its sun might be made of glass rather than gold. It was the first time I had seen so closely and covering sucha landscape the grey convolutions and hoary foliage of the olive;and all those twisted trees went by like a dance of dragons in a dream. The rocking railway-train and the vanishing railway-line seemed to begoing due east, as if disappearing into the sun; and save for the noiseof the train there was no sound in all that grey and silver solitude;not even the sound of a bird. Yet the plantations were mostly markedout in private plots and bore every trace of the care of private owners. It is seldom, I confess, that I so catch the world asleep, nor do I know why my answer should have come to me thus when I wasmyself only half-awake. It is common in such a case to see some newsignal or landmark; but in my experience it is rather the thingsalready grown familiar that suddenly grow strange and significant. A million olives must have flashed by before I saw the first olive;the first, so to speak, which really waved the olive branch. For I remembered at last to what land I was going; and I knew the nameof the magic which had made all those peasants out of pagan slaves, and has presented to the modern world a new problem of labourand liberty. It was as if I already saw against the cloudsof daybreak that mountain which takes its title from the olive:and standing half visible upon it, a figure at which I did not look. _Ex oriente lux_; and I knew what dawn had broken over the ruins of Rome. I have taken but this one text or label, out of a hundred such, the matter of labour and liberty; and thought it worthwhile to trace it from one blatant and bewildering yellowposter in the London streets to its high places in history. But it is only one example of the way in which a thousand thingsgrouped themselves and fell into perspective as I passed farther andfarther from them, and drew near the central origins of civilisation. I do not say that I saw the solution; but I saw the problem. In the litter of journalism and the chatter of politics, it is toomuch of a puzzle even to be a problem. For instance, a friendof mine described his book, _The Path to Rome_, as a journey throughall Europe that the Faith had saved; and I might very well describemy own journey as one through all Europe that the War has saved. The trail of the actual fighting, of course, was awfullyapparent everywhere; the plantations of pale crosses seemed to cropup on every side like growing things; and the first French villagesthrough which I passed had heard in the distance, day and night, the guns of the long battle-line, like the breaking of an endlessexterior sea of night upon the very borderland of the world. I felt it most as we passed the noble towers of Amiens, so nearthe high-water mark of the high tide of barbarism, in that nightof terror just before the turning of the tide. For the truth whichthus grew clearer with travel is rightly represented by the metaphorof the artillery, as the thunder and surf of a sea beyond the world. Whatever else the war was, it was like the resistance of somethingas solid as land, and sometimes as patient and inert as land, against something as unstable as water, as weak as water; but also as_strong_ as water, as strong as water is in a cataract or a flood. It was the resistance of form to formlessness; that version orvision of it seemed to clarify itself more and more as I went on. It was the defence of that same ancient enclosure in which stoodthe broken columns of the Roman forum and the column in theParis square, and of all other such enclosures down to the domesticenclosures of my own dog and donkey. All had the same design, the marking out of a square for the experiment of liberty;of the old civic liberty or the later universal liberty. I knew, to take the domestic metaphor, that the watchdog of the Westhad again proved too strong for the wild dogs of the Orient. For the foes of such creative limits are chaos and old night, whether theyare the Northern barbarism that pitted tribal pride and brutal drillagainst the civic ideal of Paris, or the Eastern barbarism that broughtbrigands out of the wilds of Asia to sit on the throne of Byzantium. And as in the other case, what I saw was something simpler andlarger than all the disputed details about the war and the peace. A man may think it extraordinary, as I do, that the natural dissolutionof the artificial German Empire into smaller states should haveactually been prevented by its enemies, when it was already acceptedin despair by its friends. For we are now trying hard to holdthe Prussian system together, having hammered hard for four mortalyears to burst it asunder. Or he may think exactly the opposite;it makes no difference to the larger fact I have in mind. A man may think it simply topsy-turvy, as I do, that we shouldclear the Turks out of Turkey, but leave them in Constantinople. For that is driving the barbarians from their own rude tillageand pasturage, and giving up to them our own European and Christian city;it is as if the Romans annexed Parthia but surrendered Rome. But he may think exactly the opposite; and the larger and simplertruth will still be there. It was that the weeds and wildthings had been everywhere breaking into our boundaries, climbing over the northern wall or crawling through the eastern gate, so that the city would soon have been swallowed in the jungle. And whether the lines had been redrawn logically or loosely, or particular things cleared with consistency or caprice, a linehas been drawn somewhere and a clearance has been made somehow. The ancient plan of our city has been saved; a city at leastcapable of containing citizens. I felt this in the chance relicsof the war itself; I felt it twenty times more in those older relicswhich even the war had never touched at all; I felt the changeas much in the changeless East as in the ever-changing West. I felt it when I crossed another great square in Paris to lookat a certain statue, which I had last seen hung with crapeand such garlands as we give the dead; but on whose plainpedestal nothing now is left but the single word "Strasbourg. "I felt it when I saw words merely scribbled with a pencil on a wallin a poor street in Brindisi; _Italia vittoriosa_. But I felt itas much or even more in things infinitely more ancient and remote;in those monuments like mountains that still seem to look downupon all modern things. For these things were more than a trophythat had been raised, they were a palladium that had been rescued. These were the things that had again been saved from chaos, as they were saved at Salamis and Lepanto; and I knew what hadsaved them or at least in what formation they had been saved. I knew that these scattered splendours of antiquity would hardlyhave descended to us at all, to be endangered or delivered, if all that pagan world had not crystallised into Christendom. Crossing seas as smooth as pavements inlaid with turquoiseand lapis lazuli, and relieved with marble mountains as clearand famous as marble statues, it was easy to feel all that hadbeen pure and radiant even in the long evening of paganism;but that did not make me forget what strong stars had comfortedthe inevitable night. The historical moral was the same whetherthese marble outlines were merely "the isles" seen afar off likesunset clouds by the Hebrew prophets, or were felt indeed as Hellas, the great archipelago of arts and arms praised by the Greek poets;the historic heritage of both descended only to the Greek Fathers. In those wild times and places, the thing that preserved both wasthe only thing that would have permanently preserved either. It was but part of the same story when we passed the hoaryhills that held the primeval culture of Crete, and rememberedthat it may well have been the first home of the Philistines. It mattered the less by now whether the pagans were bestrepresented by Poseidon the deity or by Dagon the demon. It mattered the less what gods had blessed the Greeks in their youthand liberty; for I knew what god had blessed them in their despair. I knew by what sign they had survived the long slavery underOttoman orientalism; and upon what name they had called in the darkness, when there was no light but the horned moon of Mahound. If the glory of Greece has survived in some sense, I knew why ithad ever survived in any sense. Nor did this feeling of our fixedformation fail me when I came to the very gates of Asia and of Africa;when there rose out of the same blue seas the great harbour of Alexandria;where had shone the Pharos like the star of Hellas, and where menhad heard from the lips of Hypatia the last words of Plato. I know the Christians tore Hypatia in pieces; but they did not tearPlato in pieces. The wild men that rode behind Omar the Arab wouldhave thought nothing of tearing every page of Plato in pieces. For it is the nature of all this outer nomadic anarchy that it iscapable sooner or later of tearing anything and everything in pieces;it has no instinct of preservation or of the permanent needs of men. Where it has passed the ruins remain ruins and are not renewed;where it has been resisted and rolled back, the links of our longhistory are never lost. As I went forward the vision of ourown civilisation, in the form in which it finally found unity, grew clearer and clearer; nor did I ever know it more certainlythan when I had left it behind. For the vision was that of a shape appearing and reappearing amongshapeless things; and it was a shape I knew. The imagination was forcedto rise into altitudes infinitely ancient and dizzy with distance, as if into the cold colours of primeval dawns, or into the upperstrata and dead spaces of a daylight older than the sun and moon. But the character of that central clearance still became clearerand clearer. And my memory turned again homewards; and I thought itwas like the vision of a man flying from Northolt, over that littlemarket-place beside my own door; who can see nothing below himbut a waste as of grey forests, and the pale pattern of a cross. CHAPTER II THE WAY OF THE DESERT It may truly be said, touching the type of culture at least, that Egypt has an Egyptian lower class, a French middle class and anEnglish governing class. Anyhow it is true that the civilisationsare stratified in this formation, or superimposed in this order. It is the first impression produced by the darkness and densityof the bazaars, the line of the lighted cafes and the blazeof the big hotels. But it contains a much deeper truth in allthree cases, and especially in the case of the French influence. It is indeed one of the first examples of what I mean by the divisionsof the West becoming clearer in the ancient centres of the East. It is often said that we can only appreciate the work of England in aplace like India. In so far as this is true, it is quite equally truethat we can only appreciate the work of France in a place like Egypt. But this work is of a peculiar and even paradoxical kind. It is too practical to be prominent, and so universal thatit is unnoticed. The French view of the Rights of Man is called visionary;but in practice it is very solid and even prosaic. The French have a unique and successful trick by which Frenchthings are not accepted as French. They are accepted as human. However many foreigners played football, they would still considerfootball an English thing. But they do not consider fencinga French thing, though all the terms of it are still French. If a Frenchman were to label his hostelry an inn or a public house(probably written publicouse) we should think him a victim of ratheradvanced Anglomania. But when an Englishman calls it an hotel, we feel no special dread of him either as a dangerous foreigneror a dangerous lunatic. We need not recognise less readilythe value of this because our own distinction is different;especially as our own distinction is being more distinguished. The spirit of the English is adventure; and it is the essence of adventurethat the adventurer does remain different from the strange tribesor strange cities, which he studies because of their strangeness. He does not become like them, as did some of the Germans, or persuade them to become like him, as do most of the French. But whether we like or dislike this French capacity, or merelyappreciate it properly in its place, there can be no doubtabout the cause of that capacity. The cause is in the spiritthat is so often regarded as wildly Utopian and unreal. The cause is in the abstract creed of equality and citizenship;in the possession of a political philosophy that appeals to all men. In truth men have never looked low enough for the successof the French Revolution. They have assumed that it claimsto be a sort of divine and distant thing, and therefore havenot noticed it in the nearest and most materialistic things. They have watched its wavering in the senate and never seen itwalking in the streets; though it can be seen in the streets of Cairoas in the streets of Paris. In Cairo a man thinks it English to go into a tea-shop;but he does not think it French to go into a cafe. And the peoplewho go to the tea-shop, the English officers and officials, are stamped as English and also stamped as official. They are generally genial, they are generally generous, but theyhave the detachment of a governing group and even a garrison. They cannot be mistaken for human beings. The people going to a cafeare simply human beings going to it because it is a human place. They have forgotten how much is French and how much Egyptianin their civilisation; they simply think of it as civilisation. Now this character of the older French culture must be grasped becauseit is the clue to many things in the mystery of the modern East. I call it an old culture because as a matter of fact it runs backto the Roman culture. In this respect the Gauls really continuethe work of the Romans, in making something official which comesat last to be regarded as ordinary. And the great fundamental factwhich is incessantly forgotten and ought to be incessantly remembered, about these cities and provinces of the near East, is that theywere once as Roman as Gaul. There is a frivolous and fanciful debate I have often had with a friend, about whether it is better to find one's way or to lose it, to rememberthe road or to forget it. I am so constituted as to be capableof losing my way in my own village and almost in my own house. And I am prepared to maintain the privilege to be a poetic one. In truth I am prepared to maintain that both attitudes are valuable, and should exist side by side. And so my friend and I walk side by sidealong the ways of the world, he being full of a rich and humane sentiment, because he remembers passing that way a few hundred times sincehis childhood; while to me existence is a perpetual fairy-tale, because I have forgotten all about it. The lamp-post which moveshim to a tear of reminiscence wrings from me a cry of astonishment;and the wall which to him is as historic as a pyramid is to meas arresting and revolutionary as a barricade. Now in this, I am glad to say, my temperament is very English; and the differenceis very typical of the two functions of the English and the French. But in practical politics the French have a certain advantage in knowingwhere they are, and knowing it is where they have been before. It is in the Roman Empire. The position of the English in Egypt or even in Palestine is somethingof a paradox. The real English claim is never heard in England and neveruttered by Englishmen. We do indeed hear a number of false Englishclaims, and other English claims that are rather irrelevant than false. We hear pompous and hypocritical suggestions, full of that which sooften accompanies the sin of pride, the weakness of provinciality. We hear suggestions that the English alone can establish anywherea reign of law, justice, mercy, purity and all the rest of it. We also hear franker and fairer suggestions that the Englishhave after all (as indeed they have) embarked on a spiritedand stirring adventure; and that there has been a real romancein the extending of the British Empire in strange lands. But the real case for these semi-eastern occupations is notthat of extending the British Empire in strange lands. Rather it is restoring the Roman Empire in familiar lands. It is not merely breaking out of Europe in the searchfor something non-European. It would be much truer to callit putting Europe together again after it had been broken. It may almost be said of the Britons, considered as the mostwestern of Europeans, that they have so completely forgottentheir own history that they have forgotten even their own rights. At any rate they have forgotten the claims that could reasonably bemade for them, but which they never think of making for themselves. They have not the faintest notion, for instance, of why hundreds of yearsago an English saint was taken from Egypt, or why an English kingwas fighting in Palestine. They merely have a vague idea that Georgeof Cappadocia was naturalised much in the same way as George of Hanover. They almost certainly suppose that Coeur de Lion in his wanderingshappened to meet the King of Egypt, as Captain Cook might happento meet the King of the Cannibal Islands. To understand the pastconnection of England with the near East, it is necessary to understandsomething that lies behind Europe and even behind the Roman Empire;something that can only be conveyed by the name of the Mediterranean. When people talk, for instance, as if the Crusades were nothingmore than an aggressive raid against Islam, they seem to forgetin the strangest way that Islam itself was only an aggressiveraid against the old and ordered civilisation in these parts. I do not say it in mere hostility to the religion of Mahomet; as will beapparent later, I am fully conscious of many values and virtues in it;but certainly it was Islam that was the invasion and Christendomthat was the thing invaded. An Arabian gentleman found ridingon the road to Paris or hammering on the gates of Vienna can hardlycomplain that we have sought him out in his simple tent in the desert. The conqueror of Sicily and Spain cannot reasonably express surprise atbeing an object of morbid curiosity to the people of Italy and France. In the city of Cairo the stranger feels many of the Moslem merits, but he certainly feels the militaristic character of the Moslem glories. The crown of the city is the citadel, built by the great Saladinbut of the spoils of ancient Egyptian architecture; and that factis in its turn very symbolical. The man was a great conqueror, but he certainly behaved like an invader; he spoiled the Egyptians. He broke the old temples and tombs and built his own out of fragments. Nor is this the only respect in which the citadel of Cairo is sethigh like a sign in heaven. The sign is also significant becausefrom this superb height the traveller first beholds the desert, out of which the great conquest came. Every one has heard the great story of the Greeks who cried aloudin triumph when they saw the sea afar off; but it is a strangerexperience to see the earth afar off. And few of us, strictly speaking, have ever seen the earth at all. In cultivated countries itis always clad, as it were, in green garments. The first sightof the desert is like the sight of a naked giant in the distance. The image is all the more natural because of the particular formationwhich it takes, at least as it borders upon the fields of Egypt, and as it is seen from the high places of Cairo. Those who have seenthe desert only in pictures generally think of it as entirely flat. But this edge of it at least stands up on the horizon, as a lineof wrinkled and hollow hills like the scalps of bald men; or worse, of bald women. For it is impossible not to think of such repulsiveimages, in spite of real sublimity of the call to the imagination. There is something curiously hostile and inhuman about the firstappearance of the motionless surges of that dry and dreadful sea. Afterwards, if the traveller has happened to linger here and therein the outposts of the desert, has seen the British camp at Kantaraor the graceful French garden town of Ismalia, he comes to takethe desert as a background, and sometimes a beautiful background;a mirror of mighty reflections and changing colours almost as strangeas the colours of the sea. But when it is first seen abutting, and as it were, advancing, upon the fields and gardens of humanity, then it looks indeed like an enemy, or a long line of enemies;like a line of tawny wild beasts thus halted with their heads lifted. It is the feeling that such vain and sterile sand can yet makeitself into something like a mountain range; and the travellerremembers all the tragedies of the desert, when he lifts up his eyesto those accursed hills, from whence no help can come. But this is only a first glimpse from a city set among green fields;and is concerned rather with what the desert has been in its relationto men than with what the desert is in itself. When the mind hasgrown used to its monotony, a curious change takes place which Ihave never seen noted or explained by the students of mental science. It may sound strange to say that monotony of its nature becomes novelty. But if any one will try the common experiment of saying some ordinaryword such as "moon" or "man" about fifty times, he will findthat the expression has become extraordinary by sheer repetition. A man has become a strange animal with a name as queer as that of the gnu;and the moon something monstrous like the moon-calf. Somethingof this magic of monotony is effected by the monotony of deserts;and the traveller feels as if he had entered into a secret, and was looking at everything from another side. Something of thissimplification appears, I think, in the religions of the desert, especially in the religion of Islam. It explains something of thesuper-human hopes that fill the desert prophets concerning the future;it explains something also about their barbarous indifferenceto the past. We think of the desert and its stones as old; but in one sensethey are unnaturally new. They are unused, and perhaps unusable. They might be the raw material of a world; only they are so rawas to be rejected. It is not easy to define this quality ofsomething primitive, something not mature enough to be fruitful. Indeed there is a hard simplicity about many Eastern things that isas much crude as archaic. A palm-tree is very like a tree drawnby a child--or by a very futurist artist. Even a pyramid is likea mathematical figure drawn by a schoolmaster teaching children;and its very impressiveness is that of an ultimate Platonic abstraction. There is something curiously simple about the shape in whichthese colossal crystals of the ancient sands have been cast. It is only when we have felt something of this element, not only of simplicity, but of crudity, and even in a senseof novelty, that we can begin to understand both the immensityand the insufficiency of that power that came out of the desert, the great religion of Mahomet. In the red circle of the desert, in the dark and secret place, the prophet discovers the obvious things. I do not say itmerely as a sneer, for obvious things are very easily forgotten;and indeed every high civilisation decays by forgetting obvious things. But it is true that in such a solitude men tend to take very simpleideas as if they were entirely new ideas. There is a love ofconcentration which comes from the lack of comparison. The lonelyman looking at the lonely palm-tree does see the elementary truthsabout the palm-tree; and the elementary truths are very essential. Thus he does see that though the palm-tree may be a very simple design, it was not he who designed it. It may look like a tree drawnby a child, but he is not the child who could draw it. He has notcommand of that magic slate on which the pictures can come to life, or of that magic green chalk of which the green lines can grow. He sees at once that a power is at work in whose presencehe and the palm-tree are alike little children. In other words, he is intelligent enough to believe in God; and the Moslem, the man of the desert, is intelligent enough to believe in God. But his belief is lacking in that humane complexity that comesfrom comparison. The man looking at the palm-tree does realisethe simple fact that God made it; while the man looking atthe lamp-post in a large modern city can be persuaded by a hundredsophistical circumlocutions that he made it himself. But the manin the desert cannot compare the palm-tree with the lamp-post, or even with all the other trees which may be better worth lookingat than the lamp-post. Hence his religion, though true as faras it goes, has not the variety and vitality of the churchesthat were designed by men walking in the woods and orchards. I speak here of the Moslem type of religion and not of the oriental typeof ornament, which is much older than the Moslem type of religion. But even the oriental type of ornament, admirable as it often is, is to the ornament of a gothic cathedral what a fossil forest isto a forest full of birds. In short, the man of the desert tendsto simplify too much, and to take his first truth for the last truth. And as it is with religion so it is with morality. He who believesin the existence of God believes in the equality of man. And it hasbeen one of the merits of the Moslem faith that it felt men as men, and was not incapable of welcoming men of many different races. But here again it was so hard and crude that its very equality waslike a desert rather than a field. Its very humanity was inhuman. But though this human sentiment is rather rudimentary it is very real. When a man in the desert meets another man, he is reallya man; the proverbial two-legged fowl without feathers. He is an absolute and elementary shape, like the palm-treeor the pyramid. The discoverer does not pause to considerthrough what gradations he may have been evolved from a camel. When the man is a mere dot in the distance, the other man doesnot shout at him and ask whether he had a university education, or whether he is quite sure he is purely Teutonic and not Celticor Iberian. A man is a man; and a man is a very important thing. One thing redeems the Moslem morality which can be set over againsta mountain of crimes; a considerable deposit of common sense. And the first fact of common sense is the common bond of men. There is indeed in the Moslem character also a deep and most dangerouspotentiality of fanaticism of the menace of which something may besaid later. Fanaticism sounds like the flat contrary of common sense;yet curiously enough they are both sides of the same thing. The fanatic of the desert is dangerous precisely because he doestake his faith as a fact, and not even as a truth in our moretranscendental sense. When he does take up a mystical idea he takesit as he takes the man or the palm-tree; that is, quite literally. When he does distinguish somebody not as a man but as a Moslem, then he divides the Moslem from the non-Moslem exactly as he dividesthe man from the camel. But even then he recognises the equality of menin the sense of the equality of Moslems. He does not, for instance, complicate his conscience with any sham science about races. In this he has something like an intellectual advantage overthe Jew, who is generally so much his intellectual superior;and even in some ways his spiritual superior. The Jew has far moremoral imagination and sympathy with the subtler ideals of the soul. For instance, it is said that many Jews disbelieve in a future life;but if they did believe in a future life, it would be somethingmore worthy of the genius of Isaiah and Spinoza. The Moslem Paradiseis a very Earthly Paradise. But with all their fine apprehensions, the Jews suffer from one heavy calamity; that of being a Chosen Race. It is the vice of any patriotism or religion depending on racethat the individual is himself the thing to be worshipped;the individual is his own ideal, and even his own idol. This fancy was fatal to the Germans; it is fatal to the Anglo-Saxons, whenever any of them forswear the glorious name of Englishmenand Americans to fall into that forlorn description. This is not so when the nation is felt as a noble abstraction, of which the individual is proud in the abstract. A Frenchman is proud of France, and therefore may think himselfunworthy of France. But a German is proud of being a German;and he cannot be too unworthy to be a German when he is a German. In short, mere family pride flatters every member of the family;it produced the arrogance of the Germans, and it is capable of producinga much subtler kind of arrogance in the Jews. From this particularsort of self-deception the more savage man of the desert is free. If he is not considering somebody as a Moslem, he will considerhim as a man. At the price of something like barbarism, he hasat least been saved from ethnology. But here again the obvious is a limit as well as a light to him. It does not permit, for instance, anything fine or subtle inthe sentiment of sex. Islam asserts admirably the equality of men;but it is the equality of males. No one can deny that a nobledignity is possible even to the poorest, who has seen the Arabscoming in from the desert to the cities of Palestine or Egypt. No one can deny that men whose rags are dropping off their backs canbear themselves in a way befitting kings or prophets in the greatstories of Scripture. No one can be surprised that so many fineartists have delighted to draw such models on the spot, and to makerealistic studies for illustrations to the Old and New Testaments. On the road to Cairo one may see twenty groups exactly like thatof the Holy Family in the pictures of the Flight into Egypt;with only one difference. The man is riding on the ass. In the East it is the male who is dignified and even ceremonial. Possibly that is why he wears skirts. I pointed out long agothat petticoats, which some regard as a garb of humiliation for womenare really regarded as the only garb of magnificence for men, when they wish to be something more than men. They are worn by kings, by priests, and by judges. The male Moslem, especially in hisown family, is the king and the priest and the judge. I do not meanmerely that he is the master, as many would say of the male in manyWestern societies, especially simple and self-governing societies. I mean something more; I mean that he has not only the kingdomand the power but the glory, and even as it were the glamour. I mean he has not only the rough leadership that we often giveto the man, but the special sort of social beauty and statelinessthat we generally expect only of the woman. What we mean when wesay that an ambitious man wants to have a fine woman at the headof the dinner-table, that the Moslem world really means when it expectsto see a fine man at the head of the house. Even in the streethe is the peacock, coloured much more splendidly than the peahen. Even when clad in comparatively sober and partly European costume, as outside the cafes of Cairo and the great cities, he exhibitsthis indefinable character not merely of dignity but of pomp. It can be traced even in the tarbouch, the minimum of Turkishattire worn by all the commercial classes; the thing more commonlycalled in England a fez. The fez is not a sort of smoking cap. It is a tower of scarlet often tall enough to be the head-dressof a priest. And it is a hat one cannot take off to a lady. This fact is familiar enough in talk about Moslem and orientallife generally; but I only repeat it in order to refer it backto the same simplification which is the advantage and disadvantageof the philosophy of the desert. Chivalry is not an obvious idea. It is not as plain as a pike-staff or as a palm-tree. It is a delicatebalance between the sexes which gives the rarest and most poetickind of pleasure to those who can strike it. But it is notself-evident to a savage merely because he is also a sane man. It often seems to him as much a part of his own coarse common sensethat all the fame and fun should go to the sex that is strongerand less tied, as that all the authority should go to the parentsrather than the children. Pity for weakness he can understand;and the Moslem is quite capable of giving royal alms to a crippleor an orphan. But reverence for weakness is to him simply meaningless. It is a mystical idea that is to him no more than a mystery. But the same is true touching what may be called the lighter side ofthe more civilised sentiment. This hard and literal view of life givesno place for that slight element of a magnanimous sort of play-acting, which has run through all our tales of true lovers in the West. Wherever there is chivalry there is courtesy; and wherever thereis courtesy there is comedy. There is no comedy in the desert. Another quite logical and consistent element, in the very logicaland consistent creed we call Mahometanism, is the elementthat we call Vandalism. Since such few and obvious things aloneare vital, and since a half-artistic half-antiquarian affectionis not one of these things, and cannot be called obvious, it is largely left out. It is very difficult to say in a fewwell-chosen words exactly what is now the use of the Pyramids. Therefore Saladin, the great Saracen warrior, simply strippedthe Pyramids to build a military fortress on the heights of Cairo. It is a little difficult to define exactly what is a man's duty tothe Sphinx; and therefore the Mamelukes used it entirely as a target. There was little in them of that double feeling, full of pathos and irony, which divided the hearts of the primitive Christians in presence ofthe great pagan literature and art. This is not concerned with brutaloutbreaks of revenge which may be found on both sides, or with chivalrouscaprices of toleration, which may also be found on both sides;it is concerned with the inmost mentality of the two religions, which must be understood in order to do justice to either. The Moslem mind never tended to that mystical mode of "loving yet leaving"with which Augustine cried aloud upon the ancient beauty, or Dantesaid farewell to Virgil when he left him in the limbo of the pagans. The Moslem traditions, unlike the medieval legends, do not suggestthe image of a knight who kissed Venus before he killed her. We see in all the Christian ages this combination which is nota compromise, but rather a complexity made by two contrary enthusiasms;as when the Dark Ages copied out the pagan poems while denyingthe pagan legends; or when the popes of the Renascenceimitated the Greek temples while denying the Greek gods. This high inconsistency is inconsistent with Islam. Islam, as Ihave said, takes everything literally, and does not know how to playwith anything. And the cause of the contrast is the historicalcause of which we must be conscious in all studies of this kind. The Christian Church had from a very early date the idea ofreconstructing a whole civilisation, and even a complex civilisation. It was the attempt to make a new balance, which differed from the oldbalance of the stoics of Rome; but which could not afford to loseits balance any more than they. It differed because the old systemwas one of many religions under one government, while the newwas one of many governments under one religion. But the ideaof variety in unity remained though it was in a sense reversed. A historical instinct made the men of the new Europe try hardto find a place for everything in the system, however much mightbe denied to the individual. Christians might lose everything, but Christendom, if possible, must not lose anything. The verynature of Islam, even at its best, was quite different from this. Nobody supposed, even subconsciously, that Mahomet meant to restoreancient Babylon as medievalism vaguely sought to restore ancient Rome. Nobody thought that the builders of the Mosque of Omar had lookedat the Pyramids as the builders of St. Peter's might have lookedat the Parthenon. Islam began at the beginning; it was content withthe idea that it had a great truth; as indeed it had a colossal truth. It was so huge a truth that it was hard to see it was a half-truth. Islam was a movement; that is why it has ceased to move. For a movement can only be a mood. It may be a very necessary movementarising from a very noble mood, but sooner or later it must find itslevel in a larger philosophy, and be balanced against other things. Islam was a reaction towards simplicity; it was a violent simplification, which turned out to be an over-simplification. Stevenson has somewhereone of his perfectly picked phrases for an empty-minded man;that he has not one thought to rub against another while he waitsfor a train. The Moslem had one thought, and that a most vital one;the greatness of God which levels all men. But the Moslem had not onethought to rub against another, because he really had not another. It is the friction of two spiritual things, of tradition and invention, or of substance and symbol, from which the mind takes fire. The creeds condemned as complex have something like the secret of sex;they can breed thoughts. An idealistic intellectual remarked recently that there werea great many things in the creed for which he had no use. He might just as well have said that there were a great manythings in the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ for which he had no use. It would probably have occurred to him that the work in questionwas meant for humanity and not for him. But even in the caseof the _Encyclopedia_, it will often be found a stimulatingexercise to read two articles on two widely different subjectsand note where they touch. In fact there is really a great dealto be said for the man in _Pickwick_ who read first about Chinaand then about metaphysics and combined his information. But however this may be in the famous case of Chinese metaphysics, it is this which is chiefly lacking in Arabian metaphysics. They suffer, as I have said of the palm-tree in the desert, from a lack of the vitality that comes from complexity, and of the complexity that comes from comparison. They sufferfrom having been in a single movement in a single direction;from having begun as a mood and ended rather as a mode, that is a mere custom or fashion. But any modern Christian thuscriticising the Moslem movement will do well to criticise himselfand his world at the same time. For in truth most modern thingsare mere movements in the same sense as the Moslem movement. They are at best fashions, in which one thing is exaggeratedbecause it has been neglected. They are at worst mere monomanias, in which everything is neglected that one thing may be exaggerated. Good or bad, they are alike movements which in their nature can onlymove for a certain distance and then stop. Feminism, for instance, is in its nature a movement, and one that must stop somewhere. But the Suffragettes no more established a philosophy of the sexesby their feminism than the Arabs did by their anti-feminism. A womancan find her home on the hustings even less than in the harem;but such movements do not really attempt to find a final home foranybody or anything. Bolshevism is a movement; and in my opiniona very natural and just movement considered as a revolt againstthe crude cruelty of Capitalism. But when we find the Bolshevistsmaking a rule that the drama "must encourage the proletarian spirit, "it is obvious that those who say so are not only maniacs but, what is more to the point here, are monomaniacs. Imagine havingto apply that principle, let us say, to "Charley's Aunt. "None of these things seek to establish a complete philosophysuch as Aquinas founded on Aristotle. The only two modern menwho attempted it were Comte and Herbert Spencer. Spencer, I think, was too small a man to do it at all; and Comte was a great enoughman to show how difficult it is to do it in modern times. None of these movements can do anything but move; they have notdiscovered where to rest. And this fact brings us back to the man of the desert, who movesand does not rest; but who has many superiorities to the restlessraces of the industrial city. Men who have been in the Manchestermovement in 1860 and the Fabian movement in 1880 cannot sneerat a religious mood that lasted for eight hundred years. And those who tolerate the degraded homelessness of the slumscannot despise the much more dignified homelessness of the desert. Nevertheless, the thing is a homelessness and not a home; and thereruns through it all the note of the nomad. The Moslem takes literally, as he takes everything, the truth that here we have no abiding city. He can see no meaning in the mysticism of materialism, the sacramental idea that a French poet expressed so nobly, when he said that our earthly city is the body of the city of God. He has no true notion of building a house, or in our Westernsense of recognising the kindred points of heaven and home. Even the exception to this rule is an exception at once terribleand touching. There is one house that the Moslem does buildlike a house and even a home, often with walls and roof and door;as square as a cottage, as solid as a fort. And that is his grave. A Moslem cemetery is literally like a little village. It is a village, as the saying goes, that one would not care to walk through at night. There is something singularly creepy about so strange a streetof houses, each with a door that might be opened by a dead man. But in a less fanciful sense, there is about it something profoundlypathetic and human. Here indeed is the sailor home from sea, in the only port he will consent to call his home; here at lastthe nomad confesses the common need of men. But even about thisthere broods the presence of the desert and its dry bones of reason. He will accept nothing between a tent and a tomb. The philosophy of the desert can only begin over again. It cannot grow; it cannot have what Protestants call progressand Catholics call development. There is death and hellin the desert when it does begin over again. There is alwaysthe possibility that a new prophet will rediscover the old truth;will find again written on the red sands the secret of the obvious. But it will always be the same secret, for which thousandsof these simple and serious and splendidly valiant men will die. The highest message of Mahomet is a piece of divine tautology. The very cry that God is God is a repetition of words, like therepetitions of wide sands and rolling skies. The very phrase is likean everlasting echo, that can never cease to say the same sacred word;and when I saw afterwards the mightiest and most magnificentof all the mosques of that land, I found that its inscriptionshad the same character of a deliberate and defiant sameness. The ancient Arabic alphabet and script is itself at once so elegantand so exact that it can be used as a fixed ornament, like the eggand dart pattern or the Greek key. It is as if we could makea heraldry of handwriting, or cover a wall-paper with signatures. But the literary style is as recurrent as the decorative style;perhaps that is why it can be used as a decorative style. Phrases are repeated again and again like ornamental stars or flowers. Many modern people, for example, imagine that the Athanasian Creedis full of vain repetitions; but that is because people are too lazyto listen to it, or not lucid enough to understand it. The sameterms are used throughout, as they are in a proposition of Euclid. But the steps are all as differentiated and progressive as in aproposition of Euclid. But in the inscriptions of the Mosque wholesentences seem to occur, not like the steps of an argument, but ratherlike the chorus of a song. This is the impression everywhere producedby this spirit of the sandy wastes; this is the voice of the desert, though the muezzin cries from the high turrets of the city. Indeed one is driven to repeating oneself about the repetition, so overpowering is the impression of the tall horizons of thosetremendous plains, brooding upon the soul with all the solemn weightof the self-evident. There is indeed another aspect of the desert, yet more ancientand momentous, of which I may speak; but here I only dealwith its effect on this great religion of simplicity. For it isthrough the atmosphere of that religion that a man makes his way, as so many pilgrims have done, to the goal of this pilgrimage. Also this particular aspect remained the more sharply in my memorybecause of the suddenness with which I escaped from it. I had notexpected the contrast; and it may have coloured all my after experiences. I descended from the desert train at Ludd, which had all the lookof a large camp in the desert; appropriately enough perhaps, for it is the traditional birthplace of the soldier St. George. At the moment, however, there was nothing rousing or romanticabout its appearance. It was perhaps unusually dreary; for heavyrain had fallen; and the water stood about in what it is easierto call large puddles than anything so poetic as small pools. A motor car sent by friends had halted beside the platform;I got into it with a not unusual vagueness about where Iwas going; and it wound its way up miry paths to a more rollingstretch of country with patches of cactus here and there. And then with a curious abruptness I became conscious thatthe whole huge desert had vanished, and I was in a new land. The dark red plains had rolled away like an enormous nightmare;and I found myself in a fresh and exceedingly pleasant dream. I know it will seem fanciful; but for a moment I really felt as if Ihad come home; or rather to that home behind home for which weare all homesick. The lost memory of it is the life at onceof faith and of fairy-tale. Groves glowing with oranges rose behindhedges of grotesque cactus or prickly pear; which really lookedlike green dragons guarding the golden apples of the Hesperides. On each side of the road were such flowers as I had never seenbefore under the sun; for indeed they seemed to have the sun in themrather than the sun on them. Clusters and crowds of crimson anemoneswere of a red not to be symbolised in blood or wine; but ratherin the red glass that glows in the window dedicated to a martyr. Only in a wild Eastern tale could one picture a pilgrim ortraveller finding such a garden in the desert; and I thoughtof the oldest tale of all and the garden from which we came. But there was something in it yet more subtle; which there mustbe in the impression of any earthly paradise. It is vital to sucha dream that things familiar should be mixed with things fantastic;as when an actual dream is filled with the faces of old friends. Sparrows, which seem to be the same all over the world, were dartinghither and thither among the flowers; and I had the fancy that theywere the souls of the town-sparrows of London and the smoky cities, and now gone wherever the good sparrows go. And a little wayup the road before me, on the hill between the cactus hedges, I saw a grey donkey trotting; and I could almost have sworn that itwas the donkey I had left at home. He was trotting on ahead of me, and the outline of his erectand elfish ears was dark against the sky. He was evidentlygoing somewhere with great determination; and I thought I knewto what appropriate place he was going, and that it was my fateto follow him like a moving omen. I lost sight of him later, for I had to complete the journey by train; but the train followedthe same direction, which was up steeper and steeper hills. I began to realise more clearly where I was; and to know thatthe garden in the desert that had bloomed so suddenly about mehad borne for many desert wanderers the name of the promised land. As the rocks rose higher and higher on every side, and hungover us like terrible and tangible clouds, I saw in the dim grassof the slopes below them something I had never seen before. It was a rainbow fallen upon the earth, with no part of itagainst the sky, but only the grasses and the flowers shiningthrough its fine shades of fiery colour. I thought this also waslike an omen; and in such a mood of idle mysticism there fellon me another accident which I was content to count for a third. For when the train stopped at last in the rain, and there was no othervehicle for the last lap of the journey, a very courteous officer, an army surgeon, gave me a seat in an ambulance wagon; and it wasunder the shield of the red cross that I entered Jerusalem. For suddenly, between a post of the wagon and a wrack of rainy cloudI saw it, uplifted and withdrawn under all the arching heavensof its history, alone with its benediction and its blasphemy, the city that is set upon a hill, and cannot be hid. CHAPTER III THE GATES OF THE CITY The men I met coming from Jerusalem reported all sorts ofcontradictory impressions; and yet my own impression contradictedthem all. Their impressions were doubtless as true as mine;but I describe my own because it is true, and because I think itpoints to a neglected truth about the real Jerusalem. I need not sayI did not expect the real Jerusalem to be the New Jerusalem; a cityof charity and peace, any more than a city of chrysolite and pearl. I might more reasonably have expected an austere and ascetic place, oppressed with the weight of its destiny, with no inns except monasteries, and these sealed with the terrible silence of the Trappists;an awful city where men speak by signs in the street. I did not need the numberless jokes about Jerusalem to-day, to warn me against expecting this; anyhow I did not expect it, and certainly I did not find it. But neither did I find what Iwas much more inclined to expect; something at the other extreme. Many reports had led me to look for a truly cosmopolitan town, that is a truly conquered town. I looked for a place like Cairo, containing indeed old and interesting things, but open on every sideto new and vulgar things; full of the touts who seem only createdfor the tourists and the tourists who seem only created for the touts. There may be more of this in the place than pleases thosewho would idealise it. But I fancy there is much less of itthan is commonly supposed in the reaction from such an ideal. It does not, like Cairo, offer the exciting experience of twentyguides fighting for one traveller; of young Turks drinking Americancocktails as a protest against Christian wine. The town is quiteinconvenient enough to make it a decent place for pilgrims. Or a stranger might have imagined a place even less Western than Cairo, one of those villages of Palestine described in dusty old booksof Biblical research. He might remember drawings like diagramsrepresenting a well or a wine-press, rather a dry well, so to speak, and a wine-press very difficult to associate with wine. These hardcolourless outlines never did justice to the colour of the East, but evento give it the colour of the East would not do justice to Jerusalem. If I had anticipated the Bagdad of all our dreams, a maze of bazaarsglowing with gorgeous wares, I should have been wrong again. There is quite enough of this vivid and varied colour in Jerusalem, but it is not the first fact that arrests the attention, and certainly not the first that arrested mine. I give my own firstimpression as a fact, for what it is worth and exactly as it came. I did not expect it, and it was some time before I even understood it. As soon as I was walking inside the walls of Jerusalem, I hadan overwhelming impression that I was walking in the town of Rye, where it looks across the flat sea-meadows towards Winchelsea. As I tried to explain this eccentric sentiment to myself, I wasconscious of another which at once completed and contradicted it. It was not only like a memory of Rye, it was mixed with a memoryof the Mount St. Michael, which stands among the sands ofNormandy on the other side of the narrow seas. The first partof the sensation is that the traveller, as he walks the stonystreets between the walls, feels that he is inside a fortress. But it is the paradox of such a place that, while he feels in a sensethat he is in a prison, he also feels that he is on a precipice. The sense of being uplifted, and set on a high place, comes to himthrough the smallest cranny, or most accidental crack in rockor stone; it comes to him especially through those long narrowwindows in the walls of the old fortifications; those slitsin the stone through which the medieval archers used their bowsand the medieval artists used their eyes, with even greater success. Those green glimpses of fields far below or of flats far away, which delight us and yet make us dizzy (by being both near and far)when seen through the windows of Memling, can often be seen fromthe walls of Jerusalem. Then I remembered that in the same stripsof medieval landscape could be seen always, here and there, a steephill crowned with a city of towers. And I knew I had the mysticaland double pleasure of seeing such a hill and standing on it. A city that is set upon a hill cannot be hid; but it is morestrange when the hill cannot anywhere be hid, even from the citizenin the city. Then indeed I knew that what I saw was Jerusalem of the Crusaders;or at least Jerusalem of the Crusades. It was a medieval town, with wallsand gates and a citadel, and built upon a hill to be defended by bowmen. The greater part of the actual walls now standing were built by Moslemslate in the Middle Ages; but they are almost exactly like the wallsthat were being built by the Christians at or before that time. The Crusader Edward, afterwards Edward the First, reared suchbattlements far away among the rainy hills of Wales. I do not knowwhat elements were originally Gothic or what originally Saracenic. The Crusaders and the Saracens constantly copied each other whilethey combated each other; indeed it is a fact always to be foundin such combats. It is one of the arguments against war that arereally human, and therefore are never used by humanitarians. The curse of war is that it does lead to more international imitation;while in peace and freedom men can afford to have national variety. But some things in this country were certainly copied fromthe Christian invaders, and even if they are not Christian theyare in many ways strangely European. The wall and gates whichnow stand, whatever stood before them and whatever comes after them, carry a memory of those men from the West who came here uponthat wild adventure, who climbed this rock and clung to it soperilously from the victory of Godfrey to the victory of Saladin;and that is why this momentary Eastern exile reminded me so strangelyof the hill of Rye and of home. I do not forget, of course, that all these visible walls and towersare but the battlements and pinnacles of a buried city, or of manyburied cities. I do not forget that such buildings have foundationsthat are to us almost like fossils; the gigantic fossils of someother geological epoch. Something may be said later of those lostempires whose very masterpieces are to us like petrified monsters. From this height, after long histories unrecorded, fell the forgottenidol of the Jebusites, on that day when David's javelin-menscaled the citadel and carried through it, in darkness behind hiscoloured curtains, the god whose image had never been made by man. Here was waged that endless war between the graven gods of the plainand the invisible god of the mountain; from here the hosts carryingthe sacred fish of the Philistines were driven back to the seafrom which their worship came. Those who worshipped on this hillhad come out of bondage in Egypt and went into bondage in Babylon;small as was their country, there passed before them almost the wholepageant of the old pagan world. All its strange shapes and strongalmost cruel colours remain in the records of their prophets;whose lightest phrase seems heavier than the pyramids of Egypt;and whose very words are like winged bulls walking. All this historic orpre-historic interest may be touched on in its turn; but I am not dealinghere with the historic secrets unearthed by the study of the place, but with the historic associations aroused by the sight of it. The traveller is in the position of that famous fantastic who tiedhis horse to a wayside cross in the snow, and afterward saw itdangling from the church-spire of what had been a buried city. But here the cross does not stand as it does on the top of a spire;but as it does on the top of an Egyptian obelisk in Rome, --where the priests have put a cross on the top of the heathen monument;for fear it should walk. I entirely sympathise with their sentiment;and I shall try to suggest later why I think that symbolthe logical culmination of heathen as well as Christian things. The traveller in the traveller's tale looked up at last and saw, from the streets far below, the spire and cross dominating a Gothic city. If I looked up in a vision and saw it dominating a Babylonian city, that blocked the heavens with monstrous palaces and temples, I should still think it natural that it should dominate. But the point here is that what I saw above ground was rather the Gothictown than the Babylonian; and that it reminded me, if not speciallyof the cross, at least of the soldiers who took the cross. Nor do I forget the long centuries that have passed over the placesince these medieval walls were built, any more than the farmore interesting centuries that passed before they were built. But any one taking exception to the description on that groundmay well realise, on consideration, that it is an exceptionthat proves the rule. There is something very negative aboutTurkish rule; and the best and worst of it is in the word neglect. Everything that lived under the vague empire of Constantinopleremained in a state of suspended animation like something frozenrather than decayed, like something sleeping rather than dead. It was a sort of Arabian spell, like that which turned princesand princesses into marble statues in the _Arabian Nights_. All that part of the history of the place is a kind of sleep;and that of a sleeper who hardly knows if he has slept an hour or ahundred years. When I first found myself in the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem, my eye happened to fall on something that might be seen anywhere, but which seemed somehow to have a curious significance there. Most people are conscious of some common object which stillstrikes them as uncommon; as if it were the first fantastic sketchin the sketch-book of nature. I myself can never overcome the senseof something almost unearthly about grass growing upon human buildings. There is in it a wild and even horrible fancy, as if houses couldgrow hair. When I saw that green hair on the huge stone blocks ofthe citadel, though I had seen the same thing on any number of ruins, it came to me like an omen or a vision, a curious vision at onceof chaos and of sleep. It is said that the grass will not growwhere the Turk sets his foot; but it is the other side of the sametruth to say that it would grow anywhere but where it ought to grow. And though in this case it was but an accident and a symbol, it was a very true symbol. We talk of the green banner of the Turkhaving been planted on this or that citadel; and certainly itwas so planted with splendid valour and sensational victory. But this is the green banner that he plants on all his high citiesin the end. Therefore my immediate impression of the walls and gates wasnot contradicted by my consciousness of what came before andwhat came after that medieval period. It remained primarilya thing of walls and gates; a thing which the modern worlddoes not perhaps understand so well as the medieval world. There is involved in it all that idea of definition which those who donot like it are fond of describing as dogma. A wall is like rule;and the gates are like the exceptions that prove the rule. The man making it has to decide where his rule will runand where his exception shall stand. He cannot have a citythat is all gates any more than a house that is all windows;nor is it possible to have a law that consists entirely of liberties. The ancient races and religions that contended for this city agreedwith each other in this, when they differed about everything else. It was true of practically all of them that when they built a city theybuilt a citadel. That is, whatever strange thing they may have made, they regarded it as something to be defined and to be defended. And from this standpoint the holy city was a happy city;it had no suburbs. That is to say, there are all sortsof buildings outside the wall; but they are outside the wall. Everybody is conscious of being inside or outside a boundary; but itis the whole character of the true suburbs which grow round our greatindustrial towns that they grow, as it were, unconsciously and blindly, like grass that covers up a boundary line traced on the earth. This indefinite expansion is controlled neither by the soul of the cityfrom within, nor by the resistance of the lands round about. It destroysat once the dignity of a town and the freedom of a countryside. The citizens are too new and numerous for citizenship; yet theynever learn what there is to be learned of the ancient traditionsof agriculture. The first sight of the sharp outline of Jerusalemis like a memory of the older types of limitation and liberty. Happy is the city that has a wall; and happier still if itis a precipice. Again, Jerusalem might be called a city of staircases. Many streets are steep and most actually cut into steps. It is, I believe, an element in the controversy about the caveat Bethlehem traditionally connected with the Nativitythat the sceptics doubt whether any beasts of burden couldhave entered a stable that has to be reached by such steps. And indeed to any one in a modern city like London or Liverpoolit may well appear odd, like a cab-horse climbing a ladder. But as a matter of fact, if the asses and goats of Jerusalemcould not go up and downstairs, they could not go anywhere. However this may be, I mention the matter here merely as adding anothertouch to that angular profile which is the impression involved here. Strangely enough, there is something that leads up to this impressioneven in the labyrinth of mountains through which the road windsits way to the city. The hills round Jerusalem are themselvesoften hewn out in terraces, like a huge stairway. This is mostlyfor the practical and indeed profitable purpose of vineyards;and serves for a reminder that this ancient seat of civilisationhas not lost the tradition of the mercy and the glory of the vine. But in outline such a mountain looks much like the mountainof Purgatory that Dante saw in his vision, lifted in terraces, like titanic steps up to God. And indeed this shape also is symbolic;as symbolic as the pointed profile of the Holy City. For a creed is like a ladder, while an evolution is only like a slope. A spiritual and social evolution is generally a pretty slippery slope;a miry slope where it is very easy to slide down again. Such is something like the sharp and even abrupt impression producedby this mountain city; and especially by its wall with gateslike a house with windows. A gate, like a window, is primarilya picture-frame. The pictures that are found within the frame areindeed very various and sometimes very alien. Within this frame-workare indeed to be found things entirely Asiatic, or entirely Moslem, or even entirely nomadic. But Jerusalem itself is not nomadic. Nothing could be less like a mere camp of tents pitched by Arabs. Nothing could be less like the mere chaos of colour in a temporaryand tawdry bazaar. The Arabs are there and the colours are there, and they make a glorious picture; but the picture is in a Gothic frame, and is seen so to speak through a Gothic window. And the meaning of allthis is the meaning of all windows, and especially of Gothic windows. It is that even light itself is most divine within limits;and that even the shining one is most shining, when he takes uponhimself a shape. Such a system of walls and gates, like many other things thought rudeand primitive, is really very rationalistic. It turns the town, as it were, into a plan of itself, and even into a guide to itself. This is especially true, as may be suggested in a moment, regarding the direction of the roads leading out of it. But anyhow, a man must decide which way he will leave the city;he cannot merely drift out of the city as he drifts out of the moderncities through a litter of slums. And there is no better way to geta preliminary plan of the city than to follow the wall and fix the gatesin the memory. Suppose, for instance, that a man begins in the southwith the Zion Gate, which bears the ancient name of Jerusalem. This, to begin with, will sharpen the medieval and even the Westernimpression first because it is here that he has the strongestsentiment of threading the narrow passages of a great castle;but also because the very name of the gate was given to this south-westernhill by Godfrey and Tancred during the period of the Latin kingdom. I believe it is one of the problems of the scholars why the Latinconquerors called this hill the Zion Hill, when the other is obviouslythe sacred hill. Jerusalem is traditionally divided into four hills, but for practical purposes into two; the lower eastern hill wherestood the Temple, and now stands the great Mosque, and the westernwhere is the citadel and the Zion Gate to the south of it. I know nothing of such questions; and I attach no importance tothe notion that has crossed my own mind, and which I only mentionin passing, for I have no doubt there are a hundred objections to it. But it is known that Zion or Sion was the old name of the placebefore it was stormed by David; and even afterwards the Jebusitesremained on this western hill, and some compromise seems to havebeen made with them. Is it conceivable, I wonder, that even inthe twelfth century there lingered some local memory of what hadonce been a way of distinguishing Sion of the Jebusites from Salemof the Jews? The Zion Gate, however, is only a starting-point here;if we go south-eastward from it we descend a steep and rocky path, from which can be caught the first and finest vision of what standson the other hill to the east. The great Mosque of Omar standsup like a peacock, lustrous with mosaics that are like plumesof blue and green. Scholars, I may say here, object to calling it the Mosque of Omar;on the petty and pedantic ground that it is not a mosque and wasnot built by Omar. But it is my fixed intention to call itthe Mosque of Omar, and with ever renewed pertinacity to continuecalling it the Mosque of Omar. I possess a special permit fromthe Grand Mufti to call it the Mosque of Omar. He is the headof the whole Moslem religion, and if he does not know, who does?He told me, in the beautiful French which matches his beautiful manners, that it really is not so ridiculous after all to call the placethe Mosque of Omar, since the great Caliph desired and even designedsuch a building, though he did not build it. I suppose it israther as if Solomon's Temple had been called David's Temple. Omar was a great man and the Mosque was a great work, and the two weretelescoped together by the excellent common sense of vulgar tradition. There could not be a better example of that great truth forall travellers; that popular tradition is never so right as when itis wrong; and that pedantry is never so wrong as when it is right. And as for the other objection, that the Dome of the Rock(to give it its other name) is not actually used as a Mosque, Ianswer that Westminster Abbey is not used as an Abbey. But modern Englishmen would be much surprised if I were to refer to itas Westminster Church; to say nothing of the many modern Englishmenfor whom it would be more suitable to call it Westminster Museum. And for whatever purposes the Moslems may actually use theirgreat and glorious sanctuary, at least they have not allowedit to become the private house of a particular rich man. And that is what we have suffered to happen, if not to Westminster Abbey, at least to Welbeck Abbey. The Mosque of Omar (I repeat firmly) stands on the great easternplateau in place of the Temple; and the wall that runs roundto it on the south side of the city contains only the Dung Gate, on which the fancy need not linger. All along outside thiswall the ground falls away into the southern valley; and uponthe dreary and stony steep opposite is the place called Acaldama. Wall and valley turn together round the corner of the greattemple platform, and confronting the eastern wall, across the ravine, is the mighty wall of the Mount of Olives. On this side thereare several gates now blocked up, of which the most famous, the Golden Gate, carries in its very uselessness a testimonyto the fallen warriors of the cross. For there is a strangeMoslem legend that through this gate, so solemnly sealed up, shall ride the Christian King who shall again rule in Jerusalem. In the middle of the square enclosure rises the great dark Domeof the Rock; and standing near it, a man may see for the first timein the distance, another dome. It lies away to the west, but a littleto the north; and it is surmounted, not by a crescent but a cross. Many heroes and holy kings have desired to see this thing, and have not seen it. It is very characteristic of the city, with its medieval medley and huddleof houses, that a man may first see the Church of the Holy Sepulchrewhich is in the west, by going as far as possible to the east. All the sights are glimpses; and things far can be visible and thingsnear invisible. The traveller comes on the Moslem dome round a corner;and he finds the Christian dome, as it were, behind his own back. But if he goes on round the wall to the north-east corner of the Courtof the Temple, he will find the next entrance; the Gate of St. Stephen. On the slope outside, by a strange and suitable coincidence, the loose stones which lie on every side of the mountain cityseemed to be heaped higher; and across the valley on the skirtsof the Mount of Olives is the great grey olive of Gethsemane. On the northern side the valley turns to an artificial trench, for the ground here is higher; and the next or northern gate bearsthe name of Herod; though it might well bear the name eitherof Godfrey or Saladin. For just outside it stands a pine-tree, and beside it a rude bulk of stone; where stood these greatcaptains in turn, before they took Jerusalem. Then the wall runson till it comes to the great Damascus Gate, graven I know notwhy with great roses in a style wholly heraldic and occidental, and in no way likely to remind us of the rich roses of Damascus;though their name has passed into our own English tongue and tradition, along with another word for the delicate decoration of the sword. But at the first glance, at any rate, it is hard to believe thatthe roses on the walls are not the Western roses of York or Lancaster, or that the swords which guarded them were not the straight swordsof England or of France. Doubtless a deeper and more solemn memoryought to return immediately to the mind where that gate looks downthe great highway; as if one could see, hung over it in the sky for ever, the cloud concealing the sunburst that broods upon the road to Damascus. But I am here only confessing the facts or fancies of my first impression;and again the fancy that came to me first was not of any suchalien or awful things. I did not think of damask or damasceneor the great Arabian city or even the conversion of St. Paul. I thought of my own little house in Buckinghamshire, and how the edgeof the country town where it stands is called Aylesbury End, merely because it is the corner nearest to Aylesbury. That is what I mean by saying that these ancient customs are morerational and even utilitarian than the fashions of modernity. When a street in a new suburb is called Pretoria Avenue, the clerkliving there does not set out from his villa with the cheerful hopeof finding the road lead him to Pretoria. But the man leavingAylesbury End does know it would lead him to Aylesbury; and the mangoing out at the Damascus Gate did know it would lead him to Damascus. And the same is true of the next and last of the old entrances, the Jaffa Gate in the east; but when I saw that I saw somethingelse as well. I have heard that there is a low doorway at the entrance to a famousshrine which is called the Gate of Humility; but indeed in this senseall gates are gates of humility, and especially gates of this kind. Any one who has ever looked at a landscape under an archwaywill know what I mean, when I say that it sharpens a pleasurewith a strange sentiment of privilege. It adds to the graceof distance something that makes it not only a grace but a gift. Such are the visions of remote places that appear in the low gatewaysof a Gothic town; as if each gateway led into a separate world;and almost as if each dome of sky were a different chamber. But he who walks round the walls of this city in this spirit will comesuddenly upon an exception which will surprise him like an earthquake. It looks indeed rather like something done by an earthquake;an earthquake with a half-witted sense of humour. Immediately atthe side of one of these humble and human gateways there is a great gapin the wall, with a wide road running through it. There is somethingof unreason in the sight which affects the eye as well as the reason. It recalls some crazy tale about the great works of the Wise Menof Gotham. It suggests the old joke about the man who madea small hole for the kitten as well as a large hole for the cat. Everybody has read about it by this time; but the immediate impressionof it is not merely an effect of reading or even of reasoning. It looks lop-sided; like something done by a one-eyed giant. But it was done by the last prince of the great Prussian imperial system, in what was probably the proudest moment in all his life of pride. What is true has a way of sounding trite; and what is trite hasa way of sounding false. We shall now probably weary the worldwith calling the Germans barbaric, just as we very recently weariedthe world with calling them cultured and progressive and scientific. But the thing is true though we say it a thousand times. And any one whowishes to understand the sense in which it is true has only to contemplatethat fantasy and fallacy in stone; a gate with an open road beside it. The quality I mean, however, is not merely in that particular contrast;as of a front door standing by itself in an open field. It is also in the origin, the occasion and the whole story of the thing. There is above all this supreme stamp of the barbarian; the sacrificeof the permanent to the temporary. When the walls of the Holy Citywere overthrown for the glory of the German Emperor, it was hardlyeven for that everlasting glory which has been the vision andthe temptation of great men. It was for the glory of a single day. It was something rather in the nature of a holiday than anythingthat could be even in the most vainglorious sense a heritage. It did not in the ordinary sense make a monument, or even a trophy. It destroyed a monument to make a procession. We might almost saythat it destroyed a trophy to make a triumph. There is the truebarbaric touch in this oblivion of what Jerusalem would look like acentury after, or a year after, or even the day after. It is thiswhich distinguishes the savage tribe on the march after a victory fromthe civilised army establishing a government, even if it be a tyranny. Hence the very effect of it, like the effect of the whole Prussianadventure in history, remains something negative and even nihilistic. The Christians made the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Moslemsmade the Mosque of Omar; but this is what the most scientificculture made at the end of the great century of science. It made an enormous hole. The only positive contribution ofthe nineteenth century to the spot is an unnaturally ugly clock, at the top of an ornamental tower, or a tower that was meant tobe ornamental. It was erected, I believe, to commemorate the reignof Abdul Hamid; and it seems perfectly adapted to its purpose, like one of Sir William Watson's sonnets on the same subject. But this object only adds a touch of triviality to the much moretremendous negative effect of the gap by the gate. That remains a parableas well as a puzzle, under all the changing skies of day and night;with the shadows that gather tinder the narrow Gate of Humility;and beside it, blank as daybreak and abrupt as an abyss, the broadroad that has led already to destruction. The gap remains like a gash, a sort of wound in the walls; but itonly strengthens by contrast the general sense of their continuity. Save this one angle where the nineteenth century has entered, the vague impression of the thirteenth or fourteenth century ratherdeepens than dies away. It is supported more than many would supposeeven by the figures that appear in the gateways or pass in processionunder the walls. The brown Franciscans and the white Dominicanswould alone give some colour to a memory of the Latin kingdomof Jerusalem; and there are other examples and effects which areless easily imagined in the West. Thus as I look down the street, I see coming out from under an archway a woman wearing a high whitehead-dress very like those we have all seen in a hundred picturesof tournaments or hunting parties, or the Canterbury Pilgrimageor the Court of Louis XI. She is as white as a woman of the North;and it is not, I think, entirely fanciful to trace a certainfreedom and dignity in her movement, which is quite differentat least from the shuffling walk of the shrouded Moslem women. She is a woman of Bethlehem, where a tradition, it is said, still claimsas a heroic heritage the blood of the Latin knights of the cross. This is, of course, but one aspect of the city; but it is onewhich may be early noted, yet one which is generally neglected. As I have said, I had expected many things of Jerusalem, but I had not expected this. I had expected to be disappointedwith it as a place utterly profaned and fallen below its mission. I had expected to be awed by it; indeed I had expected to be frightenedof it, as a place dedicated and even doomed by its mission. But I had never fancied that it would be possible to be fond of it;as one might be fond of a little walled town among the orchardsof Normandy or the hop-fields of Kent. And just then there happened a coincidence that was also somethinglike a catastrophe. I was idly watching, as it moved downthe narrow street to one of the dark doorways, the head-dress, like a tower of white drapery, belonging to the Christian womanfrom the place where Christ was born. After she had disappearedinto the darkness of the porch I continued to look vaguelyat the porch, and thought how easily it might have been a smallGothic gate in some old corner of Rouen, or even Canterbury. In twenty such places in the town one may see the details thatappeal to the same associations, so different and so distant. One may see that angular dogtooth ornament that makes the roundNorman gateways look like the gaping mouths of sharks. One may see the pointed niches in the walls, shaped like windowsand serving somewhat the purpose of brackets, on which wereto stand sacred images possibly removed by the Moslems. One may come upon a small court planted with ornamental treeswith some monument in the centre, which makes the precise impressionof something in a small French town. There are no Gothic spires, but there are numberless Gothic doors and windows; and he whofirst strikes the place at this angle, as it were, may well feelthe Northern element as native and the Eastern element as intrusive. While I was thinking all these things, something happened which inthat place was almost a portent. It was very cold; and there were curious colours in the sky. There had been chilly rains from time to time; and the wholeair seemed to have taken on something sharper than a chill. It was as if a door had been opened in the northern corner of the heavens;letting in something that changed all the face of the earth. Great grey clouds with haloes of lurid pearl and pale-green were comingup from the plains or the sea and spreading over the towers of the city. In the middle of the moving mass of grey vapours was a splashof paler vapour; a wan white cloud whose white seemed somehow moreominous than gloom. It went over the high citadel like a whitewild goose flying; and a few white feathers fell. It was the snow; and it snowed day and night until that Easterncity was sealed up like a village in Norway or Northern Scotland. It rose in the streets till men might almost have been drownedin it like a sea of solid foam. And the people of the place toldme there had been no such thing seen in it in all recent records, or perhaps in the records of all its four thousand years. All this came later; but for me at the moment, looking at the scenein so dreamy a fashion, it seemed merely like a dramatic conclusionto my dream. It was but an accident confirming what was but an aspect. But it confirmed it with a strange and almost supernatural completeness. The white light out of the window in the north lay on all the roofsand turrets of the mountain town; for there is an aspect in whichsnow looks less like frozen water than like solidified light. As the snow accumulated there accumulated also everywherethose fantastic effects of frost which seem to fit in withthe fantastic qualities of medieval architecture; and whichmake an icicle seem like the mere extension of a gargoyle. It was the atmosphere that has led so many romancers to makemedieval Paris a mere black and white study of night and snow. Something had redrawn in silver all things from the rude ornamenton the old gateways to the wrinkles on the ancient hills of Moab. Fields of white still spotted with green swept down into the valleysbetween us and the hills; and high above them the Holy City liftedher head into the thunder-clouded heavens, wearing a white head-dresslike a daughter of the Crusaders. CHAPTER IV THE PHILOSOPHY OF SIGHT-SEEING Various cultivated critics told me that I should findJerusalem disappointing; and I fear it will disappoint them that Iam not disappointed. Of the city as a city I shall try to saysomething elsewhere; but the things which these critics haveespecially in mind are at once more general and more internal. They concern something tawdry, squalid or superstitious about the shrinesand those who use them. Now the mistake of critics is not that theycriticise the world; it is that they never criticise themselves. They compare the alien with the ideal; but they do not at the sametime compare themselves with the ideal; rather they identifythemselves with the ideal. I have met a tourist who had seenthe great Pyramid, and who told me that the Pyramid looked small. Believe me, the tourist looked much smaller. There is indeed anothertype of traveller, who is not at all small in the moral mental sense, who will confess such disappointments quite honestly, as a pieceof realism about his own sensations. In that case he generally suffersfrom the defect of most realists; that of not being realistic enough. He does not really think out his own impressions thoroughly;or he would generally find they are not so disappointing after all. A humorous soldier told me that he came from Derbyshire, and thathe did not think much of the Pyramid because it was not so tallas the Peak. I pointed out to him that he was really offeringthe tallest possible tribute to a work of man in comparing itto a mountain; even if he thought it was a rather small mountain. I suggested that it was a rather large tombstone. I appealedto those with whom I debated in that district, as to whether theywould not be faintly surprised to find such a monument duringtheir quiet rambles in a country churchyard. I asked whethereach one of them, if he had such a tombstone in the family, would not feel it natural, if hardly necessary, to point it out;and that with a certain pride. The same principle of the higher realismapplies to those who are disappointed with the sight of the Sphinx. The Sphinx really exceeds expectations because it escapes expectations. Monuments commonly look impressive when they are high and oftenwhen they are distant. The Sphinx is really unexpected, because it is found suddenly in a hollow, and unnaturally near. Its face is turned away; and the effect is as creepy as coming into a roomapparently empty, and finding somebody as still as the furniture. Or it is as if one found a lion couchant in that hole in the sand;as indeed the buried part of the monster is in the form of acouchant lion. If it was a real lion it would hardly be lessarresting merely because it was near; nor could the first emotionof the traveller be adequately described as disappointment. In such cases there is generally some profit in looking at the monumenta second time, or even at our own sensations a second time. So I reasoned, striving with wild critics in the wilderness;but the only part of the debate which is relevant here canbe expressed in the statement that I do think the Pyramid big, for the deep and simple reason that it is bigger than I am. I delicately suggested to those who were disappointed in the Sphinxthat it was just possible that the Sphinx was disappointed in them. The Sphinx has seen Julius Caesar; it has very probably seen St. Francis, when he brought his flaming charity to Egypt; it has certainly looked, in the first high days of the revolutionary victories, on the faceof the young Napoleon. Is it not barely possible, I hintedto my friends and fellow-tourists, that after these experiences, it might be a little depressed at the sight of you and me?But as I say, I only reintroduce my remarks in connection with agreater matter than these dead things of the desert; in connectionwith a tomb to which even the Pyramids are but titanic lumber, and a presence greater than the Sphinx, since it is not only a riddlebut an answer. Before I go on to deeper defences of any such cult or culture, I wish first to note a sort of test for the first impressionsof an ordinary tourist like myself, to whom much that is really fullof an archaic strength may seem merely stiff, or much that reallydeals with a deep devotional psychology may seem merely distorted. In short I would put myself in the position of the educatedEnglishman who does quite honestly receive a mere impressionof idolatry. Incidentally, I may remark, it is the educatedEnglishman who is the idolater. It is he who only reverencesthe place, and does not reverence the reverence for the place. It is he who is supremely concerned about whether a mere objectis old or new, or whether a mere ornament is gold or gilt. In other words, it is he who values the visible things ratherthan the invisible; for no sane man can doubt that invisible thingsare vivid to the priests and pilgrims of these shrines. In the midst of emotions that have moved the whole world outof its course, girt about with crowds who will die or do murderfor a definition, the educated English gentleman in his blindnessbows down to wood and stone. For the only thing wrong about thatadmirable man is that he is blind about himself. No man will really attempt to describe his feelings, when he firststood at the gateway of the grave of Christ. The only record relevanthere is that I did not feel the reaction, not to say repulsion, that many seem to have felt about its formal surroundings. Either I was particularly fortunate or others areparticularly fastidious. The guide who showed me the Sepulchrewas not particularly noisy or profane or palpably mercenary;he was rather more than less sympathetic than the same sort of manwho might have shown me Westminster Abbey or Stratford-on-Avon. Hewas a small, solemn, owlish old man, a Roman Catholic in religion;but so far from deserving the charge of not knowing the Bible, he deserved rather a gentle remonstrance against his assumptionthat nobody else knew it. If there was anything to smile at, in associations so sacred, it was the elaborate simplicity withwhich he told the first facts of the Gospel story, as if he wereevangelising a savage. Anyhow, he did not talk like a cheap-jackat a stall; but rather like a teacher in an infant school. He made it very clear that Jesus Christ was crucified in caseany one should suppose he was beheaded; and often stopped in hisnarrative to repeat that the hero of these events was Jesus Christ, lest we should fancy it was Nebuchadnezzar or the Duke of Wellington. I do not in the least mind being amused at this; but I have no reasonwhatever for doubting that he may have been a better man than I. Igave him what I should have given a similar guide in my own country;I parted from him as politely as from one of my own countrymen. I also, of course, gave money, as is the custom, to the various monasticcustodians of the shrines; but I see nothing surprising about that. I am not quite so ignorant as not to know that without the monasticbrotherhoods, supported by such charity, there would not by thistime be anything to see in Jerusalem at all. There was only oneclass of men whose consistent concern was to watch these things, from the age of heathens and heresies to the age of Turks and tourists;and I am certainly not going to sneer at them for doing no practical work, and then refuse to pay them for the practical work they do. For the rest, even the architectural defacement is overstated, the church was burned down and rebuilt in a bad and modern period;but the older parts, especially the Crusaders' porch, are asgrand as the men who made them. The incongruities there are, are those of local colour. In connection, by the way, with what Isaid about beasts of burden, I mounted a series of steep staircasesto the roof of the convent beside the Holy Sepulchre. When I gotto the top I found myself in the placid presence of two camels. It would be curious to meet two cows on the roof of a village church. Nevertheless it is the only moral of the chapter interpolated here, that we can meet things quite as curious in our own country. When the critic says that Jerusalem is disappointing he generallymeans that the popular worship there is weak and degraded, and especially that the religious art is gaudy and grotesque. In so far as there is any kind of truth in this, it isstill true that the critic seldom sees the whole truth. What is wrong with the critic is that he does not criticise himself. He does not honestly compare what is weak, in this particular worldof ideas, with what is weak in his own world of ideas. I will takean example from my own experience, and in a manner at my own expense. If I have a native heath it is certainly Kensington High Street, off which stands the house of my childhood. I grew up in thatthorough-fare which Mr. Max Beerbohm, with his usual easy exactitudeof phrase, has described as "dapper, with a leaning to the fine arts. "Dapper was never perhaps a descriptive term for myself;but it is quite true that I owe a certain taste for the artsto the sort of people among whom I was brought up. It is also truethat such a taste, in various forms and degrees, was fairly commonin the world which may be symbolised as Kensington High Street. And whether or no it is a tribute, it is certainly a truth that mostpeople with an artistic turn in Kensington High Street would have beenvery much shocked, in their sense of propriety, if they had seenthe popular shrines of Jerusalem; the sham gold, the garish colours, the fantastic tales and the feverish tumult. But what I want suchpeople to do, and what they never do, is to turn this truth round. I want them to imagine, not a Kensington aesthete walking downDavid Street to the Holy Sepulchre, but a Greek monk or a Russianpilgrim walking down Kensington High Street to Kensington Gardens. I will not insist here on all the hundred plagues of plutocracythat would really surprise such a Christian peasant; especially thatcurse of an irreligious society (unknown in religious societies, Moslem as well as Christian) the detestable denial of all dignityto the poor. I am not speaking now of moral but of artistic things;of the concrete arts and crafts used in popular worship. Well, my imaginary pilgrim would walk past Kensington Gardens tillhis sight was blasted by a prodigy. He would either fall on hisknees as before a shrine, or cover his face as from a sacrilege. He would have seen the Albert Memorial. There is nothing so conspicuousin Jerusalem. There is nothing so gilded and gaudy in Jerusalem. Above all, there is nothing in Jerusalem that is on so largea scale and at the same time in so gay and glittering a style. My simple Eastern Christian would almost certainly be driven tocry aloud, "To what superhuman God was this enormous temple erected?I hope it is Christ; but I fear it is Antichrist. " Such, he would think, might well be the great and golden image of the Prince of the World, set up in this great open space to receive the heathen prayersand heathen sacrifices of a lost humanity. I fancy he would feela desire to be at home again amid the humble shrines of Zion. I really cannot imagine _what_ he would feel, if he were toldthat the gilded idol was neither a god nor a demon, but a pettyGerman prince who had some slight influence in turning us intothe tools of Prussia. Now I myself, I cheerfully admit, feel that enormity in Kensington Gardensas something quite natural. I feel it so because I have beenbrought up, so to speak, under its shadow; and stared at the gravenimages of Raphael and Shakespeare almost before I knew their names;and long before I saw anything funny in their figures being carved, on a smaller scale, under the feet of Prince Albert. I even took a certain childish pleasure in the gilding ofthe canopy and spire, as if in the golden palace of what was, to Peter Pan and all children, something of a fairy garden. So do the Christians of Jerusalem take pleasure, and possiblya childish pleasure, in the gilding of a better palace, besides a nobler garden, ornamented with a somewhat worthier aim. But the point is that the people of Kensington, whatever they mightthink about the Holy Sepulchre, do not think anything at all aboutthe Albert Memorial. They are quite unconscious of how strangea thing it is; and that simply because they are used to it. The religious groups in Jerusalem are also accustomed to theircoloured background; and they are surely none the worse if they stillfeel rather more of the meaning of the colours. It may be said thatthey retain their childish illusion about _their_ Albert Memorial. I confess I cannot manage to regard Palestine as a place where aspecial curse was laid on those who can become like little children. And I never could understand why such critics who agreethat the kingdom of heaven is for children, should forbid itto be the only sort of kingdom that children would really like;a kingdom with real crowns of gold or even of tinsel. But that is another question, which I shall discuss in another place;the point is for the moment that such people would be quite as muchsurprised at the place of tinsel in our lives as we are at its placein theirs. If we are critical of the petty things they do to glorifygreat things, they would find quite as much to criticise (as inKensington Gardens) in the great things we do to glorify petty things. And if we wonder at the way in which they seem to gild the lily, they would wonder quite as much at the way we gild the weed. There are countless other examples of course of this principleof self-criticism, as the necessary condition of all criticism. It applies quite as much, for instance, to the other great complaintwhich my Kensington friend would make after the complaint aboutpaltry ornament; the complaint about what is commonly called backsheesh. Here again there is really something to complain of; though much ofthe fault is not due to Jerusalem, but rather to London and New York. The worst superstition of Jerusalem, like the worst profligacyof Paris, is a thing so much invented for Anglo-Saxons that it mightbe called an Anglo-Saxon institution. But here again the criticcould only really judge fairly if he realised with what abusesat home he ought really to compare this particular abuse abroad. He ought to imagine, for example, the feelings of a religiousRussian peasant if he really understood all the highly-colouredadvertisements covering High Street Kensington Station. It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for moneyas to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement isthe rich asking for more money. A man would be annoyed if he foundhimself in a mob of millionaires, all holding out their silk hatsfor a penny; or all shouting with one voice, "Give me money. "Yet advertisement does really assault the eye very much as such a shoutwould assault the ear. "Budge's Boots are the Best" simply means"Give me money"; "Use Seraphic Soap" simply means "Give me money. "It is a complete mistake to suppose that common people make ourtowns commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements. Most of those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very wealthygentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are probablyvery particular about the artistic adornment of their own homes. They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses. To see such men crowding and clamouring for more wealth wouldreally be a more unworthy sight than a scramble of poor guides;yet this is what would be conveyed by all the glare of gaudyadvertisement to anybody who saw and understood it for the first time. Yet for us who are familiar with it all that gaudy advertisementfades into a background, just as the gaudy oriental patternsfade into a background for those oriental priests and pilgrims. Just as the innocent Kensington gentleman is wholly unawarethat his black top hat is relieved against a background, or encircled as by a halo, of a yellow hoarding about mustard, so is the poor guide sometimes unaware that his small doings aredark against the fainter and more fading gold in which are tracedonly the humbler haloes of the Twelve Apostles. But all these misunderstandings are merely convenient illustrations andintroductions, leading up to the great fact of the main misunderstanding. It is a misunderstanding of the whole history and philosophyof the position; that is the whole of the story and the wholemoral of the story. The critic of the Christianity of Jerusalememphatically manages to miss the point. The lesson he ought tolearn from it is one which the Western and modern man needs most, and does not even know that he needs. It is the lesson of constancy. These people may decorate their temples with gold or with tinsel;but their tinsel has lasted longer than our gold. They may build things as costly and ugly as the Albert Memorial;but the thing remains a memorial, a thing of immortal memory. They do not build it for a passing fashion and then forget it, or try hard to forget it. They may paint a picture of a saint as gaudyas any advertisement of a soap; but one saint does not drive out anothersaint as one soap drives out another soap. They do not forget theirrecent idolatries, as the educated English are now trying to forgettheir very recent idolatry of everything German. These Christianbodies have been in Jerusalem for at least fifteen hundred years. Save for a few years after the time of Constantine and a few years afterthe First Crusade, they have been practically persecuted all the time. At least they have been under heathen masters whose attitude towardsChristendom was hatred and whose type of government was despotism. No man living in the West can form the faintest conceptionof what it must have been to live in the very heart of the Eastthrough the long and seemingly everlasting epoch of Moslem power. A man in Jerusalem was in the centre of the Turkish Empire as a manin Rome was in the centre of the Roman Empire. The imperial powerof Islam stretched away to the sunrise and the sunset; westward tothe mountains of Spain and eastward towards the wall of China. It must have seemed as if the whole earth belonged to Mahomet to thosewho in this rocky city renewed their hopeless witness to Christ. What we have to ask ourselves is not whether we happen inall respects to agree with them, but whether we in the samecondition should even have the courage to agree with ourselves. It is not a question of how much of their religion is superstition, but of how much of our religion is convention; how much is customand how much a compromise even with custom; how much a thing made facileby the security of our own society or the success of our own state. These are powerful supports; and the enlightened Englishman, from a cathedral town or a suburban chapel, walks these wildEastern places with a certain sense of assurance and stability. Even after centuries of Turkish supremacy, such a man feels, he would not have descended to such a credulity. He wouldnot be fighting for the Holy Fire or wrangling with beggarsin the Holy Sepulchre. He would not be hanging fantasticlamps on a pillar peculiar to the Armenians, or peering intothe gilded cage that contains the brown Madonna of the Copts. He would not be the dupe of such degenerate fables; God forbid. He would not be grovelling at such grotesque shrines; no indeed. He would be many hundred yards away, decorously bowing towardsa more distant city; where, above the only formal and officialopen place in Jerusalem, the mighty mosaics of the Mosque of Omarproclaim across the valleys the victory and the glory of Mahomet. That is the real lesson that the enlightened traveller should learn;the lesson about himself. That is the test that should really be putto those who say that the Christianity of Jerusalem is degraded. After a thousand years of Turkish tyranny, the religion of a Londonfashionable preacher would not be degraded. It would be destroyed. It would not be there at all, to be jeered at by every prosperous touristout of a _train de luxe_. It is worth while to pause upon the point;for nothing has been so wholly missed in our modern religiousideals as the ideal of tenacity. Fashion is called progress. Every new fashion is called a new faith. Every faith is a faithwhich offers everything except faithfulness. It was never so necessaryto insist that most of the really vital and valuable ideas in the world, including Christianity, would never have survived at all if theyhad not survived their own death, even in the sense of dying daily. The ideal was out of date almost from the first day;that is why it is eternal; for whatever is dated is doomed. As for our own society, if it proceeds at its present rate of progressand improvement, no trace or memory of it will be left at all. Some think that this would be an improvement in itself. We have cometo live morally, as the Japs live literally, in houses of paper. But they are pavilions made of the morning papers, which have to beburned on the appearance of the evening editions. Well, a thousandyears hence the Japs may be ruling in Jerusalem; the modern Japs whono longer live in paper houses, but in sweated factories and slums. They and the Chinese (that much more dignified and democratic people)seem to be about the only people of importance who have not yetruled Jerusalem. But though we may think the Christian chapelsas thin as Japanese tea-houses, they will still be Christian;though we may think the sacred lamps as cheap as Chinese lanterns, they will still be burning before a crucified creator of the world. But besides this need of making strange cults the test not ofthemselves but ourselves, the sights of Jerusalem also illustratethe other suggestion about the philosophy of sight-seeing. It is true, as I have suggested, that after all the Sphinx is larger than I am;and on the same principle the painted saints are saintlierthan I am, and the patient pilgrims more constant than I am. But it is also true, as in the lesser matter before mentioned, that even those who think the Sphinx small generally do notnotice the small things about it. They do not even discoverwhat is interesting about their own disappointment. And similarlyeven those who are truly irritated by the unfamiliar fashionsof worship in a place like Jerusalem, do not know how to discoverwhat is interesting in the very existence of what is irritating. For instance, they talk of Byzantine decay or barbaric delusion, and they generally go away with an impression that the ritualand symbolism is something dating from the Dark Ages. But if they would really note the details of their surroundings, or even of their sensations, they would observe a rather curious factabout such ornament of such places as the Church of the Holy Sepulchreas may really be counted unworthy of them. They would realisethat what they would most instinctively reject as superstitious doesnot date from what they would regard as the ages of superstition. There really are bad pictures but they are not barbaric pictures;they are florid pictures in the last faded realism of the Renascence. There really is stiff and ungainly decoration, but it is notthe harsh or ascetic decoration of a Spanish cloister; it is muchmore like the pompous yet frivolous decorations of a Parisian hotel. In short, in so far as the shrine has really been defaced ithas not been defaced by the Dark Ages, but rather if anythingby the Age of Reason. It is the enlightened eighteenth century, which regarded itself as the very noonday of natural cultureand common sense, that has really though indirectly laid itsdisfiguring finger on the dark but dignified Byzantine temple. I do not particularly mind it myself; for in such great matters Ido not think taste is the test. But if taste is to be made the test, there is matter for momentary reflection in this fact; for itis another example of the weakness of what may be called fashion. Voltaire, I believe, erected a sort of temple to God in his own garden;and we may be sure that it was in the most exquisite taste of the time. Nothing would have surprised him more than to learn that, fifty years after the success of the French Revolution, almost everyfreethinker of any artistic taste would think his temple far lessartistically admirable than the nearest gargoyle on Notre Dame. Thus it is progress that must be blamed for most of these things:and we ought not to turn away in contempt from something antiquated, but rather recognise with respect and even alarm a sort of permanentman-trap in the idea of being modern. So that the moral of thismatter is the same as that of the other; that these things shouldraise in us, not merely the question of whether we like them, but of whether there is anything very infallible or imperishableabout what we like. At least the essentials of these things endure;and if they seem to have remained fixed as effigies, at least theyhave not faded like fashion-plates. It has seemed worth while to insert here this note on the philosophyof sight-seeing, however dilatory or disproportionate it may seem. For I am particularly and positively convinced that unless these thingscan somehow or other be seen in the right historical perspectiveand philosophical proportion, they are not worth seeing at all. And let me say in conclusion that I can not only respect the sincerity, but understand the sentiments, of a man who says they are notworth seeing at all. Sight-seeing is a far more difficult anddisputable matter than many seem to suppose; and a man refusing italtogether might be a man of sense and even a man of imagination. It was the great Wordsworth who refused to revisit Yarrow;it was only the small Wordsworth who revisited it after all. I remember the first great sight in my own entrance to the Near East, when I looked by accident out of the train going to Cairo, and saw faraway across the luminous flats a faint triangular shape; the Pyramids. I could understand a man who had seen it turning his back and retracinghis whole journey to his own country and his own home, saying, "I will gono further; for I have seen afar off the last houses of the kings. "I can understand a man who had only seen in the distance Jerusalemsitting on the hill going no further and keeping that vision for ever. It would, of course, be said that it was absurd to come at all, and to see so little. To which I answer that in that senseit is absurd to come at all. It is no more fantastic to turnback for such a fancy than it was to come for a similar fancy. A man cannot eat the Pyramids; he cannot buy or sell the Holy City;there can be no practical aspect either of his coming or going. If he has not come for a poetic mood he has come for nothing; if he hascome for such a mood, he is not a fool to obey that mood. The wayto be really a fool is to try to be practical about unpractical things. It is to try to collect clouds or preserve moonshine like money. Now there is much to be said for the view that to search for a moodis in its nature moonshine. It may be said that this is especiallytrue in the crowded and commonplace conditions in which mostsight-seeing has to be done. It may be said that thirty touristsgoing together to see a tombstone is really as ridiculous as thirtypoets going together to write poems about the nightingale. There would be something rather depressing about a crowdof travellers, walking over hill and dale after the celebratedcloud of Wordsworth; especially if the crowd is like the cloud, and moveth all together if it move at all. A vast mob assembledon Salisbury Plain to listen to Shelley's skylark would probably(after an hour or two) consider it a rather subdued sort of skylarking. It may be argued that it is just as illogical to hope to fix beforehandthe elusive effects of the works of man as of the works of nature. It may be called a contradiction in terms to expect the unexpected. It may be counted mere madness to anticipate astonishment, or goin search of a surprise. To all of which there is only one answer;that such anticipation is absurd, and such realisation willbe disappointing, that images will seem to be idols and idolswill seem to be dolls, unless there be some rudiment of sucha habit of mind as I have tried to suggest in this chapter. No great works will seem great, and no wonders of the worldwill seem wonderful, unless the angle from which they are seenis that of historical humility. One more word may be added of a more practical sort. The place wherethe most passionate convictions on this planet are concentrated is notone where it will always be wise, even from a political standpoint, to air our plutocratic patronage and our sceptical superiority. Strange scenes have already been enacted round that fane where theHoly Fire bursts forth to declare that Christ is risen; and whetheror no we think the thing holy there is no doubt about it being fiery. Whether or no the superior person is right to expect the unexpected, it is possible that something may be revealed to him that he reallydoes not expect. And whatever he may think about the philosophyof sight-seeing, it is not unlikely that he may see some sights. CHAPTER V THE STREETS OF THE CITY When Jerusalem had been half buried in snow for two or three days, I remarked to a friend that I was prepared henceforward to justifyall the Christmas cards. The cards that spangle Bethlehem with frostare generally regarded by the learned merely as vulgar lies. At best they are regarded as popular fictions, like that which madethe shepherds in the Nativity Play talk a broad dialect of Somerset. In the deepest sense of course this democratic tradition is truerthan most history. But even in the cruder and more concrete sense thetradition about the December snow is not quite so false as is suggested. It is not a mere local illusion for Englishmen to picturethe Holy Child in a snowstorm, as it would be for the Londonersto picture him in a London fog. There can be snow in Jerusalem, and there might be snow in Bethlehem; and when we penetrate to the ideabehind the image, we find it is not only possible but probable. In Palestine, at least in these mountainous parts of Palestine, men have the same general sentiment about the seasons as in the Westor the North. Snow is a rarity, but winter is a reality. Whether we regard it as the divine purpose of a mystery or the humanpurpose of a myth, the purpose of putting such a feast in winterwould be just the same in Bethlehem as it would be in Balham. Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would meanby it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summersun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate. In other words, the semi-tropical nature of the place, like itsvulgarity and desecration, can be, and are, enormously exaggerated. But it is always hard to correct the exaggeration without exaggeratingthe correction. It would be absurd seriously to deny that Jerusalemis an Eastern town; but we may say it was Westernised withoutbeing modernised. Anyhow, it was medievalised before it was modernised. And in the same way it would be absurd to deny that Jerusalemis a Southern town, in the sense of being normally out of the wayof snowstorms, but the truth can be suggested by saying that ithas always known the quality of snow, but not the quantity. And the quantity of snow that fell on this occasion would havebeen something striking and even sensational in Sussex or Kent. And yet another way of putting the proportions of the thing wouldbe to say that Jerusalem has been besieged more often and by moredifferent kinds of people than any town upon the globe; that it hasbeen besieged by Jews and Assyrians, Egyptians and Babylonians, Greeksand Romans, Persians and Saracens, Frenchmen and Englishmen;but perhaps never before in all its agony of ages has it ever reallybeen besieged by winter. In this case it was not only snowed on, it was snowed up. For some days the city was really in a state of siege. If the snow had held for a sufficient number of days it might havebeen in a state of famine. The railway failed between Jerusalemand the nearest station. The roads were impassable betweenJerusalem and the nearest village, or even the nearest suburb. In some places the snow drifted deep enough to bury a man, and in some places, alas, it did actually bury little children;poor little Arabs whose bodies were stiff where they had fallen. Many mules were overwhelmed as if by floods, and countless trees struckdown as if by lightning. Even when the snow began at last to melt itonly threatened to turn the besieged fortress into a sort of island. A river that men could not ford flowed between Jerusalem and the Mountof Olives. Even a man walking about the ordinary streets could easilystep up to his knees or up to his waist. Snow stood about like a newsystem of natural barricades reared in some new type of revolution. I have already remarked that what struck me most about the city wasthe city wall; but now a new white wall stood all round the city;and one that neither friend nor foe could pass. But a state of siege, whatever its inconveniences, is exceedingly convenient for a critic and observer of the town. It concentrated all that impression of being something compact and what, with less tragic attendant circumstances, one might call cosy. It fixed the whole picture in a frame even more absolute thanthe city wall; and it turned the eyes of all spectators inwards. Above all, by its very abnormality it accentuated the normaldivisions and differences of the place; and made it more possibleto distinguish and describe them like _dramatis personae_. The parts they played in the crisis of the snow were very likethe parts they played in the general crisis of the state. And the very cut and colour of the figures, turban and tarbouch, khaki and burnous and gabardine, seemed to stand out more sharplyagainst that blank background of white. The first fact of course was a fact of contrast. When I said thatthe city struck me in its historic aspect as being at least as mucha memory of the Crusaders as of the Saracens, I did not of course meanto deny the incidental contrasts between this Southern civilisationand the civilisation of Europe, especially northern Europe. The immediate difference was obvious enough when the gold andthe gaudy vegetation of so comparatively Asiatic a city were struckby this strange blast out of the North. It was a queer spectacleto see a great green palm bowed down under a white load of snow;and it was a stranger and sadder spectacle to see the people accustomedto live under such palm-trees bowed down under such unearthly storms. Yet the very manner in which they bore it is perhaps the first factto be noted among all the facts that make up the puzzling problemof Jerusalem. Odd as it may sound you can see that the true Orientalsare not familiar with snow by the very fact that they accept it. They accept it as we should accept being swallowed by an earthquake;because we do not know the answer to an earthquake. The men from thedesert do not know the answer to the snow, it seems to them unanswerable. But Christians fight with snow in a double sense; they fight withsnow as they fight with snowballs. A Moslem left to himself wouldno more play with a snowball than make a toy of a thunderbolt. And this is really a type of the true problem that was raisedby the very presence of the English soldier in the street, even if he was only shovelling away the snow. It would be far from a bad thing, I fancy, if the rights and wrongsof these Bible countries could occasionally be translated intoBible language. And I suggest this here, not in the least because itis a religious language, but merely because it is a simple language. It may be a good thing, and in many ways it certainly is a good thing, that the races native to the Near East, to Egypt or Arabia, should come in contact with Western culture; but it will beunfortunate if this only means coming in contact with Westernpedantry and even Western hypocrisy. As it is there is only toomuch danger that the local complaints against the government may beexactly like the official explanations of the government; that is, mere strings of long words with very little meaning involved. In short, if people are to learn to talk English it will be a refreshingfinishing touch to their culture if they learn to talk plain English. Of this it would be hard to find a better working model than what may becalled scriptural English. It would be a very good thing for everybodyconcerned if any really unjust or unpopular official were describedonly in terms taken from the denunciations of Jezebel and Herod. It would especially be a good thing for the official. If it were trueit would be appropriate, and if it were untrue it would be absurd. When people are really oppressed, their condition can generallybe described in very plain terms connected with very plain things;with bread, with land, with taxes and children and churches. If imperialists and capitalists do thus oppress them, as theymost certainly often do, then the condition of those more powerfulpersons can also be described in few and simple words; such ascrime and sin and death and hell. But when complaints are made, as they are sometimes in Palestine and still more in Egypt, in the elaborate and long-winded style of a leading article, the sympathetic European is apt to remember how very little confidencehe has ever felt in his own leading articles. If an Arab comesto me and says, "The stranger from across the sea has taxed me, and taken the corn-sheaves from the field of my fathers, " I do reallyfeel that he towers over me and my perishing industrial civilisationwith a terrible appeal to eternal things. I feel he is a figuremore enduring than a statue, like the figure of Naboth or of Nathan. But when that simple son of the desert opens his mouth and says, "The self-determination of proletarian class-conscious solidarityas it functions for international reconstruction, " and so on, why then I must confess to the weakness of feeling my sympathiesinstantly and strangely chilled. I merely feel inclined to tell himthat I can talk that sort of pidgin English better than he can. If he modelled himself on the great rebels and revolutionistsof the Bible, it would at least be a considerable improvementin his literary style. But as a matter of fact something muchmore solid is involved than literary style. There is a logicand justice in the distinction, even in the world of ideas. That most people with much more education than the Arab, and thereforemuch less excuse than the Arab, entirely ignore that distinction, is merely a result of their ignoring ideas, and being satisfiedwith long words. They like democracy because it is a long word;that is the only thing they do like about it. People are entitled to self-government; that is, to suchgovernment as is self-made. They are not necessarily entitledto a special and elaborate machinery that somebody else has made. It is their right to make it for themselves, but it is also theirduty to think of it for themselves. Self-government of a simplekind has existed in numberless simple societies, and I shallalways think it a horrible responsibility to interfere with it. But representative government, or theoretically representative government, of an exceedingly complicated kind, may exist in certain complicatedsocieties without their being bound to transfer it to others, or even to admire it for themselves. At any rate, for good or evil, they have invented it themselves. And there is a moral distinction, which is perfectly rational and democratic, between such inventionsand the self-evident rights which no man can claim to have invented. If the Arab says to me, "I don't care a curse for Europe; I demand bread, "the reproach is to me both true and terrible. But if he says, "I don't care a curse for Europe; I demand French cookery, Italian confectionery, English audit ale, " and so on, I think he israther an unreasonable Arab. After all, we invented these things;in _auctore auctoritas_. And of this problem there is a sort of working model in the presenceof the snow in Palestine, especially in the light of the old proverbabout the impossibility of snow in Egypt. Palestine is wilder, less wealthy and modernised, more religious and therefore more realistic. The issue between the things only a European can do, and the thingsno European has the right to do, is much sharper and clearerthan the confusions of verbosity. On the one hand the thingsthe English can do are more real things, like clearing away the snow;for the very reason that the English are not here, so to speak, building on a French pavement but on the bare rocks of the Eastern wilds, the contact with Islam and Israel is more simple and direct. And on the other side the discontents and revolts are more real. So far from intending to suggest that the Egyptians have no complaints, I am very far from meaning that they have no wrongs. But curiouslyenough the wrongs seem to me more real than the complaints. The real case against our Egyptian adventure was stated long agoby Randolph Churchill, when he denounced "a bondholder's war"; it isin the whole business of collecting debts due to cosmopolitan finance. But a stranger in Egypt hears little denunciation of cosmopolitan finance, and a great deal of drivel in the way of cosmopolitan idealism. When the Palestinians say that usurers menace their land they meanthe land they dig; an old actuality and not a new abstraction. Their revolt may be right or wrong, but it is real;and what applies to their revolt applies to their religion. There may well be doubts about whether Egypt is a nation, but thereis no doubt that Jerusalem is a city, and the nations have cometo its light. The problem of the snow proved indeed the text for a tale touchingthe practical politics of the city. The English soldiers clearedthe snow away; the Arabs sat down satisfied or stoical withthe snow blocking their own doors or loading their own roofs. But the Jews, as the story went, were at length persuaded to clearaway the snow in front of them, and then demanded a handsomesalary for having recovered the use of their own front doors. The story is not quite fair; and yet it is not so unfair as it seems. Any rational Anti-Semite will agree that such tales, even when theyare true, do not always signify an avaricious tradition in Semitism, but sometimes the healthier and more human suggestion of Bolshevism. The Jews do demand high wages, but it is not always because theyare in the old sense money-grabbers, but rather in the newsense money-grabbers (as an enemy would put it) men sincerelyand bitterly convinced of their right to the surplus of capitalism. There is the same problem in the Jewish colonies in the country districts;in the Jewish explanation of the employment of Arab and Syrian labour. The Jews argue that this occurs, not because they wish to remainidle capitalists, but because they insist on being properlypaid proletarians. With all this I shall deal, however, when Itreat of the Jewish problem itself. The point for the momentis that the episode of the snow did in a superficial way suggestthe parts played by the three parties and the tales told about them. To begin with, it is right to say that the English do a great many things, as they clear away the snow, simply because nobody else would do them. They did save the oriental inhabitants from some of the worstconsequences of the calamity. Probably they sometimes savethe inhabitants from something which the inhabitants do notregard as a calamity. It is the danger of all such foreignefficiency that it often saves men who do not want to be saved. But they do in many cases do things from which Moslems profit, but which Moslems by themselves would not propose, let alone perform. And this has a general significance even in our first survey, for itsuggests a truth easy to abuse, but I think impossible to ignore. I mean that there is something non-political about Moslem morality. Perverse as it may appear, I suspect that most of theirpolitical movements result from their non-political morality. They become politicians because they know they are not political;and feel their simple and more or less healthy life is at a disadvantage, in face of the political supremacy of the English and the politicalsubtlety of the Jews. For instance, the tradition of Turkish rule is simply a joke. All the stories about it are jokes, and often very good jokes. My own favourite incident is that which is still commemoratedin the English cathedral by an enormous hole in the floor. The Turks dug up the pavement looking for concealed English artillery;because they had been told that the bishop had given his blessingto two canons. The bishop had indeed recently appointed two canonsto the service of the Church, but he had not secreted them underthe floor of the chancel. There was another agreeable incident whenthe Turkish authorities, by an impulsive movement of religious toleration, sent for a Greek priest to bury Greek soldiers, and told himto take his choice in a heap of corpses of all creeds and colours. But at once the most curious and the most common touch of comedyis the perpetual social introduction to solid and smiling citizenswho have been nearly hanged by the Turks. The fortunate gentlemanseems still to be regarding his escape with a broad grin. If you were introduced to a polite Frenchman who had come straightfrom the guillotine, or to an affable American who had only justvacated the electrical chair, you would feel a faint curiosityabout the whole story. If a friend introduced somebody, saying, "My friend Robinson; his sentence has been commuted to penal servitude, "or "My Uncle William, just come from Dartmoor Prison, " your mindand perhaps your lips would faintly form the syllables "What for?"But evidently, under Turkish rule, being hanged was likebeing knocked down by a cab; it might happen to anybody. This is a parenthesis, since I am only dealing here with thesuperficial experience of the streets, especially in the snow. But it will be well to safeguard it by saying that this unpoliticalcarelessness and comprehensiveness of the indiscriminate Turk had itstragic as well as its comic side. It was by no means everybody thatescaped hanging; and there was a tree growing outside the Jaffa Gateat which men might still shudder as they pass it in the sunlight. It was what a modern revolutionary poet has called bitterly the Treeof Man's Making; and what a medieval revolutionary poet calledthe fruit tree in the orchard of the king. It was the gibbet;and lives have dropped from it like leaves from a tree in autumn. Yet even on the sterner side, we can trace the truth aboutthe Moslem fatalism which seems so alien to political actuality. There was a popular legend or proverb that this terrible treewas in some way bound up with the power of the Turk, and perhapsthe Moslem over a great part of the earth. There is nothingmore strange about that Moslem fatalism than a certain gloomymagnanimity which can invoke omens and oracles against itself. It is astonishing how often the Turks seem to have accepted a legendor prophecy about their own ultimate failure. De Quincey mentionsone of them in the blow that half broke the Palladium of Byzantium. It is said that the Moslems themselves predict the entryof a Christian king of Jerusalem through the Golden Gate. Perhaps that is why they have blocked up the fatal gate;but in any case they dealt in that fashion with the fatal tree. They elaborately bound and riveted it with iron, as if acceptingthe popular prophecy which declared that so long as it stoodthe Turkish Empire would stand. It was as if the wicked manof Scripture had daily watered a green bay-tree, to make surethat it should flourish. In the last chapter I have attempted to suggest a backgroundof the battlemented walls with the low gates and narrow windowswhich seem to relieve the liveliest of the coloured groups againstthe neutral tints of the North, and how this was intensifiedwhen the neutral tints were touched with the positive hue of snow. In the same merely impressionist spirit I would here attempt to sketchsome of the externals of the actors in such a scene, though it ishard to do justice to such a picture even in the superficial matterof the picturesque. Indeed it is hard to be sufficiently superficial;for in the East nearly every external is a symbol. The greater part of it is the gorgeous rag-heap of Arabian humanity, and even about that one could lecture on almost every coloured rag. We hear much of the gaudy colours of the East; but the moststriking thing about them is that they are delicate colours. It is rare to see a red that is merely like a pillar-box, or a bluethat is Reckitt's blue; the red is sure to have the enrichmentof tawny wine or blood oranges, and the blue of peacocks or the sea. In short these people are artistic in the sense that used to becalled aesthetic; and it is a nameless instinct that preservesthese nameless tints. Like all such instincts, it can beblunted by a bullying rationalism; like all such children, these people do not know why they prefer the better, and cantherefore be persuaded by sophists that they prefer the worst. But there are other elements emerging from the coloured crowd, which are more significant, and therefore more stubborn. A stranger entirely ignorant of that world would feel somethinglike a chill to the blood when he first saw the black figuresof the veiled Moslem women, sinister figures without faces. It is as if in that world every woman were a widow. When he realisedthat these were not the masked mutes at a very grisly funeral, but merely ladies literally obeying a convention of wearingveils in public, he would probably have a reaction of laughter. He would be disposed to say flippantly that it must be, a dull life, not only for the women but the men; and that a man might well wantfive wives if he had to marry them before he could even look at them. But he will be wise not to be satisfied with such flippancy, for the complete veiling of the Moslem women of Jerusalem, though not a finer thing than the freedom of the Christian womanof Bethlehem, is almost certainly a finer thing than the morecoquettish compromise of the other Moslem women of Cairo. It simply means that the Moslem religion is here more sincerely observed;and this in turn is part of something that a sympathetic person willsoon feel in Jerusalem, if he has come from these more commercialcities of the East; a spiritual tone decidedly more delicateand dignified, like the clear air about the mountain city. Whatever the human vices involved, it is not altogether fornothing that this is the holy town of three great religions. When all is said, he will feel that there are some tricks that couldnot be played, some trades that could not be plied, some shopsthat could not be opened, within a stone's throw of the Sepulchre. This indefinable seriousness has its own fantasies of fanaticismor formalism; but if these are vices they are not vulgarities. There is no stronger example of this than the real Jews of Jerusalem, especially those from the ghettoes of eastern Europe. They can be immediately picked out by the peculiar wisps of hair wornon each side of the face, like something between curls and whiskers. Sometimes they look strangely effeminate, like some rococoburlesque of the ringlets of an Early Victorian woman. Sometimes they look considerably more like the horns of a devil;and one need not be an Anti-Semite to say that the face is oftenmade to match. But though they may be ugly, or even horrible, they are not vulgar like the Jews at Brighton; they trail behindthem too many primeval traditions and laborious loyalties, along with their grand though often greasy robes of bronzeor purple velvet. They often wear on their heads that oddturban of fur worn by the Rabbis in the pictures of Rembrandt. And indeed that great name is not irrelevant; for the whole truthat the back of Zionism is in the difference between the pictureof a Jew by Rembrandt and a picture of a Jew by Sargent. For Rembrandt the Rabbi was, in a special and double sense, a distinguished figure. He was something distinct from the worldof the artist, who drew a Rabbi as he would a Brahmin. But Sargenthad to treat his sitters as solid citizens of England or America;and consequently his pictures are direct provocations to a pogrom. But the light that Rembrandt loved falls not irreverently onthe strange hairy haloes that can still be seen on the shaven headsof the Jews of Jerusalem. And I should be sorry for any pogromthat brought down any of their grey wisps or whiskers in sorrowto the grave. The whole scene indeed, seriousness apart, might be regarded as afantasia for barbers; for the different ways of dressing the hairwould alone serve as symbols of different races and religions. Thus the Greek priests of the Orthodox Church, bearded and robedin black with black towers upon their heads, have for somestrange reason their hair bound up behind like a woman's. Inany case they have in their pomp a touch of the bearded bullsof Assyrian sculpture; and this strange fashion of curling if notoiling the Assyrian bull gives the newcomer an indescribable andillogical impression of the unnatural sublimity of archaic art. In the Apocalypse somewhere there is an inspiringly unintelligibleallusion to men coming on the earth, whose hair is like the hairof women and their teeth like the teeth of lions. I have never beenbitten by an Orthodox clergyman, and cannot say whether his teethare at all leonine; though I have seen seven of them togetherenjoying their lunch at an hotel with decorum and dispatch. But the twisting of the hair in the womanish fashion does for ustouch that note of the abnormal which the mystic meant to conveyin his poetry, and which others feel rather as a recoil into humour. The best and last touch to this topsy-turvydom was given when a lady, observing one of these reverend gentlemen who for some reason didnot carry this curious coiffure, exclaimed, in a tone of heartrendingsurprise and distress, "Oh, he's bobbed his hair!" Here again of course even a superficial glance at the pageantof the street should not be content with its comedy. There isan intellectual interest in the external pomp and air of placidpower in these ordinary Orthodox parish priests; especially if wecompare them with the comparatively prosaic and jog-trot good natureof the Roman monks, called in this country the Latins. Mingling inthe same crowd with these black-robed pontiffs can be seen shaven menin brown habits who seem in comparison to be both busy and obscure. These are the sons of St. Francis, who came to the East with a grandsimplicity and thought to finish the Crusades with a smile. The spectator will be wise to accept this first contrast that strikesthe eye with an impartial intellectual interest; it has nothingto do with personal character, of course, and many Greek priestsare as simple in their tastes as they are charming in their manners;while any Roman priests can find as much ritual as they may happento want in other aspects of their own religion. But it is broadlytrue that Roman and Greek Catholicism are contrasted in this wayin this country; and the contrast is the flat contrary to all ourcustomary associations in the West. In the East it is Roman Catholicismthat stands for much that we associate with Protestantism. It is Roman Catholicism that is by comparison plain and practicaland scornful of superstition and concerned for social work. It is Greek Catholicism that is stiff with gold and gorgeouswith ceremonial, with its hold on ancient history and its inheritanceof imperial tradition. In the cant of our own society, we may sayit is the Roman who rationalises and the Greek who Romanises. It is the Roman Catholic who is impatient with Russian andGreek childishness, and perpetually appealing for common sense. It is the Greek who defends such childishness as childlike faithand would rebuke such common sense as common scepticism. I do notspeak of the theological tenets or even the deeper emotions involved, but only, as I have said, of contrasts visible even in the street. And the whole difference is sufficiently suggested in two phrasesI heard within a few days. A distinguished Anglo-Catholic, who has himself much sympathy with the Greek Orthodox traditions, said to me, "After all, the Romans were the first Puritans. "And I heard that a Franciscan, being told that this Englishmanand perhaps the English generally were disposed to make an alliancewith the Greek Church, had only said by way of comment, "And a goodthing too, the Greeks might do something at last. " Anyhow the first impression is that the Greek is more gorgeousin black than the Roman in colours. But the Greek of coursecan also appear in colours, especially in those eternalforms of frozen yet fiery colours which we call jewels. I have seen the Greek Patriarch, that magnificent old gentleman, walking down the street like an emperor in the _Arabian Nights_, hung all over with historic jewels as thick as beads or buttons, with a gigantic cross of solid emeralds that might have been given himby the green genii of the sea, if any of the genii are Christians. These things are toys, but I am entirely in favour of toys;and rubies and emeralds are almost as intoxicating as that sortof lustrous coloured paper they put inside Christmas crackers. This beauty has been best achieved in the North in the gloryof coloured glass; and I have seen great Gothic windowsin which one could really believe that the robes of martyrswere giant rubies or the starry sky a single enormous sapphire. But the colours of the West are transparent, the coloursof the East opaque. I have spoken of the _Arabian Nights_, and there is really a touch of them even in the Christian churches, perhaps increased with a tradition of early Christian secrecy. There are glimpses of gorgeously tiled walls, of blue curtains and greendoors and golden inner chambers, that are just like the entranceto an Eastern tale. The Orthodox are at least more orientalin the sense of being more ornamental; more flat and decorative. The Romans are more Western, I might even say more modern, in the sense of having more realism even in their ritualism. The Greek cross is a cross; the Roman cross is a crucifix. But these are deeper matters; I am only trying to suggest a sortof silhouette of the crowd like the similar silhouette of the city, a profile or outline of the heads and hats, like the profile ofthe towers and spires. The tower that makes the Greek priest looklike a walking catafalque is by no means alone among the horns thusfantastically exalted. There is the peaked hood of the Armenian priest, for instance; the stately survival of that strange Monophysiteheresy which perpetuated itself in pomp and pride mainly throughthe sublime accident of the Crusades. That black cone also risesabove the crowd with something of the immemorial majesty of a pyramid;and rightly so, for it is typical of the prehistoric poetryby which these places live that some say it is a surviving memoryof Ararat and the Ark. Again the high white headgear of the Bethlehem women, or to speak more strictly of the Bethlehem wives, has alreadybeen noted in another connection; but it is well to remark itagain among the colours of the crowd, because this at least hasa significance essential to all criticism of such a crowd. Most travellers from the West regard such an Eastern city far toomuch as a Moslem city, like the lady whom Mr. Maurice Baring met whotravelled all over Russia, and thought all the churches were mosques. But in truth it is very hard to generalise about Jerusalem, preciselybecause it contains everything, and its contrasts are real contrasts. And anybody who doubts that its Christianity is Christian, a thingfighting for our own culture and morals on the borders of Asia, need only consider the concrete fact of these women of Bethlehemand their costume. There is no need to sneer in any unsympatheticfashion at all the domestic institutions of Islam; the sexes arenever quite so stupid as some feminists represent; and I dare saya woman often has her own way in a harem as well as in a household. But the broad difference does remain. And if there be one thing, I think, that can safely be said about all Asia and all oriental tribes, it is this; that if a married woman wears any distinctive mark, it is always meant to prevent her from receiving the admiration or eventhe notice of strange men. Often it is only made to disguise her;sometimes it is made to disfigure her. It may be the maskingof the face as among the Moslems; it may be the shaving of the headas among the Jews; it may, I believe, be the blackening of the teethand other queer expedients among the people of the Far East. But is never meant to make her look magnificent in public;and the Bethlehem wife is made to look magnificent in public. She notonly shows all the beauty of her face; and she is often very beautiful. She also wears a towering erection which is as unmistakablymeant to give her consequence as the triple tiara of the Pope. A woman wearing such a crown, and wearing it without a veil, does stand, and can only conceivably stand, for what we call the Western viewof women, but should rather call the Christian view of women. This is the sort of dignity which must of necessity come fromsome vague memory of chivalry. The woman may or may not be, as the legend says, a lineal descendant of a Crusader. But whether or no she is his daughter, she is certainly his heiress. She may be put last among the local figures I have here described, for the special reason that her case has this rather deeper significance. For it is not possible to remain content with the fact that the crowdoffers such varied shapes and colours to the eye, when it also offersmuch deeper divisions and even dilemmas to the intelligence. The black dress of the Moslem woman and the white dress of theChristian woman are in sober truth as different as black and white. They stand for real principles in a real opposition; and the black andwhite will not easily disappear in the dull grey of our own compromises. The one tradition will defend what it regards as modesty, and the otherwhat it regards as dignity, with passions far deeper than most of ourpaltry political appetites. Nor do I see how we can deny such a rightof defence, even in the case we consider the less enlightened. It is made all the more difficult by the fact that those who considerthemselves the pioneers of enlightenment generally also considerthemselves the protectors of native races and aboriginal rights. Whatever view we take of the Moslem Arab, we must at least admitthat the greater includes the less. It is manifestly absurd to saywe have no right to interfere in his country, but have a rightto interfere in his home. It is the intense interest of Jerusalem that there can thus betwo universes in the same street. Indeed there are ten ratherthan two; and it is a proverb that the fight is not only betweenChristian and Moslem, but between Christian and Christian. At this moment, it must be admitted, it is almost entirely a fightof Christian and Moslem allied against Jew. But of that I shall haveto speak later; the point for the moment is that the varied coloursof the streets are a true symbol of the varied colours of the souls. It is perhaps the only modern place where the war waged between ideashas such a visible and vivid heraldry. And that fact alone may well leave the spectator with onefinal reflection; for it is a matter in which the modern worldmay well have to learn something from the motley rabble of thisremote Eastern town. It may be an odd thing to suggest that a crowd in Bond Streetor Piccadilly should model itself on this masquerade of religions. It would be facile and fascinating to turn it into a satire oran extravaganza. Every good and innocent mind would be gratifiedwith the image of a bowler hat in the precise proportions of the Domeof St. Paul's, and surmounted with a little ball and cross, symbolising the loyalty of some Anglican to his mother church. It might even be pleasing to see the street dominatedwith a more graceful top-hat modelled on the Eiffel Tower, and signifying the wearer's faith in scientific enterprise, or perhaps in its frequent concomitant of political corruption. These would be fair Western parallels to the head-dresses of Jerusalem;modelled on Mount Ararat or Solomon's Temple, and some may insinuatethat we are not very likely ever to meet them in the Strand. A man wearing whiskers is not even compelled to plead some sortof excuse or authority for wearing whiskers, as the Jew canfor wearing ringlets; and though the Anglican clergyman may indeedbe very loyal to his mother church, there might be considerablehesitation if his mother bade him bind his hair. Nevertheless a morehistorical view of the London and Jerusalem crowds will show as farfrom impossible to domesticate such symbols; that some day a lady'sjewels might mean something like the sacred jewels of the Patriarch, or a lady's furs mean something like the furred turban of the Rabbi. History indeed will show us that we are not so much superior to themas inferior to ourselves. When the Crusaders came to Palestine, and came riding up that roadfrom Jaffa where the orange plantations glow on either side, they camewith motives which may have been mixed and are certainly disputed. There may have been different theories among the Crusaders; there arecertainly different theories among the critics of the Crusaders. Many sought God, some gold, some perhaps black magic. But whatever elsethey were in search of, they were not in search of the picturesque. They were not drawn from a drab civilisation by that mere thirst forcolour that draws so many modern artists to the bazaars of the East. In those days there were colours in the West as well as in the East;and a glow in the sunset as well as in the sunrise. Many of the menwho rode up that road were dressed to match the most gloriousorange garden and to rival the most magnificent oriental king. King Richard cannot have been considered dowdy, even by comparison, when he rode on that high red saddle graven with golden lions, with his great scarlet hat and his vest of silver crescents. That squire of the comparatively unobtrusive householdof Joinville, who was clad in scarlet striped with yellow, must surely have been capable (if I may be allowed the expression)of knocking them in the most magnificent Asiatic bazaar. Nor were these external symbols less significant, but rather moresignificant than the corresponding symbols of the Eastern civilisation. It is true that heraldry began beautifully as an art and afterwardsdegenerated into a science. But even in being a science it hadto possess a significance; and the Western colours were oftenallegorical where the Eastern were only accidental. To a certainextent this more philosophical ornament was doubtless imitated;and I have remarked elsewhere on the highly heraldic lionswhich even the Saracens carved over the gate of St. Stephen. But it is the extraordinary and even exasperating fact that it was notimitated as the most meaningless sort of modern vulgarity is imitated. King Richard's great red hat embroidered with beasts and birds has notovershadowed the earth so much as the billycock, which no one has yetthought of embroidering with any such natural and universal imagery. The cockney tourist is not only more likely to set out withthe intention of knocking them, but he has actually knocked them;and Orientals are imitating the tweeds of the tourist more than theyimitated the stripes of the squire. It is a curious and perhapsmelancholy truth that the world is imitating our worst, our wearinessand our dingy decline, when it did not imitate our best and the highmoment of our morning. Perhaps it is only when civilisation becomes a disease that itbecomes an infection. Possibly it is only when it becomes a veryvirulent disease that it becomes an epidemic. Possibly againthat is the meaning both of cosmopolitanism and imperialism. Anyhow the tribes sitting by Afric's sunny fountains didnot take up the song when Francis of Assisi stood on the verymountain of the Middle Ages, singing the Canticle of the Sun. When Michael Angelo carved a statue in snow, Eskimos did notcopy him, despite their large natural quarries or resources. Laplanders never made a model of the Elgin Marbles, with a friezeof reindeers instead of horses; nor did Hottentots try to paintMumbo Jumbo as Raphael had painted Madonnas. But many a savage kinghas worn a top-hat, and the barbarian has sometimes been so debasedas to add to it a pair of trousers. Explosive bullets and the brutalfactory system numbers of advanced natives are anxious to possess. And it was this reflection, arising out of the mere pleasureof the eye in the parti-coloured crowd before me, that brought backmy mind to the chief problem and peril of our position in Palestine, on which I touched earlier in this chapter; the peril which is largelyat the back both of the just and of the unjust objections to Zionism. It is the fear that the West, in its modern mercantile mood, will send not its best but its worst. The artisan way of putting it, from the point of view of the Arab, is that it will mean notso much the English merchant as the Jewish money-lender. I shallwrite elsewhere of better types of Jew and the truths theyreally represent; but the Jewish money-lender is in a curiousand complex sense the representative of this unfortunate paradox. He is not only unpopular both in the East and West, but he is unpopularin the West for being Eastern and in the East for being Western. He is accused in Europe of Asiatic crookedness and secrecy, and in Asia of European vulgarity and bounce. I have said _a propos_of the Arab that the dignity of the oriental is in his long robe;the merely mercantile Jew is the oriental who has lost his long robe, which leads to a dangerous liveliness in the legs. He bustlesand hustles too much; and in Palestine some of the unpopularityeven of the better sort of Jew is simply due to his restlessness. But there remains a fear that it will not be a question of thebetter sort of Jew, or of the better sort of British influence. The same ignominious inversion which reproduces everywhere the factorychimney without the church tower, which spreads a cockney commercebut not a Christian culture, has given many men a vague feelingthat the influence of modern civilisation will surround these raggedbut coloured groups with something as dreary and discoloured, as unnatural and as desolate as the unfamiliar snow in which theywere shivering as I watched them. There seemed a sort of sinisteromen in this strange visitation that the north had sent them;in the fact that when the north wind blew at last, it had onlyscattered on them this silver dust of death. It may be that this more melancholy mood was intensified by thatpale landscape and those impassable ways. I do not dislike snow;on the contrary I delight in it; and if it had drifted as deep in myown country against my own door I should have thought it the triumphof Christmas, and a thing as comic as my own dog and donkey. But the people in the coloured rags did dislike it; and the effects of itwere not comic but tragic. The news that came in seemed in that littlelonely town like the news of a great war, or even of a great defeat. Men fell to regarding it, as they have fallen too much to regardingthe war, merely as an unmixed misery, and here the misery wasreally unmixed. As the snow began to melt corpses were found in it, homes were hopelessly buried, and even the gradual clearing of the roadsonly brought him stories of the lonely hamlets lost in the hills. It seemed as if a breath of the aimless destruction that wandersin the world had drifted across us; and no task remained for menbut the weary rebuilding of ruins and the numbering of the dead. Only as I went out of the Jaffa Gate, a man told me that the treeof the hundred deaths, that was the type of the eternal Caliphateof the Crescent, was cast down and lying broken in the snow. CHAPTER VI THE GROUPS OF THE CITY Palestine is a striped country; that is the first effect of landscapeon the eye. It runs in great parallel lines wavering into vast hillsand valleys, but preserving the parallel pattern; as if drawn boldlybut accurately with gigantic chalks of green and grey and red and yellow. The natural explanation or (to speak less foolishly) the natural processof this is simple enough. The stripes are the strata of the rock, only they are stripped by the great rains, so that everything hasto grow on ledges, repeating yet again that terraced characterto be seen in the vineyards and the staircase streets of the town. But though the cause is in a sense in the ruinous strength of the rain, the hues are not the dreary hues of ruin. What earth there is is commonlya red clay richer than that of Devon; a red clay of which it wouldbe easy to believe that the giant limbs of the first man were made. What grass there is is not only an enamel of emerald, but isliterally crowded with those crimson anemones which might well havecalled forth the great saying touching Solomon in all his glory. And even what rock there is is coloured with a thousand secondaryand tertiary tints, as are the walls and streets of the Holy Citywhich is built from the quarries of these hills. For the oldstones of the old Jerusalem are as precious as the precious stonesof the New Jerusalem; and at certain moments of morning or of sunset, every pebble might be a pearl. And all these coloured strata rise so high and roll so far that they mightbe skies rather than slopes. It is as if we looked up at a frozen sunset;or a daybreak fixed for ever with its fleeting bars of cloud. And indeed the fancy is not without a symbolic suggestiveness. This is the land of eternal things; but we tend too much to forgetthat recurrent things are eternal things. We tend to forget thatsubtle tones and delicate hues, whether in the hills or the heavens, were to the primitive poets and sages as visible as they are to us;and the strong and simple words in which they describe themdo not prove that they did not realise them. When Wordsworthspeaks of "the clouds that gather round the setting sun, "we assume that he has seen every shadow of colour and everycurve of form; but when the Hebrew poet says "He hath madethe clouds his chariot"; we do not always realise that he wasfull of indescribable emotions aroused by indescribable sights. We vaguely assume that the very sky was plainer in primitive times. We feel as if there had been a fashion in sunsets; or as if dawnwas always grey in the Stone Age or brown in the Bronze Age. But there is another parable written in those long lines of many-colouredclay and stone. Palestine is in every sense a stratified country. It is not only true in the natural sense, as here where the clay hasfallen away and left visible the very ribs of the hills. It is truein the quarries where men dig, in the dead cities where they excavate, and even in the living cities where they still fight and pray. The sorrow of all Palestine is that its divisions in culture, politics and theology are like its divisions in geology. The dividing line is horizontal instead of vertical. The frontierdoes not run between states but between stratified layers. The Jew did not appear beside the Canaanite but on top of the Canaanite;the Greek not beside the Jew but on top of the Jew; the Moslem notbeside the Christian but on top of the Christian. It is not merelya house divided against itself, but one divided across itself. It is a house in which the first floor is fighting the second floor, in which the basement is oppressed from above and attics are besiegedfrom below. There is a great deal of gunpowder in the cellars;and people are by no means comfortable even on the roof. In days of what some call Bolshevism, it may be said that most statesare houses in which the kitchen has declared war on the drawing-room. But this will give no notion of the toppling pagoda of politicaland religious and racial differences, of which the name is Palestine. To explain that it is necessary to give the traveller's firstimpressions more particularly in their order, and before Ireturn to this view of the society as stratified, I must statethe problem more practically as it presents itself while the societystill seems fragmentary. We are always told that the Turk kept the peace betweenthe Christian sects. It would be nearer the nerve of vitaltruth to say that he made the war between the Christian sects. But it would be nearer still to say that the war is somethingnot made by Turks but made up by infidels. The tourist visitingthe churches is often incredulous about the tall tales told about them;but he is completely credulous about the tallest of all the tales, the tale that is told against them. He believes in a frantic fraticidalwar perpetually waged by Christian against Christian in Jerusalem. It freshens the free sense of adventure to wander through thosecrooked and cavernous streets, expecting every minute to see theArmenian Patriarch trying to stick a knife into the Greek Patriarch;just as it would add to the romance of London to linger about Lambethand Westminster in the hope of seeing the Archbishop of Canterbury lockedin a deadly grapple with the President of the Wesleyan Conference. And if we return to our homes at evening without having actually seenthese things with the eye of flesh, the vision has none the less shoneon our path, and led us round many corners with alertness and with hope. But in bald fact religion does not involve perpetual war in the East, any more than patriotism involves perpetual war in the West. What it does involve in both cases is a defensive attitude;a vigilance on the frontiers. There is no war; but there isan armed peace. I have already explained the sense in which I say that the Moslemsare unhistoric or even anti-historic. Perhaps it would be nearthe truth to say that they are prehistoric. They attach themselvesto the tremendous truisms which men might have realised before theyhad any political experience at all; which might have been scratchedwith primitive knives of flint upon primitive pots of clay. Being simple and sincere, they do not escape the need for legends;I might almost say that, being honest, they do not escape the needfor lies. But their mood is not historic, they do not wish to grapplewith the past; they do not love its complexities; nor do theyunderstand the enthusiasm for its details and even its doubts. Now in all this the Moslems of a place like Jerusalem are the veryopposite of the Christians of Jerusalem. The Christianity of Jerusalem ishighly historic, and cannot be understood without historical imagination. And this is not the strong point perhaps of those among us who generallyrecord their impressions of the place. As the educated Englishmandoes not know the history of England, it would be unreasonableto expect him to know the history of Moab or of Mesopotamia. He receives the impression, in visiting the shrines of Jerusalem, of a number of small sects squabbling about small things. In short, he has before him a tangle of trivialities, which includethe Roman Empire in the West and in the East, the Catholic Churchin its two great divisions, the Jewish race, the memories of Greeceand Egypt, and the whole Mahometan world in Asia and Africa. It may be that he regards these as small things; but I should be gladif he would cast his eye over human history, and tell me what arethe large things. The truth is that the things that meet to-day inJerusalem are by far the greatest things that the world has yet seen. If they are not important nothing on this earth is important, and certainly not the impressions of those who happen to be boredby them. But to understand them it is necessary to have somethingwhich is much commoner in Jerusalem than in Oxford or Boston;that sort of living history which we call tradition. For instance, the critic generally begins by dismissing these conflictswith the statement that they are all about small points of theology. I do not admit that theological points are small points. Theology is onlythought applied to religion; and those who prefer a thoughtless religionneed not be so very disdainful of others with a more rationalistic taste. The old joke that the Greek sects only differed about a singleletter is about the lamest and most illogical joke in the world. An atheist and a theist only differ by a single letter; yet theologiansare so subtle as to distinguish definitely between the two. But though I do not in any case allow that it is idle to be concernedabout theology, as a matter of actual fact these quarrels are notchiefly concerned about theology. They are concerned about history. They are concerned with the things about which the only human sortof history is concerned; great memories of great men, great battlesfor great ideas, the love of brave people for beautiful places, and the faith by which the dead are alive. It is quite true that withthis historic sense men inherit heavy responsibilities and revenges, fury and sorrow and shame. It is also true that without it men die, and nobody even digs their graves. The truth is that these quarrels are rather about patriotism thanabout religion, in the sense of theology. That is, they are just suchheroic passions about the past as we call in the West by the nameof nationalism; but they are conditioned by the extraordinarilycomplicated position of the nations, or what corresponds to the nations. We of the West, if we wish to understand it, must imagine ourselvesas left with all our local loves and family memories unchanged, but the places affected by them intermingled and tumbled about by somealmost inconceivable convulsion. We must imagine cities and landscapesto have turned on some unseen pivots, or been shifted about by someunseen machinery, so that our nearest was furthest and our remotestenemy our neighbour. We must imagine monuments on the wrong sites, and the antiquities of one county emptied out on top of another. And we must imagine through all this the thin but tough threadsof tradition everywhere tangled and yet everywhere unbroken. We must picture a new map made out of the broken fragments of the old map;and yet with every one remembering the old map and ignoring the new. In short we must try to imagine, or rather we must try to hope, that our own memories would be as long and our own loyaltiesas steady as the memories and loyalties of the little crowdin Jerusalem; and hope, or pray, that we could only be as rigid, as rabid and as bigoted as are these benighted people. Then perhaps we might preserve all our distinctions of truthand falsehood in a chaos of time and space. We have to conceive that the Tomb of Napoleon is in the middleof Stratford-on-Avon, and that the Nelson Column is erectedon the field of Bannockburn; that Westminster Abbey has takenwings and flown away to the most romantic situation on the Rhine, and that the wooden "Victory" is stranded, like the Ark on Ararat, on the top of the Hill of Tara; that the pilgrims to the shrineof Lourdes have to look for it in the Island of Runnymede, and that the only existing German statue of Bismarck is to be foundin the Pantheon at Paris. This intolerable topsy-turvydom is noexaggeration of the way in which stories cut across each other and sitesare imposed on each other in the historic chaos of the Holy City. Now we in the West are very lucky in having our nations normallydistributed into their native lands; so that good patriots can talkabout themselves without perpetually annoying their neighbours. Some of the pacifists tell us that national frontiers and divisionsare evil because they exasperate us to war. It would be far truerto say that national frontiers and divisions keep us at peace. It would be far truer to say that we can always love eachother so long as we do not see each other. But the peopleof Jerusalem are doomed to have difference without division. They are driven to set pillar against pillar in the same temple, while we can set city against city across the plains of the world. While for us a church rises from its foundations as naturallyas a flower springs from a flower-bed, they have to bless the soiland curse the stones that stand on it. While the land we loveis solid under our feet to the earth's centre, they have to seeall they love and hate lying in strata like alternate night and day, as incompatible and as inseparable. Their entanglements are tragic, but they are not trumpery or accidental. Everything has a meaning;they are loyal to great names as men are loyal to great nations;they have differences about which they feel bound to dispute to the death;but in their death they are not divided. Jerusalem is a small town of big things; and the average moderncity is a big town full of small things. All the most importantand interesting powers in history are here gathered within the areaof a quiet village; and if they are not always friends, at least theyare necessarily neighbours. This is a point of intellectual interest, and even intensity, that is far too little realised. It is a matterof modern complaint that in a place like Jerusalem the Christiangroups do not always regard each other with Christian feelings. It is said that they fight each other; but at least they meet each other. In a great industrial city like London or Liverpool, how often do theyeven meet each other? In a large town men live in small cliques, which are much narrower than classes; but in this small town theylive at least by large contacts, even if they are conflicts. Nor is it really true, in the daily humours of human life, that theyare only conflicts. I have heard an eminent English clergyman fromCambridge bargaining for a brass lamp with a Syrian of the Greek Church, and asking the advice of a Franciscan friar who was standing smilingin the same shop. I have met the same representative of the Churchof England, at a luncheon party with the wildest Zionist Jews, and with the Grand Mufti, the head of the Moslem religion. Suppose the same Englishman had been, as he might well have been, an eloquent and popular vicar in Chelsea or Hampstead. How oftenwould he have met a Franciscan or a Zionist? Not once in a year. How often would he have met a Moslem or a Greek Syrian? Not oncein a lifetime. Even if he were a bigot, he would be boundin Jerusalem to become a more interesting kind of bigot. Even if his opinions were narrow, his experiences would be wide. He is not, as a fact, a bigot, nor, as a fact, are the otherpeople bigots, but at the worst they could not be unconscious bigots. They could not live in such uncorrected complacency as is possibleto a larger social set in a larger social system. They could notbe quite so ignorant as a broad-minded person in a big suburb. Indeed there is something fine and distinguished about the very delicacy, and even irony, of their diplomatic relations. There is somethingof chivalry in the courtesy of their armed truce, and it is a greatschool of manners that includes such differences in morals. This is an aspect of the interest of Jerusalem which can easilybe neglected and is not easy to describe. The normal lifethere is intensely exciting, not because the factions fight, but rather because they do not fight. Of the abnormal crisiswhen they did fight, and the abnormal motives that made them fight, I shall have something to say later on. But it was true for a greatpart of the time that what was picturesque and thrilling was notthe war but the peace. The sensation of being in this little townis rather like that of being at a great international congress. It is like that moving and glittering social satire, in whichdiplomatists can join in a waltz who may soon be joining in a war. For the religious and political parties have yet another pointin common with separate nations; that even within this narrowspace the complicated curve of their frontiers is really moreor less fixed, and certainly not particularly fluctuating. Persecution is impossible and conversion is not at all common. The very able Anglo-Catholic leader, to whom I have already referred, uttered to me a paradox that was a very practical truth. He said he felt exasperated with the Christian sects, not for their fanaticism but for their lack of fanaticism. He meant their lack of any fervour and even of any hope, of converting each other to their respective religions. An Armenian may be quite as proud of the Armenian Church as a Frenchmanof the French nation, yet he may no more expect to make a Moslem anArmenian than the Frenchman expects to make an Englishman a Frenchman. If, as we are told, the quarrels could be condemned as merelytheological, this would certainly be the very reverse of logical. But as I say, we get much nearer to them by calling them national;and the leaders of the great religions feel much more likethe ambassadors of great nations. And, as I have also said, that ambassadorial atmosphere can be best expressed on the word irony, sometimes a rather tragic irony. At any tea-party or talk in the street, between the rival leaders, there is a natural tendency to that sortof wit which consists in veiled allusion to a very open secret. Each mail feels that there are heavy forces behind a small point, as the weight of the fencer is behind the point of the rapier. And the point can be yet more pointed because the politics of the city, when I was there, included several men with a taste and talent for suchpolished intercourse; including especially two men whose experienceand culture would have been remarkable in any community in the world;the American Consul and the Military Governor of Jerusalem. If in cataloguing the strata of the society we take first the topmostlayer of Western officialism, we might indeed find it not inconvenientto take these two men as representing the chief realities about it. Dr. Glazebrook, the representative of the United States, has the less to do with the internal issues of the country; but hismere presence and history is so strangely picturesque that he mightbe put among the first reasons for finding the city interesting. He is an old man now, for he actually began life as a soldier in theSouthern and Secessionist army, and still keeps alive in every detail, not merely the virtues but the very gestures of the old Southernand Secessionist aristocrat. He afterward became a clergyman of the Episcopalian Church, and servedas a chaplain in the Spanish-American war, then, at an age when mostmen have long retired from the most peaceful occupations, he was sentout by President Wilson to the permanent battlefield of Palestine. The brilliant services he performed there, in the protection of Britishand American subjects, are here chiefly interesting as throwinga backward light on the unearthly topsy-turvydom of Turkish rule. There appears in his experiences something in such rulewhich we are perhaps apt to forget in a vision of statelyEastern princes and gallant Eastern warriors, something moretyrannical even than the dull pigheadedness of Prussianism. I mean the most atrocious of all tortures, which is called caprice. It is the thing we feel in the Arabian tales, when no man knowswhether the Sultan is good or bad, and he gives the same Viziera thousand pounds or a thousand lashes. I have heard Dr. Glazebrookdescribe a whole day of hideous hesitation, in which fugitivesfor whom he pleaded were allowed four times to embark and fourtimes were brought back again to their prison. There is somethingthere dizzy as well as dark, a whirlpool in the very heart of Asia;and something wilder than our own worst oppressions in the perilof those men who looked up and saw above all the power of Asiatic arms, their hopes hanging on a rocking mind like that of a maniac. The tyrant let them go at last, avowedly out of a simple sentimentfor the white hair of the consul, and the strange respect that manyMoslems feel for the minister of any religion. Once at leastthe trembling rock of barbaric rule nearly fell on him and killed him. By a sudden movement of lawlessness the Turkish military authoritiessent to him, demanding the English documents left in his custody. He refused to give them up; and he knew what he was doing. In standing firm he was not even standing like Nurse Cavell againstorganised Prussia under the full criticism of organised Europe. He was rather standing in a den of brigands, most of whomhad never heard of the international rules they violated. Finally by another freak of friendliness they left him and hispapers alone; but the old man had to wait many days in doubt, not knowing what they would do, since they did not know themselves. I do not know what were his thoughts, or whether they were far fromPalestine and all possibilities that tyranny might return and reignfor ever. But I have sometimes fancied that, in that ghastly silence, he may have heard again only the guns of Lee and the last battlein the Wilderness. If the mention of the American Consul refers back to the oppressionof the past, the mention of the Military Governor brings backall the problems of the present. Here I only sketch these groupsas I first found them in the present; and it must be rememberedthat my present is already past. All this was before the latestchange from military to civil government, but the mere nameof Colonel Storrs raises a question which is rather misunderstoodin relation to that change itself. Many of our journalists, especially at the time of the last and worst of the riots, wrote as if it would be a change from some sort of stiff militarismto a liberal policy akin to parliamentarism. I think this a fallacy, and a fallacy not uncommon in journalism, which is professedlyvery much up to date, and actually very much behind the times. As a fact it is nearly four years behind the times, for it isthinking in terms of the old small and rigidly professional army. Colonel Storrs is the very last man to be called militaristic inthe narrow sense; he is a particularly liberal and enlightened typeof the sort of English gentleman who readily served his country in war, but who is rather particularly fitted to serve her in politicsor literature. Of course many purely professional soldiers haveliberal and artistic tastes; as General Shea, one of the organisersof Palestinian victory, has a fine taste in poetry, or Colonel Popham, then deputy Governor of Jerusalem, an admirable taste in painting. But while it is sometimes forgotten that many soldiers are men, it isnow still more strange to forget that most men are soldiers. I fancythere are now few things more representative than the British Army;certainly it is much more representative than the British Parliament. The men I knew, and whom I remember with so much gratitude, working underGeneral Bols at the seat of government on the Mount of Olives, were certainly not narrowed by any military professionalism, and had ifanything the mark of quite different professions. One was a very shrewdand humorous lawyer employed on legal problems about enemy property, another was a young schoolmaster, with keen and clear ideas, or rather ideals, about education for all the races in Palestine. These men did not cease to be themselves because they were alldressed in khaki; and if Colonel Storrs recurs first to the memory, it is not because he had become a colonel in the trade of soldiering, but because he is the sort of man who could talk equally aboutall these other trades and twenty more. Incidentally, and by wayof example, he can talk about them in about ten languages. There is a story, which whether or no it be true is very typical, that one of the Zionist leaders made a patriotic speech in Hebrew, and broke off short in his recollection of this partially revivednational tongue; whereupon the Governor of Jerusalem finishedhis Hebrew speech for him--whether to exactly the same effector not it would be impertinent to inquire. He is a man ratherrecalling the eighteenth century aristocrat, with his love of witand classical learning; one of that small group of the governingclass that contains his uncle, Harry Cust, and was warmed withthe generous culture of George Wyndham. It was a purely mechanicaldistinction between the military and civil government that wouldlend to such figures the stiffness of a drumhead court martial. And even those who differed with him accused him in practice, not of militarist lack of sympathy with any of those he ruled, but rather with too imaginative a sympathy with some of them. To know these things, however slightly, and then read the Englishnewspapers afterwards is often amusing enough; but I have only mentionedthe matter because there is a real danger in so crude a differentiation. It would be a bad thing if a system military in form but representativein fact gave place to a system representative in form but financialin fact. That is what the Arabs and many of the English fear;and with the mention of that fear we come to the next stratumafter the official. It must be remembered that I am not at thisstage judging these groups, but merely very rapidly sketching them, like figures and costumes in the street. The group standing nearest to the official is that of the Zionists;who are supposed to have a place at least in our official policy. Among these also I am happy to have friends; and I may venture to callthe official head of the Zionists an old friend in a matter quite remotefrom Zionism. Dr. Eder, the President of the Zionist Commission, is a man for whom I conceived a respect long ago when he protested, as a professional physician, against the subjection of the poorto medical interference to the destruction of all moral independence. He criticised with great effect the proposal of legislators to kidnapanybody else's child whom they chose to suspect of a feeblemindednessthey were themselves too feeble-minded to define. It was defended, very characteristically, by a combination of precedent and progress;and we were told that it only extended the principle of the lunacy laws. That is to say, it only extended the principle of the lunacy lawsto people whom no sane man would call lunatics. It is as if theywere to alter the terms of a quarantine law from "lepers"to "light-haired persons"; and then say blandly that the principlewas the same. The humour and human sympathy of a Jewish doctor wasvery welcome to us when we were accused of being Anti-Semites, and weafterwards asked Dr. Eder for his own views on the Jewish problem. We found he was then a very strong Zionist; and this was long beforehe had the faintest chance of figuring as a leader of Zionism. And this accident is important; for it stamps the sincerity of the smallgroup of original Zionists, who were in favour of this nationalistideal when all the international Jewish millionaires were against it. To my mind the most serious point now against it is that the millionairesare for it. But it is enough to note here the reality of the idealin men like Dr. Eder and Dr. Weizmann, and doubtless many others. The only defect that need be noted, as a mere detail of portraiture, is a certain excessive vigilance and jealousy and pertinacity inthe wrong place, which sometimes makes the genuine Zionists unpopularwith the English, who themselves suffer unpopularity for supporting them. For though I am called an Anti-Semite, there were really periods ofofficial impatience when I was almost the only Pro-Semite in the company. I went about pointing out what was really to be said for Zionism, to people who were represented by the Arabs as the mere slavesof the Zionists. This group of Arab Anti-Semites may be taken next, but very briefly; for the problem itself belongs to a later page;and the one thing to be said of it here is very simple. I never expected it, and even now I do not fully understand it. But it is the fact that the native Moslems are more Anti-Semiticthan the native Christians. Both are more or less so; and have formeda sort of alliance out of the fact. The banner carried by the mobbore the Arabic inscription "Moslems and Christians are brothers. "It is as if the little wedge of Zionism had closed up the cracksof the Crusades. Of the Christian crowds in that partnership, and the Christian creedsthey are proud to inherit, I have already suggested something;it is only as well to note that I have put them out of their strict orderin the stratification of history. It is too often forgotten that inthese countries the Christian culture is older than the Moslem culture. I for one regret that the old Pax Romana was broken up by the Arabs;and hold that in the long run there was more life in that Byzantinedecline than in that Semitic revival. And I will add what I cannothere develop or defend; that in the long run it is best that thePax Romana should return; and that the suzerainty of those landsat least will have to be Christian, and neither Moslem nor Jewish. To defend it is to defend a philosophy; but I do hold that there isin that philosophy, for all the talk of its persecutions in the past, a possibility of comprehension and many-sided sympathy which isnot in the narrow intensity either of the Moslem or the Jew. Christianity is really the right angle of that triangle, and the other two are very acute angles. But in the meetings that led up to the riots it is the more Moslempart of the mixed crowds that I chiefly remember; which touchesthe same truth that the Christians are the more potentially tolerant. But many of the Moslem leaders are as dignified and human as manyof the Zionist leaders; the Grand Mufti is a man I cannot imagineas either insulting anybody, or being conceivably the object of insult. The Moslem Mayor of Jerusalem was another such figure, belonging also Ibelieve to one of the Arab aristocratic houses (the Grand Mufti isa descendant of Mahomet) and I shall not forget his first appearanceat the first of the riotous meetings in which I found myself. I will give it as the first of two final impressions with which Iwill end this chapter, I fear on a note of almost anarchic noise, the unearthly beating and braying of the Eastern gongs and hornsof two fierce desert faiths against each other. I first saw from the balcony of the hotel the crowd of riotors comerolling up the street. In front of them went two fantastic figuresturning like teetotums in an endless dance and twirling two crookedand naked scimitars, as the Irish were supposed to twirl shillelaghs. I thought it a delightful way of opening a political meeting;and I wished we could do it at home at the General Election. I wish that instead of the wearisome business of Mr. Bonar Lawtaking the chair, and Mr. Lloyd George addressing the meeting, Mr. Law and Mr. Lloyd George would only hop and caper in front ofa procession, spinning round and round till they were dizzy, and wavingand crossing a pair of umbrellas in a thousand invisible patterns. But this political announcement or advertisement, though more intelligentthan our own, had, as I could readily believe, another side to it. I was told that it was often a prelude to ordinary festivals, such as weddings; and no doubt it remains from some ancient ritual danceof a religious character. But I could imagine that it might sometimesseem to a more rational taste to have too religious a character. I could imagine that those dancing men might indeed be dancing dervishes, with their heads going round in a more irrational sense thantheir bodies. I could imagine that at some moments it might suckthe soul into what I have called in metaphor the whirlpool of Asia, or the whirlwind of a world whipped like a top with a raging monotony;the cyclone of eternity. That is not the sort of rhythm northe sort of religion by which I myself should hope to save the soul;but it is intensely interesting to the mind and even the eye, and Iwent downstairs and wedged myself into the thick and thronging press. It surged through the gap by the gate, where men climbedlamp-posts and roared out speeches, and more especially recitednational poems in rich resounding voices; a really moving effect, at least for one who could not understand a word that was said. Feeling had already gone as far as knocking Jews' hats off and otherpopular sports, but not as yet on any universal and systematic scale;I saw a few of the antiquated Jews with wrinkles and ringlets, peering about here and there; some said as spies or representativesof the Zionists, to take away the Anti-Semitic colour from the meeting. But I think this unlikely; especially as it would have been pretty hardto take it away. It is more likely, I think, that the archaic Jewswere really not unamused and perhaps not unsympathetic spectators;for the Zionist problem is complicated by a real quarrelin the Ghetto about Zionism. The old religious Jews do notwelcome the new nationalist Jews; it would sometimes be hardlyan exaggeration to say that one party stands for the religion withoutthe nation, and the other for the nation without the religion. Just as the old agricultural Arabs hate the Zionists as theinstruments of new Western business grab and sharp practice;so the old peddling and pedantic but intensely pious Jews hatethe Zionists as the instruments of new Western atheism of free thought. Only I fear that when the storm breaks, such distinctionsare swept away. The storm was certainly rising. Outside the Jaffa Gate the roadruns up steeply and is split in two by the wedge of a high building, looking as narrow as a tower and projecting like the prow of a ship. There is something almost theatrical about its position and stageproperties, its one high-curtained window and balcony, with a sortof pole or flag-staff; for the place is official or rather municipal. Round it swelled the crowd, with its songs and poems andpassionate rhetoric in a kind of crescendo, and then suddenlythe curtain of the window rose like the curtain of the theatre, and we saw on that high balcony the red fez and the tall figureof the Mahometan Mayor of Jerusalem. I did not understand his Arabic observations; but I knowwhen a man is calming a mob, and the mob did become calmer. It was as if a storm swelled in the night and gradually died awayin a grey morning; but there are perpetual mutterings of that storm. My point for the moment is that the exasperations come chiefly fromthe two extremes of the two great Semitic traditions of monotheism;and certainly not primarily from those poor Eastern Christiansof whose fanaticism we have been taught to make fun. From time to time there are gleams of the extremities of Easternfanaticism which are almost ghastly to Western feeling. They seem to crack the polish of the dignified leaders of the Arabaristocracy and the Zionist school of culture, and reveal avolcanic substance of which only oriental creeds have been made. One day a wild Jewish proclamation is passed from hand to hand, denouncing disloyal Jews who refuse the teaching Hebrew; telling doctorsto let them die and hospitals to let them rot, ringing with the oldunmistakable and awful accent that bade men dash their childrenagainst the stones. Another day the city would be placarded withposters printed in Damascus, telling the Jews who looked to Palestinefor a national home that they should find it a national cemetery. And when these cries clash it is like the clash of those twocrooked Eastern swords, that crossed and recrossed and revolvedlike blazing wheels, in the vanguard of the marching mob. I felt the fullest pressure of the problem when I first walked roundthe whole of the Haram enclosure, the courts of the old Temple, where the high muezzin towers now stand at every corner, and heard the clear voices of the call to prayer. The sky wasladen with a storm that became the snowstorm; and it was the timeat which the old Jews beat their hands and mourn over what arebelieved to be the last stones of the Temple. There was a movementin my own mind that was attuned to these things, and impressed bythe strait limits and steep sides of that platform of the mountains;for the sense of crisis is not only in the intensity of the ideals, but in the very conditions of the reality, the reality with which thischapter began. And the burden of it is the burden of Palestine;the narrowness of the boundaries and the stratification of the rock. A voice not of my reason but rather sounding heavily in my heart, seemed to be repeating sentences like pessimistic proverbs. There is no place for the Temple of Solomon but on the ruins ofthe Mosque of Omar. There is no place for the nation of the Jewsbut in the country of the Arabs. And these whispers came to mefirst not as intellectual conclusions upon the conditions of the case, of which I should have much more to say and to hope; but ratheras hints of something immediate and menacing and yet mysterious. I felt almost a momentary impulse to flee from the place, like onewho has received an omen. For two voices had met in my ears;and within the same narrow space and in the same dark hour, electric and yet eclipsed with cloud, I had heard Islam cryingfrom the turret and Israel wailing at the wall. CHAPTER VII THE SHADOW OF THE PROBLEM A traveller sees the hundred branches of a tree long before he isnear enough to see its single and simple root; he generally seesthe scattered or sprawling suburbs of a town long before he has lookedupon the temple or the market-place. So far I have given impressionsof the most motley things merely as they came, in chronologicaland not in logical order; the first flying vision of Islam as a sortof sea, with something both of the equality and the emptiness andthe grandeur of its purple seas of sand; the first sharp silhouetteof Jerusalem, like Mount St. Michael, lifting above that merelyMoslem flood a crag still crowned with the towers of the Crusaders;the mere kaleidoscope of the streets, with little more than a hintof the heraldic meaning of the colours; a merely personal impressionof a few of the leading figures whom I happened to meet first, and only the faintest suggestion of the groups for which they stood. So far I have not even tidied up my own first impressions of the place;far less advanced a plan for tidying up the place itself. In any case, to begin with, it is easy to be in far too muchof a hurry about tidying up. This has already been noted inthe more obvious case, of all that religious art that bewilderedthe tourist with its churches full of flat and gilded ikons. Many a man has had the sensation of something as full as a picturegallery and as futile as a lumber-room, merely by not happening to knowwhat is really of value, or especially in what way it is really valued. An Armenian or a Syrian might write a report on his visitto England, saying that our national and especially our navalheroes were neglected, and left to the lowest dregs of the rabble;since the portraits of Benbow and Nelson, when exhibited to the public, were painted on wood by the crudest and most incompetent artists. He would not perhaps fully appreciate the fine shade ofsocial status and utility implied in a public-house sign. He might not realise that the sign of Nelson could be hung onhigh everywhere, because the reputation of Nelson was high everywhere, not because it was low anywhere; that his bad portrait was reallya proof of his good name. Yet the too rapid reformer may easilymiss even the simple and superficial parallel between the woodenpictures of admirals and the wooden pictures of angels. Still less will he appreciate the intense spiritual atmosphere, that makes the real difference between an ikon and an inn-sign, and makes the inns of England, noble and national as they are, relatively the homes of Christian charity but hardly a Christian faith. He can hardly bring himself to believe that Syrians can be as fondof religion as Englishmen of beer. Nobody can do justice to these cults who has not some sympathy withthe power of a mystical idea to transmute the meanest and most trivialobjects with a kind of magic. It is easy to talk of superstitiouslyattaching importance to sticks and stones, but the whole poetryof life consists of attaching importance to sticks and stones;and not only to those tall sticks we call the trees or those largestones we call the mountains. Anything that gives to the sticks of ourown furniture, or the stones of our own backyard, even a reflectedor indirect divinity is good for the dignity of life; and thisis often achieved by the dedication of similar and special things. At least we should desire to see the profane things transfiguredby the sacred, rather than the sacred disenchanted by the profane;and it was a prophet walking on the walls of this mountain city, who said that in his vision all the bowls should be as the bowlsbefore the altar, and on every pot in Jerusalem should be writtenHoly unto the Lord. Anyhow, this intensity about trifles is not always understood. Several quite sympathetic Englishmen told me merely as a funny story(and God forbid that I should deny that it is funny) the factof the Armenians or some such people having been allowed to suspenda string of lamps from a Greek pillar by means of a nail, and theirsubsequent alarm when their nail was washed by the owners of the pillar;a sort of symbol that their nail had finally fallen into the handsof the enemy. It strikes us as odd that a nail should be so valuableor so vivid to the imagination. And yet, to men so close to Calvary, even nails are not entirely commonplace. All this, regarding a decent delay and respect for religion oreven for superstition, is obvious and has already been observed. But before leaving it, we may note that the same argument cutsthe other way; I mean that we should not insolently impose our own ideasof what is picturesque any more than our own ideas of what is practical. The aesthete is sometimes more of a vandal than the vandal. The proposed reconstructions of Jerusalem have been onthe whole reasonable and sympathetic; but there is alwaysa danger from the activities, I might almost say the antics, of a sort of antiquary who is more hasty than an anarchist. If the people of such places revolt against their own limitations, we must have a reasonable respect for their revolt, and we mustnot be impatient even with their impatience. It is their town; they have to live in it, and not we. As they are the only judges of whether their antiquities arereally authorities, so they are the only judges of whether theirnovelties are really necessities. As I pointed out more than onceto many of my friends in Jerusalem, we should be very much annoyedif artistic visitors from Asia took similar liberties in London. It would be bad enough if they proposed to conduct excavationsin Pimlico or Paddington, without much reference to the peoplewho lived there; but it would be worse if they began to relieve themof the mere utilitarianism of Chelsea Bridge or Paddington Station. Suppose an eloquent Abyssinian Christian were to hold up his hand and stopthe motor-omnibuses from going down Fleet Street on the ground thatthe thoroughfare was sacred to the simpler locomotion of Dr. Johnson. We should be pleased at the African's appreciation of Johnson;but our pleasure would not be unmixed. Suppose when you or I arein the act of stepping into a taxi-cab, an excitable Coptic Christianwere to leap from behind a lamp-post, and implore us to savethe grand old growler or the cab called the gondola of London. I admit and enjoy the poetry of the hansom; I admit and enjoythe personality of the true cabman of the old four-wheeler, upon whosemassive manhood descended something of the tremendous traditionof Tony Weller. But I am not so certain as I should like to be, that I should at that moment enjoy the personality of the Copt. For these reasons it seems really desirable, or at least defensible, to defer any premature reconstruction of disputed things, and to begin this book as a mere note-book or sketch-bookof things as they are, or at any rate as they appear. It was in this irregular order, and in this illogical disproportion, that things did in fact appear to me, and it was some time before I sawany real generalisation that would reduce my impressions to order. I saw that the groups disagreed, and to some extent why they disagreed, long before I could seriously consider anything on which they wouldbe likely to agree. I have therefore confined the first sectionof this book to a mere series of such impressions, and left to the lastsection a study of the problem and an attempt at the solution. Between these two I have inserted a sort of sketch of what seemed to methe determining historical events that make the problem what it is. Of these I will only say for the moment that, whether by a coincidenceor for some deeper cause, I feel it myself to be a case of firstthoughts being best; and that some further study of history servedrather to solidify what had seemed merely a sort of vision. I might almost say that I fell in love with Jerusalem at first sight;and the final impression, right or wrong, served only to fixthe fugitive fancy which had seen, in the snow on the city, the white crown of a woman of Bethlehem. But there is another cause for my being content for the moment, with this mere chaos of contrasts. There is a very real reasonfor emphasising those contrasts, and for shunning the temptationto shut our eyes to them even considered as contrasts. It is necessary to insist that the contrasts are not easy to turninto combinations; that the red robes of Rome and the greenscarves of Islam will not very easily fade into a dingy russet;that the gold of Byzantium and the brass of Babylon will requirea hot furnace to melt them into any kind of amalgam. The reasonfor this is akin to what has already been said about Jerusalem as aknot of realities. It is especially a knot of popular realities. Although it is so small a place, or rather because it is sosmall a place, it is a domain and a dominion for the masses. Democracy is never quite democratic except when it is quite direct;and it is never quite direct except when it is quite small. So soon as a mob has grown large enough to have delegates it hasgrown large enough to have despots; indeed the despots are oftenmuch the more representative of the two. Now in a place so smallas Jerusalem, what we call the rank and file really counts. And it is generally true, in religions especially, that the realenthusiasm or even fanaticism is to be found in the rank and file. In all intense religions it is the poor who are more religiousand the rich who are more irreligious. It is certainly so withthe creeds and causes that come to a collision in Jerusalem. The great Jewish population throughout the world did hail Mr. Balfour'sdeclaration with something almost of the tribal triumph they mighthave shown when the Persian conqueror broke the Babylonian bondage. It was rather the plutocratic princes of Jewry who long hung backand hesitated about Zionism. The mass of Mahometans really areready to combine against the Zionists as they might have combinedagainst the Crusades. It is rather the responsible Mahometanleaders who will naturally be found more moderate and diplomatic. This popular spirit may take a good or a bad form; and a mob may cryout many things, right and wrong. But a mob cries out "No Popery";it does not cry out "Not so much Popery, " still less "Only a moderateadmixture of Popery. " It shouts "Three cheers for Gladstone, "it does not shout "A gradual and evolutionary social tendency towardssome ideal similar to that of Gladstone. " It would find it quitea difficult thing to shout; and it would find exactly the samedifficulty with all the advanced formulae about nationalisationand internationalisation and class-conscious solidarity. No rabble could roar at the top of its voice the collectivistformula of "The nationalisation of all the means of production, distribution, and exchange. " The mob of Jerusalem is noexception to the rule, but rather an extreme example of it. The mob of Jerusalem has cried some remarkable things in its time;but they were not pedantic and they were not evasive. There was a day when it cried a single word; "Crucify. " It wasa thing to darken the sun and rend the veil of the temple;but there was no doubt about what it meant. This is an age of minorities; of minorities powerful and predominant, partly through the power of wealth and partly through the idolatryof education. Their powers appeared in every crisis of the Great War, when a small group of pacifists and internationalists, a microscopicminority in every country, were yet constantly figuring as diplomatistsand intermediaries and men on whose attitude great issues might depend. A man like Mr. Macdonald, not a workman nor a formal or realrepresentative of workmen, was followed everywhere by the limelight;while the millions of workmen who worked and fought were outof focus and therefore looked like a fog. Just as such figuresgive a fictitious impression of unity between the crowds fightingfor different flags and frontiers, so there are similar figuresgiving a fictitious unity to the crowds following different creeds. There are already Moslems who are Modernists; there have alwaysbeen a ruling class of Jews who are Materialists. Perhaps itwould be true to say about much of the philosophical controversyin Europe, that many Jews tend to be Materialists, but all tendto be Monists, though the best in the sense of being Monotheists. The worst are in a much grosser sense materialists, and have motivesvery different from the dry idealism of men like Mr. Macdonald, which is probably sincere enough in its way. But with whatever motives, these intermediaries everywhere bridge the chasm between creedsas they do the chasm between countries. Everywhere they exaltthe minority that is indifferent over the majority that is interested. Just as they would make an international congress out of the traitorsof all nations, so they would make an ecumenical council out ofthe heretics of all religions. Mild constitutionalists in our own country often discussthe possibility of a method of protecting the minority. If they will find any possible method of protecting the majority, they will have found something practically unknown to the modern world. The majority is always at a disadvantage; the majority isdifficult to idealise, because it is difficult to imagine. The minority is generally idealised, sometimes by its servants, always by itself. But my sympathies are generally, I confess, with the impotent and even invisible majority. And my sympathies, when I go beyond the things I myself believe, are with allthe poor Jews who do believe in Judaism and all the Mahometanswho do believe in Mahometanism, not to mention so obscure a crowdas the Christians who do believe in Christianity. I feel I havemore morally and even intellectually in common with these people, and even the religions of these people, than with the superciliousnegations that make up the most part of what is called enlightenment. It is these masses whom we ought to consider everywhere; but itis especially these masses whom we must consider in Jerusalem. And the reason is in the reality I have described; that the placeis like a Greek city or a medieval parish; it is sufficientlysmall and simple to be a democracy. This is not a university townfull of philosophies; it is a Zion of the hundred sieges ragingwith religions; not a place where resolutions can be voted and amended, but a place where men can be crowned and crucified. There is one small thing neglected in all our talkabout self-determination; and that is determination. There is a great deal more difference than there is between mostmotions and amendments between the things for which a democracywill vote and the things on which a democracy is determined. You can take a vote among Jews and Christians and Moslems about whetherlamp-posts should be painted green or portraits of politicians paintedat all, and even their solid unanimity may be solid indifference. Most of what is called self-determination is like that; but thereis no self-determination about it. The people are not determined. You cannot take a vote when the people are determined. You accept a vote, or something very much more obvious than a vote. Now it may be that in Jerusalem there is not one people but ratherthree or four; but each is a real people, having its public opinion, its public policy, its flag and almost, as I have said, its frontier. It is not a question of persuading weak and wavering voters, at a vagueparliamentary election, to vote on the other side for a change, to chooseafresh between two middle-class gentlemen, who look exactly alike andonly differ on a question about which nobody knows or cares anything. It is a question of contrasts that will almost certainly remain contrasts, except under the flood of some spiritual conversion which cannotbe foreseen and certainly cannot be enforced. We cannot enrolthese people under our religion, because we have not got one. We can enrol them under our government, and if we are obliged to do that, the obvious essential is that like Roman rule before Christianity, or the English rule in India it should profess to be impartial if onlyby being irreligious. That is why I willingly set down for the momentonly the first impressions of a stranger in a strange country. It is because our first safety is in seeing that it is a strange country;and our present preliminary peril that we may fall into the habitof thinking it a familiar country. It does no harm to put the factsin a fashion that seems disconnected; for the first fact of all isthat they are disconnected. And the first danger of all is that wemay allow some international nonsense or newspaper cant to implythat they are connected when they are not. It does no harm, at any rate to start with, to state the differences as irreconcilable. For the first and most unfamiliar fact the English have to learnin this strange land is that differences can be irreconcilable. And again the chief danger is that they may be persuaded that the wordycompromises of Western politics can reconcile them; that such abyssescan be filled up with rubbish, or such chasms bridged with cobwebs. For we have created in England a sort of compromise which may up to acertain point be workable in England; though there are signs that evenin England that point is approaching or is past. But in any case wecould only do with that compromise as we could do without conscription;because an accident had made us insular and even provincial. So in India where we have treated the peoples as different fromourselves and from each other we have at least partly succeeded. So in Ireland, where we have tried to make them agree with usand each other, we have made one never-ending nightmare. We can no more subject the world to the English compromise than to theEnglish climate; and both are things of incalculable cloud and twilight. We have grown used to a habit of calling things by the wrongnames and supporting them by the wrong arguments; and even doingthe right thing for the wrong cause. We have party governments whichconsist of people who pretend to agree when they really disagree. We have party debates which consist of people who pretend to disagreewhen they really agree. We have whole parties named after things theyno longer support, or things they would never dream of proposing. We have a mass of meaningless parliamentary ceremonials that areno longer even symbolic; the rule by which a parliamentarianpossesses a constituency but not a surname; or the rule bywhich he becomes a minister in order to cease to be a member. All this would seem the most superstitious and idolatrousmummery to the simple worshippers in the shrines of Jerusalem. You may think what they say fantastic, or what they mean fanatical, but they do not say one thing and mean another. The Greekmay or may not have a right to say he is Orthodox, but he meansthat he is Orthodox; in a very different sense from that in whicha man supporting a new Home Rule Bill means that he is Unionist. A Moslem would stop the sale of strong drink because he is a Moslem. But he is not quite so muddleheaded as to profess to stop it becausehe is a Liberal, and a particular supporter of the party of liberty. Even in England indeed it will generally be found that thereis something more clear and rational about the terms of theologythan those of politics and popular science. A man has at leasta more logical notion of what he means when he calls himselfan Anglo-Catholic than when he calls himself an Anglo-Saxon. Butthe old Jew with the drooping ringlets, shuffling in and outof the little black booths of Jerusalem, would not condescendto say he is a child of anything like the Anglo-Saxon race. He does not say he is a child of the Aramaico-Semitic race. He says he is a child of the Chosen Race, brought with thunderand with miracles and with mighty battles out of the land of Egyptand out of the house of bondage. In other words, he says somethingthat means something, and something that he really means. One of the white Dominicans or brown Franciscans, from the greatmonasteries of the Holy City, may or may not be right in maintainingthat a Papacy is necessary to the unity of Christendom. But he does not pass his life in proving that the Papacyis not a Papacy, as many of our liberal constitutionalistspass it in proving that the Monarchy is not a Monarchy. The Greek priests spend an hour on what seems to the scepticmere meaningless formalities of the preparation of the Mass. But they would not spend a minute if they were themselves scepticsand thought them meaningless formalities, as most modern people dothink of the formalities about Black Rod or the Bar of the House. They would be far less ritualistic than we are, if they caredas little for the Mass as we do for the Mace. Hence it isnecessary for us to realise that these rude and simple worshippers, of all the different forms of worship, really would be bewilderedby the ritual dances and elaborate ceremonial antics of John Bull, as by the superstitious forms and almost supernatural incantationsof most of what we call plain English. Now I take it we retain enough realism and common sense not towish to transfer these complicated conventions and compromisesto a land of such ruthless logic and such rending divisions. We may hope to reproduce our laws, we do not want to reproduce ourlegal fictions. We do not want to insist on everybody referringto Mr. Peter or Mr. Paul, as the honourable member for Waddy Walleh;because a retiring Parliamentarian has to become Stewardof the Chiltern Hundreds, we shall not insist on a retiringPalestinian official becoming Steward of the Moabitic Hundreds. But yet in much more subtle and more dangerous ways we are makingthat very mistake. We are transferring the fictions and even thehypocrisies of our own insular institutions from a place where theycan be tolerated to a place where they will be torn in pieces. I have confined myself hitherto to descriptions and not to criticisms, to stating the elements of the problem rather than attemptingas yet to solve it; because I think the danger is rather that weshall underrate the difficulties than overdo the description;that we shall too easily deny the problem rather than that we shalltoo severely criticise the solution. But I would conclude this chapterwith one practical criticism which seems to me to follow directlyfrom all that is said here of our legal fictions and local anomalies. One thing at least has been done by our own Government, which is entirelyaccording to the ritual or routine of our own Parliament. It is aparliament of Pooh Bah, where anybody may be Lord High Everything Else. It is a parliament of Alice in Wonderland, where the name of a thing isdifferent from what it is called, and even from what its name is called. It is death and destruction to send out these fictions into aforeign daylight, where they will be seen as things and not theories. And knowing all this, I cannot conceive the reason, or eventhe meaning, of sending out Sir Herbert Samuel as the Britishrepresentative in Palestine. I have heard it supported as an interesting experiment in Zionism. I have heard it denounced as a craven concession to Zionism. I think it is quite obviously a flat and violent contradictionto Zionism. Zionism, as I have always understood it, and indeedas I have always defended it, consists in maintaining that itwould be better for all parties if Israel had the dignityand distinctive responsibility of a separate nation; and thatthis should be effected, if possible, or so far as possible, by giving the Jews a national home, preferably in Palestine. But where is Sir Herbert Samuel's national home? If it is inPalestine he cannot go there as a representative of England. If it is in England, he is so far a living proof that a Jew doesnot need a national home in Palestine. If there is any pointin the Zionist argument at all, you have chosen precisely the wrongman and sent him to precisely the wrong country. You have assertednot the independence but the dependence of Israel, and yet you haveratified the worst insinuations about the dependence of Christendom. In reason you could not more strongly state that Palestine does notbelong to the Jews, than by sending a Jew to claim it for the English. And yet in practice, of course, all the Anti-Semites will say he isclaiming it for the Jews. You combine all possible disadvantagesof all possible courses of action; you run all the risks of the hardZionist adventure, while actually denying the high Zionist ideal. You make a Jew admit he is not a Jew but an Englishman; even while youallow all his enemies to revile him because he is not an Englishmanbut a Jew. Now this sort of confusion or compromise is as local as a London fog. A London fog is tolerable in London, indeed I think it is veryenjoyable in London. There is a beauty in that brown twilightas well as in the clear skies of the Orient and the South. But it is simply horribly dangerous for a Londoner to carryhis cloud of fog about with him, in the crystalline air aboutthe crags of Zion, or under the terrible stars of the desert. There men see differences with almost unnatural clearness, and call things by savagely simple names. We in England mayconsider all sorts of aspects of a man like Sir Herbert Samuel;we may consider him as a Liberal, or a friend of the Fabian Socialists, or a cadet of one of the great financial houses, or a Member ofParliament who is supposed to represent certain miners in Yorkshire, or in twenty other more or less impersonal ways. But the peoplein Palestine will see only one aspect, and it will be a very personalaspect indeed. For the enthusiastic Moslems he will simply be a Jew;for the enthusiastic Zionists he will not really be a Zionist. For them he will always be the type of Jew who would be willingto remain in London, and who is ready to represent Westminster. Meanwhile, for the masses of Moslems and Christians, he willonly be the aggravation in practice of the very thing of whichhe is the denial in theory. He will not mean that Palestineis not surrendered to the Jews, but only that England is. Now I have nothing as yet to do with the truth of that suggestion;I merely give it as an example of the violent and unexpectedreactions we shall produce if we thrust our own unrealities amidthe red-hot realities of the Near East; it is like pushing a snow maninto a furnace. I have no objection to a snow man as a part of ourown Christmas festivities; indeed, as has already been suggested, I think such festivities a great glory of English life. But I have seen the snow melting in the steep places about Jerusalem;and I know what a cataract it could feed. As I considered these things a deepening disquiet possessed me, and my thoughts were far away from where I stood. After all, the English did not indulge in this doubling of parts and muddlingof mistaken identity in their real and unique success in India. They may have been wrong or right but they were realistic about Moslemsand Hindoos; they did not say Moslems were Hindoos, or send a highlyintelligent Hindoo from Oxford to rule Moslems as an Englishman. They may not have cared for things like the ideal of Zionism;but they understood the common sense of Zionism, the desirabilityof distinguishing between entirely different things. But I remembered that of late their tact had often failed themeven in their chief success in India; and that every hourbrought worse and wilder news of their failure in Ireland. I remembered that in the Early Victorian time, against the adviceonly of the wisest and subtlest of the Early Victorians, we had tiedourselves to the triumphant progress of industrial capitalism; and thatprogress had now come to a crisis and what might well be a crash. And now, on the top of all, our fine patriotic tradition of foreignpolicy seemed to be doing these irrational and random things. A sort of fear took hold of me; and it was not for the Holy Landthat I feared. A cold wave went over me, like that unreasonable change and chillwith which a man far from home fancies his house has been burned down, or that those dear to him are dead. For one horrible moment at least Iwondered if we had come to the end of compromise and comfortable nonsense, and if at last the successful stupidity of England would toppleover like the successful wickedness of Prussia; because God is notmocked by the denial of reason any more than the denial of justice. And I fancied the very crowds of Jerusalem retorted on me wordsspoken to them long ago; that a great voice crying of old alongthe Via Dolorosa was rolled back on me like thunder from the mountains;and that all those alien faces are turned against us to-day, bidding us weep not for them, who have faith and clarity and a purpose, but weep for ourselves and for our children. CHAPTER VIII THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DESERT There was a story in Jerusalem so true or so well told that I can seethe actors in it like figures in coloured costumes on a lighted stage. It occurred during the last days of Turkish occupation, while theEnglish advance was still halted before Gaza, and heroically enduringthe slow death of desert warfare. There were German and Austrianelements present in the garrison with the Turks, though the threeallies seem to have held strangely aloof from each other. In the Austrian group there was an Austrian lady, "who had some dignityor other, " like Lord Lundy's grandmother. She was very beautiful, very fashionable, somewhat frivolous, but with fits of Catholic devotion. She had some very valuable Christian virtues, such as indiscriminatecharity for the poor and indiscriminate loathing for the Prussians. She was a nurse; she was also a nuisance. One day she was drivingjust outside the Jaffa Gate, when she saw one of those figureswhich make the Holy City seem like the eternal crisis of an epic. Such a man will enter the gate in the most ghastly rags as ifhe were going to be crowned king in the city; with his headlifted as if he saw apocalyptic stars in heaven, and a gesture atwhich the towers might fall. This man was ragged beyond all thatmoving rag-heap; he was as gaunt as a gallows tree, and the thinghe was uttering with arms held up to heaven was evidently a curse. The lady sent an inquiry by her German servant, whom also I can seein a vision, with his face of wood and his air of still trailingall the heraldic trappings of the Holy Roman Empire. This ambassadorsoon returned in state and said, "Your Serene High Sublimity(or whatever it is), he says he is cursing the English. " Her pityand patriotism were alike moved; and she again sent the plenipotentiaryto discover why he cursed the English, or what tale of wrong or ruinat English hands lay behind the large gestures of his despair. A second time the wooden intermediary returned and said, "Your Ecstatic Excellency (or whatever be the correct form), he says he is cursing the English because they don't come. " There are a great many morals to this story, besides the generaltruth to which it testifies; that the Turkish rule was notpopular even with Moslems, and that the German war was notparticularly popular even with Turks. When all deductions aremade for the patriot as a partisan, and his way of picking uponly what pleases him, it remains true that the English attackwas very widely regarded rather as a rescue than an aggression. And what complaint there was really was, in many cases, a complaintthat the rescue did not come with a rush; that the English forceshad to fall back when they had actually entered Gaza, and could notfor long afterwards continue their advance on Jerusalem. This kindof criticism of military operations is always, of course, worthless. In journalists it is generally worthless without being even harmless. There were some in London whose pessimistic wailing was less excusablethan that of the poor Arab in Jerusalem; who cursed the English withthe addition of being English themselves, who did it, not as he did, before one foreigner, but before all foreign opinion; and whoadvertised their failure in a sort of rags less reputable than his. No one can judge of a point like the capture and loss of Gaza, unless he knows a huge mass of technical and local detail that canonly be known to the staff on the spot; it is not a questionof lack of water but of exactly how little water; not of thearrival of reinforcements but of exactly how much reinforcement;not of whether time presses, but of exactly how much time there is. Nobody can know these things who is editing a newspaper at the otherend of the world; and these are the things which, for the soldieron the spot, make all the difference between jumping over a palingand jumping over a precipice. Even the latter, as the philosophicrelativist will eagerly point out, is only a matter of degree. But this is a parenthesis; for the purpose with which I mentionedthe anecdote is something different. It is the text of another andsomewhat more elusive truth; some appreciation of which is necessaryto a sympathy with the more profound problems of Palestine. And it might be expressed thus; it is a proverb that the Easternmethods seem to us slow; that the Arabs trail along on labouringcamels while the Europeans flash by on motors or mono-planes. Butthere is another and stranger sense in which we do seem to them slow, and they do seem to themselves to have a secret of swiftness. There is a sense in which we here touch the limits of a land of lightning;across which, as in a dream, the motor-car can be seen crawlinglike a snail. I have said that there is another side to the desert; though thereis something queer in talking of another side to something so bareand big and oppressively obvious. But there is another side besidesthe big and bare truths, like giant bones, that the Moslem hasfound there; there is, so to speak, an obverse of the obvious. And to suggest what I mean I must go back again to the desert andthe days I spent there, being carted from camp to camp and givingwhat were courteously described as lectures. All I can say is that ifthose were lectures, I cannot imagine why everybody is not a lecturer. Perhaps the secret is already out; and multitudes of men in evening dressare already dotted about the desert, wandering in search of an audience. Anyhow in my own wanderings I found myself in the high narrow houseof the Base Commandant at Kantara, the only house in the wholecircle of the horizon; and from the wooden balustrade and verandah, running round the top of it, could be seen nine miles of tents. Sydney Smith said that the bulbous domes of the Brighton Pavilionlooked as if St. Paul's Cathedral had come down there and littered;and that grey vista of countless cones looked rather as if theGreat Pyramid had multiplied itself on the prolific scale of the herring. Nor was even such a foolish fancy without its serious side; for thoughthese pyramids would pass, the plan of them was also among the mightiestof the works of man; and the king in every pyramid was alive. For this was the great camp that was the pivot of the greatest campaign;and from that balcony I had looked on something all the morehistoric because it may never be seen again. As the dusk felland the moon brightened above that great ghostly city of canvas, I had fallen into talk with three or four of the officers at the base;grizzled and hard-headed men talking with all the curious and almostcolourless common sense of the soldier. All that they said was objective;one felt that everything they mentioned was really a thingand not merely a thought; a thing like a post or a palm-tree. Ithink there is something in this of a sympathy between the Englishand the Moslems, which may have helped us in India and elsewhere. For they mentioned many Moslem proverbs and traditions, lightly enough but not contemptuously, and in particular anotherof the proverbial prophecies about the term of Turkish power. They said there was an old saying that the Turk would never departuntil the Nile flowed through Palestine; and this at leastwas evidently a proverb of pride and security, like many such;as who should say until the sea is dry or the sun rises in the west. And one of them smiled and made a small gesture as of attention. And in the silence of that moonlit scene we heard the clanking of a pump. The water from the Nile had been brought in pipes across the desert. And I thought that the symbol was a sound one, apart from all vanities;for this is indeed the special sort of thing that Christendomcan do, and that Islam by itself would hardly care to do. I heard more afterwards of that water, which was eventually carriedup the hills to Jerusalem, when I myself followed it thither;and all I heard bore testimony to this truth so far as it goes; the senseamong the natives themselves of something magic in our machinery, and that in the main a white magic; the sense of all the more solid sortof social service that belongs rather to the West than to the East. When the fountain first flowed in the Holy City in the mountains, and Father Waggett blessed it for the use of men, it is said thatan old Arab standing by said, in the plain and powerful phraseologyof his people: "The Turks were here for five hundred years, and they never gave us a cup of cold water. " I put first this minimum of truth about the validity of Westernwork because the same conversation swerved slowly, as it were, to the Eastern side. These same men, who talked of all thingsas if they were chairs and tables, began to talk quite calmly ofthings more amazing than table-turning. They were as wonderful as ifthe water had come there like the wind, without any pipes or pumps;or if Father Waggett had merely struck the rock like Moses. They spoke of a solitary soldier at the end of a single telephone wireacross the wastes, hearing of something that had that moment happenedhundreds of miles away, and then coming upon a casual Bedouin who knewit already. They spoke of the whole tribes moving and on the march, upon news that could only come a little later by the swiftest wiresof the white man. They offered no explanation of these things;they simply knew they were there, like the palm-trees and the moon. They did not say it was "telepathy"; they lived much too close torealities for that. That word, which will instantly leap to the lipsof too many of my readers, strikes me as merely an evidence of twoof our great modern improvements; the love of long words and the lossof common sense. It may have been telepathy, whatever that is;but a man must be almost stunned with stupidity if he is satisfiedto say telepathy as if he were saying telegraphy. If everybodyis satisfied about how it is done, why does not everybody do it?Why does not a cultivated clergyman in Cornwall make a casual remarkto an old friend of his at the University of Aberdeen? Why doesnot a harassed commercial traveller in Barcelona settle a questionby merely thinking about his business partner in Berlin? The commonsense of it is, of course, that the name makes no sort of difference;the mystery is why some people can do it and others cannot;and why it seems to be easy in one place and impossible in another. In other words it comes back to that very mystery which of allmysteries the modern world thinks most superstitious and senseless;the mystery of locality. It works back at last to the hardest ofall the hard sayings of supernaturalism; that there is such a thingas holy or unholy ground, as divinely or diabolically inspired people;that there may be such things as sacred sites or even sacred stones;in short that the airy nothing of spiritual essence, evil or good, can have quite literally a local habitation and a name. It may be said in passing that this _genius loci_ is here very muchthe presiding genius. It is true that everywhere to-day a parade of thetheory of pantheism goes with a considerable practice of particularism;and that people everywhere are beginning to wish they were somewhere. And even where it is not true of men, it seems to be true of themysterious forces which men are once more studying. The words we nowaddress to the unseen powers may be vague and universal, but the wordsthey are said to address to us are parochial and even private. While the Higher Thought Centre would widen worship everywhereto a temple not made with hands, the Psychical Research Societyis conducting practical experiments round a haunted house. Men may become cosmopolitans, but ghosts remain patriots. Men may or may not expect an act of healing to take place at a holy well, but nobody expects it ten miles from the well; and even the sceptic whocomes to expose the ghost-haunted churchyard has to haunt the churchyardlike a ghost. There may be something faintly amusing about the ideaof demi-gods with door-knockers and dinner tables, and demons, one may almost say, keeping the home fires burning. But the drivingforce of this dark mystery of locality is all the more indisputablebecause it drives against most modern theories and associations. The truth is that, upon a more transcendental consideration, we do not know what place is any more than we know what time is. We do not know of the unknown powers that they cannot concentratein space as in time, or find in a spot something that correspondsto a crisis. And if this be felt everywhere, it is necessarilyand abnormally felt in those alleged holy places and sacred spots. It is felt supremely in all those lands of the Near East which lieabout the holy hill of Zion. In these lands an impression grows steadily on the mind much toolarge for most of the recent religious or scientific definitions. The bogus heraldry of Haeckel is as obviously insufficient as anyquaint old chronicle tracing the genealogies of English kings throughthe chiefs of Troy to the children of Noah. There is no difference, except that the tale of the Dark Ages can never be proved, while the travesty of the Darwinian theory can sometimes be disproved. But I should diminish my meaning if I suggested it as a merescore in the Victorian game of Scripture versus Science. Some much larger mystery veils the origins of man than most partisanson either side have realised; and in these strange primeval plainsthe traveller does realise it. It was never so well expressedas by one of the most promising of those whose literary possibilitieswere gloriously broken off by the great war; Lieutenant Warre-Cornishwho left a strange and striking fragment, about a man who cameto these lands with a mystical idea of forcing himself backagainst the stream of time into the very fountain of creation. This is a parenthesis; but before resuming the more immediatematter of the supernormal tricks of the tribes of the East, it is well to recognise this very real if much more general historicimpression about the particular lands in which they lived. I have called it a historic impression; but it might more truly be calleda prehistoric impression. It is best expressed in symbol by sayingthat the legendary site of the Garden of Eden is in Mesopotamia. It is equally well expressed in concrete experience by saying that, when I was in these parts, a learned man told me that the primitive formof wheat had just, for the first time, been discovered in Palestine. The feeling that fills the traveller may be faintly suggested thus;that here, in this legendary land between Asia and Europe, may wellhave happened whatever did happen; that through this Eastern gate, if any, entered whatever made and changed the world. Whatever elsethis narrow strip of land may seem like, it does really seem, to the spirit and almost to the senses, like the bridge that may haveborne across archaic abysses the burden and the mystery of man. Here have been civilisations as old as any barbarism; to allappearance perhaps older than any barbarism. Here is the camel;the enormous unnatural friend of man; the prehistoric pet. He is never known to have been wild, and might make a man fancythat all wild animals had once been tame. As I said elsewhere, all might be a runaway menagerie; the whale a cow that went swimmingand never came back, the tiger a large cat that took the prize(and the prize-giver) and escaped to the jungle. This is not(I venture to think) true; but it is true as Pithecanthropus andPrimitive Man and all the other random guesses from dubious bitsof bone and stone. And the truth is some third thing, too tremendousto be remembered by men. Whatever it was, perhaps the camel saw it;but from the expression on the face of that old family servant, I feel sure that he will never tell. I have called this the other side of the desert; and in anothersense it is literally the other side. It is the other shoreof that shifting and arid sea. Looking at it from the Westand considering mainly the case of the Moslem, we feel the desertis but a barren border-land of Christendom; but seen fromthe other side it is the barrier between us and a heathendom farmore mysterious and even monstrous than anything Moslem can be. Indeed it is necessary to realise this more vividly in order to feelthe virtue of the Moslem movement. It belonged to the desert, but in one sense it was rather a clearance in the cloud that restsupon the desert; a rift of pale but clean light in volumesof vapour rolled on it like smoke from the strange lands beyond. It conceived a fixed hatred of idolatry, partly because its face wasturned towards the multitudinous idolatries of the lands of sunrise;and as I looked Eastward I seemed to be conscious of the beginningsof that other world; and saw, like a forest of arms or a dream fullof faces, the gods of Asia on their thousand thrones. It is not a mere romance that calls it a land of magic, or even of black magic. Those who carry that atmosphere to usare not the romanticists but the realists. Every one can feelit in the work of Mr. Rudyard Kipling; and when I once remarkedon his repulsive little masterpiece called "The Mark of the Beast, "to a rather cynical Anglo-Indian officer, he observed moodily, "It's abeastly story. But those devils really can do jolly queer things. "It is but to take a commonplace example out of countless morenotable ones to mention the many witnesses to the mango trick. Here again we have from time to time to weep over the weak-mindednessthat hurriedly dismisses it as the practice of hypnotism. It is as if people were asked to explain how one unarmed Indianhad killed three hundred men, and they said it was only the practiceof human sacrifice. Nothing that we know as hypnotism will enable a manto alter the eyes in the heads of a huge crowd of total strangers;wide awake in broad daylight; and if it is hypnotism, it issomething so appallingly magnified as to need a new magic to explainthe explanation; certainly something that explains it betterthan a Greek word for sleep. But the impression of these specialinstances is but one example of a more universal impression ofthe Asiatic atmosphere; and that atmosphere itself is only an exampleof something vaster still for which I am trying to find words. Asia stands for something which the world in the West as wellas the East is more and more feeling as a presence, and evena pressure. It might be called the spiritual world let loose;or a sort of psychical anarchy; a jungle of mango plants. And it is pressing upon the West also to-day because of the breakingdown of certain materialistic barriers that have hitherto held it back. In plain words the attitude of science is not only modified;it is now entirely reversed. I do not say it with mere pleasure;in some ways I prefer our materialism to their spiritualism. But for good or evil the scientists are now destroying theirown scientific world. The agnostics have been driven back on agnosticism;and are already recovering from the shock. They findthemselves in a really unknown world under really unknown gods;a world which is more mystical, or at least more mysterious. For in the Victorian age the agnostics were not really agnostics. They might be better described as reverent materialists;or at any rate monists. They had at least at the backof their minds a clear and consistent concept of their ratherclockwork cosmos; that is why they could not admit the smallestspeck of the supernatural into their clockwork. But to-day it isvery hard for a scientific man to say where the supernatural endsor the natural begins, or what name should be given to either. The word agnostic has ceased to be a polite word for atheist. It has become a real word for a very real state of mind, conscious of many possibilities beyond that of the atheist, and not excluding that of the polytheist. It is no longer a questionof defining or denying a simple central power, but of balancingthe brain in a bewilderment of new powers which seem to overlapand might even conflict. Nature herself has become unnatural. The wind is blowing from the other side of the desert, not now withnoble truism "There is no God but God, " but rather with that othermotto out of the deeper anarchy of Asia, drawn out by Mr. Kipling, in the shape of a native proverb, in the very story already mentioned;"Your gods and my gods, do you or I know which is the stronger?"There was a mystical story I read somewhere in my boyhood, of which the only image that remains is that of a rose-bush growingmysteriously in the middle of a room. Taking this image for the sakeof argument, we can easily fancy a man half-conscious and convincedthat he is delirious, or still partly in a dream, because he seessuch a magic bush growing irrationally in the middle of his bedroom. All the walls and furniture are familiar and solid, the table, the clock, the telephone, the looking glass or what not; there isnothing unnatural but this one hovering hallucination or opticaldelusion of green and red. Now that was very much the view takenof the Rose of Sharon, the mystical rose of the sacred traditionof Palestine, by any educated man about 1850, when the rationalismof the eighteenth century was supposed to have found fullsupport in the science of the nineteenth. He had a sentimentabout a rose: he was still glad it had fragrance or atmosphere;though he remembered with a slight discomfort that it had thorns. But what bothered him about it was that it was impossible. And what made him think it impossible was it was inconsistentwith everything else. It was one solitary and monstrousexception to the sort of rule that ought to have no exceptions. Science did not convince him that there were few miracles, but that there were no miracles; and why should there be miraclesonly in Palestine and only for one short period? It was a singleand senseless contradiction to an otherwise complete cosmos. For the furniture fitted in bit by bit and better and better;and the bedroom seemed to grow more and more solid. The man recognised the portrait of himself over the mantelpiece orthe medicine bottles on the table, like the dying lover in Browning. In other words, science so far had steadily solidified things;Newton had measured the walls and ceiling and made a calculusof their three dimensions. Darwin was already arrangingthe animals in rank as neatly as a row of chairs, or Faradaythe chemical elements as clearly as a row of medicine bottles. From the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, science was not only making discoveries, but all the discoverieswere in one direction. Science is still making discoveries;but they are in the opposite direction. For things are rather different when the man in the bednext looks at the bedroom. Not only is the rose-bush stillvery obvious; but the other things are looking very odd. The perspective seems to have gone crooked; the walls seem to varyin measurement till the man thinks he is going mad. The wall-paperhas a new pattern, of strange spirals instead of round dots. The table seems to have moved by itself across the room and thrownthe medicine bottles out of the window. The telephone has vanishedfrom the wall; the mirror does not reflect what is in front of it. The portrait of himself over the mantelpiece has a face that isnot his own. That is something like a vision of the vital change in the wholetrend of natural philosophy in the last twenty or thirty years. It matters little whether we regard it as the deepeningor the destruction of the scientific universe. It matters little whether we say that grander abysses haveopened in it, or merely that the bottom has fallen out of it. It is quite self-evident that scientific men are at war with wilderand more unfathomable fancies than the facts of the age of Huxley. I attempt no controversy about any of the particular cases:it is the cumulative effect of all of them that makes the impressionone of common sense. It is really true that the perspective anddimensions of the man's bedroom have altered; the disciples of Einsteinwill tell him that straight lines are curved and perhaps measuremore one way than the other; if that is not a nightmare, what is?It is really true that the clock has altered, for time has turnedinto the fourth dimension or something entirely different;and the telephone may fairly be said to have faded from view in favourof the invisible telepath. It is true that the pattern of the paperhas changed, for the very pattern of the world has changed;we are told that it is not made of atoms like the dots but ofelectrons like the spirals. Scientific men of the first rankhave seen a table move by itself, and walk upstairs by itself. It does not matter here whether it was done by the spirits; it is enoughthat few still pretend that is entirely done by the spiritualists. I am not dealing with doctrines but with doubts; with the mere factthat all these things have grown deeper and more bewildering. Some people really are throwing their medicine bottles outof the window; and some of them at least are working purelypsychological cures of a sort that would once have been calledmiraculous healing. I do not say we know how far this could go;it is my whole point that we do not know, that we are in contactwith numbers of new things of which we know uncommonly little. But the vital point is, not that science deals with what we do not know, but that science is destroying what we thought we did know. Nearly all the latest discoveries have been destructive, not of the olddogmas of religion, but rather of the recent dogmas of science. The conservation of energy could not itself be entirely conserved. The atom was smashed to atoms. And dancing to the tuneof Professor Einstein, even the law of gravity is behavingwith lamentable levity. And when the man looks at the portrait of himself he really does notsee himself. He sees his Other Self, which some say is the oppositeof his ordinary self; his Subconscious Self or his Subliminal Self, said to rage and rule in his dreams, or a suppressed self which hates himthough it is hidden from him; or the Alter Ego of a Dual Personality. It is not to my present purpose to discuss the merit ofthese speculations, or whether they be medicinal or morbid. My purpose is served in pointing out the plain historical fact;that if you had talked to a Utilitarian and Rationalist of Bentham's time, who told men to follow "enlightened self-interest, " he would have beenconsiderably bewildered if you had replied brightly and briskly, "And to which self do you refer; the sub-conscious, the conscious, the latently criminal or suppressed, or others that we fortunately havein stock?" When the man looks at his own portrait in his own bedroom, it does really melt into the face of a stranger or flicker intothe face of a fiend. When he looks at the bedroom itself, in short, it becomes clearer and clearer that it is exactly this comfortableand solid part of the vision that is altering and breaking up. It is the walls and furniture that are only a dream or memory. And when he looks again at the incongruous rose-bush, he seemsto smell as well as see; and he stretches forth his hand, and hisfinger bleeds upon a thorn. It will not be altogether surprising if the story ends with the manrecovering full consciousness, and finding he has been convalescing in ahammock in a rose-garden. It is not so very unreasonable when you cometo think of it; or at least when you come to think of the whole of it. He was not wrong in thinking the whole must be a consistent whole, and that one part seemed inconsistent with the other. He was only wrong about which part was wrong through being inconsistentwith the other. Now the whole of the rationalistic doubt aboutthe Palestinian legends, from its rise in the early eighteenthcentury out of the last movements of the Renascence, was foundedon the fixity of facts. Miracles were monstrosities because theywere against natural law, which was necessarily immutable law. The prodigies of the Old Testament or the mighty works of the Newwere extravagances because they were exceptions; and they wereexceptions because there was a rule, and that an immutable rule. In short, there was no rose-tree growing out of the carpet of a trimand tidy bedroom; because rose-trees do not grow out of carpetsin trim and tidy bedrooms. So far it seemed reasonable enough. But it left out one possibility; that a man can dream about a roomas well as a rose; and that a man can doubt about a rule as wellas an exception. As soon as the men of science began to doubt the rules of the game, the game was up. They could no longer rule out all the old marvelsas impossible, in face of the new marvels which they had to admitas possible. They were themselves dealing now with a number ofunknown quantities; what is the power of mind over matter; when ismatter an illusion of mind; what is identity, what is individuality, is there a limit to logic in the last extremes of mathematics?They knew by a hundred hints that their non-miraculous world was nolonger watertight; that floods were coming in from somewhere in whichthey were already out of their depth, and down among very fantasticaldeep-sea fishes. They could hardly feel certain even about the fishthat swallowed Jonah, when they had no test except the very trueone that there are more fish in the sea than ever came out of it. Logically they would find it quite as hard to draw the lineat the miraculous draught of fishes. I do not mean that they, or even I, need here depend on those particular stories;I mean that the difficulty now is to draw a line, and a new line, after the obliteration of an old and much more obvious line. Any one can draw it for himself, as a matter of mere taste in probability;but we have not made a philosophy until we can draw it for others. And the modern men of science cannot draw it for others. Men could easily mark the contrast between the force of gravityand the fable of the Ascension. They cannot all be made to seeany such contrast between the levitation that is now discussed as apossibility and the ascension which is still derided as a miracle. I do not even say that there is not a great difference between them;I say that science is now plunged too deep in new doubtsand possibilities to have authority to define the difference. I say the more it knows of what seems to have happened, or what issaid to have happened, in many modern drawing-rooms, the less itknows what did or did not happen on that lofty and legendary hill, where a spire rises over Jerusalem and can be seen beyond Jordan. But with that part of the Palestinian story which is told in theNew Testament I am not directly concerned till the next chapter;and the matter here is a more general one. The truth is that througha thousand channels something has returned to the modern mind. It is not Christianity. On the contrary, it would be truerto say that it is paganism. In reality it is in a very specialsense paganism; because it is polytheism. The word will startlemany people, but not the people who know the modern world best. When I told a distinguished psychologist at Oxford that I differedfrom his view of the universe, he answered, "Why universe?Why should it not be a multiverse?" The essence of polytheism isthe worship of gods who are not God; that is, who are not necessarilythe author and the authority of all things. Men are feeling moreand more that there are many spiritual forces in the universe, and the wisest men feel that some are to be trusted more than others. There will be a tendency, I think, to take a favourite force, or in other words a familiar spirit. Mr. H. G. Wells, who is, if anybody is, a genius among moderns and a modern among geniuses, really did this very thing; he selected a god who was reallymore like a daemon. He called his book _God, the Invisible King_;but the curious point was that he specially insisted that his God differedfrom other people's God in the very fact that he was not a king. He was very particular in explaining that his deity did notrule in any almighty or infinite sense; but merely influenced, like any wandering spirit. Nor was he particularly invisible, if there can be said to be any degrees in invisibility. Mr. Wells's Invisible God was really like Mr. Wells's Invisible Man. You almost felt he might appear at any moment, at any rate to hisone devoted worshipper; and that, as if in old Greece, a glad crymight ring through the woods of Essex, the voice of Mr. Wells crying, "We have seen, he hath seen us, a visible God. " I do not meanthis disrespectfully, but on the contrary very sympathetically;I think it worthy of so great a man to appreciate and answer the generalsense of a richer and more adventurous spiritual world around us. It is a great emancipation from the leaden materialism which weighedon men of imagination forty years ago. But my point for the momentis that the mode of the emancipation was pagan or even polytheistic, in the real philosophical sense that it was the selection of asingle spirit, out of many there might be in the spiritual world. The point is that while Mr. Wells worships his god (who is not hiscreator or even necessarily his overlord) there is nothing to preventMr. William Archer, also emancipated, from adoring another god inanother temple; or Mr. Arnold Bennett, should he similarly liberatehis mind, from bowing down to a third god in a third temple. My imagination rather fails me, I confess, in evoking the imageand symbolism of Mr. Bennett's or Mr. Archer's idolatries;and if I had to choose between the three, I should probably be foundas an acolyte in the shrine of Mr. Wells. But, anyhow, the trendof all this is to polytheism, rather as it existed in the oldcivilisation of paganism. There is the same modern mark in Spiritualism. Spiritualism alsohas the trend of polytheism, if it be in a form more akin toancestor-worship. But whether it be the invocation of ghosts or of gods, the mark of it is that it invokes something less than the divine;nor am I at all quarrelling with it on that account. I am merelydescribing the drift of the day; and it seems clear that it is towardsthe summoning of spirits to our aid whatever their position in theunknown world, and without any clear doctrinal plan of that world. The most probable result would seem to be a multitude of psychic cults, personal and impersonal, from the vaguest reverence for the powersof nature to the most concrete appeal to crystals or mascots. When I say that the agnostics have discovered agnosticism, and have now recovered from the shock, I do not mean merely to sneerat the identity of the word agnosticism with the word ignorance. On the contrary, I think ignorance the greater thing; for ignorancecan be creative. And the thing it can create, and soon probablywill create, is one of the lost arts of the world; a mythology. In a word, the modern world will probably end exactly where theBible begins. In that inevitable setting of spirit against spirit, or god against god, we shall soon be in a position to do morejustice not only to the New Testament, but to the Old Testament. Our descendants may very possibly do the very thing we scoffat the old Jews for doing; grope for and cling to their owndeity as one rising above rivals who seem to be equally real. They also may feel him not primarily as the sole or even the supremebut only as the best; and have to abide the miracles of ages to provethat he is also the mightiest. For them also he may at firstbe felt as their own, before he is extended to others; he also, from the collision with colossal idolatries and towering spiritualtyrannies, may emerge only as a God of Battles and a Lord of Hosts. Here between the dark wastes and the clouded mountain was foughtout what must seem even to the indifferent a wrestle of giantsdriving the world out of its course; Jehovah of the mountainscasting down Baal of the desert and Dagon of the sea. Here wanderedand endured that strange and terrible and tenacious people who heldhigh above all their virtues and their vices one indestructible idea;that they were but the tools in that tremendous hand. Here was the first triumph of those who, in some sense beyondour understanding, had rightly chosen among the powers invisible, and found their choice a great god above all gods. So the futuremay suffer not from the loss but the multiplicity of faith;and its fate be far more like the cloudy and mythological warin the desert than like the dry radiance of theism or monism. I have said nothing here of my own faith, or of that name on which, I am well persuaded, the world will be most wise to call. But I do believe that the tradition founded in that far tribal battle, in that far Eastern land, did indeed justify itself by leadingup to a lasting truth; and that it will once again be justifiedof all its children. What has survived through an age of atheismas the most indestructible would survive through an age of polytheismas the most indispensable. If among many gods it could not presentlybe proved to be the strongest, some would still know it was the best. Its central presence would endure through times of cloud and confusion, in which it was judged only as a myth among myths or a man among men. Even the old heathen test of humanity and the apparition of the body, touching which I have quoted the verse about the pagan polytheistas sung by the neo-pagan poet, is a test which that incarnatemystery will abide the best. And however much or little ourspiritual inquirers may lift the veil from their invisible kings, they will not find a vision more vivid than a man walking unveiledupon the mountains, seen of men and seeing; a visible god. CHAPTER IX THE BATTLE WITH THE DRAGON Lydda or Ludd has already been noted as the legendary birthplaceof St. George, and as the camp on the edge of the desert from which, as it happened, I caught the first glimpse of the colouredfields of Palestine that looked like the fields of Paradise. Being an encampment of soldiers, it seems an appropriate place forSt. George; and indeed it may be said that all that red and empty landhas resounded with his name like a shield of copper or of bronze. The name was not even confined to the cries of the Christians;a curious imaginative hospitality in the Moslem mind, a certain innocentand imitative enthusiasm, made the Moslems also half-accept a sortof Christian mythology, and make an abstract hero of St. George. It is said that Coeur de Lion on these very sands first invokedthe soldier saint to bless the English battle-line, and blazon his crosson the English banners. But the name occurs not only in the storiesof the victory of Richard, but in the enemy stories that led upto the great victory of Saladin. In that obscure and violent quarrelwhich let loose the disaster of Hattin, when the Grand Masterof the Templars, Gerard the Englishman from Bideford in Devon, drove with demented heroism his few lances against a host, there fellamong those radiant fanatics one Christian warrior, who had madewith his single sword such a circle of the slain, that the victoriousMoslems treated even his dead body as something supernatural;and bore it away with them with honour, saying it was the bodyof St. George. But if the purpose of the camp be appropriate to the story of St. George, the position of the camp might be considered appropriate to the morefantastic story of St. George and the Dragon. The symbolic strugglebetween man and monster might very well take place somewhere wherethe green culture of the fields meets the red desolation of the desert. As a matter of fact, I dare say, legend locates the duel itselfsomewhere else, but I am only making use of the legend as a legend, or even as a convenient figure of speech. I would only use ithere to make a kind of picture which may clarify a kind of paradox, very vital to our present attitude towards all Palestinian traditions, including those that are more sacred even than St. George. This paradoxhas already been touched on in the last chapter about polytheisticspirits or superstitions such as surrounded the Old Testament, but it is yet more true of the criticisms and apologetics surroundingthe New Testament. And the paradox is this; that we never findour own religion so right as when we find we are wrong about it. I mean that we are finally convinced not by the sort of evidence weare looking for, but by the sort of evidence we are not looking for. We are convinced when we come on a ratification that is almost as abruptas a refutation. That is the point about the wireless telegraphyor wordless telepathy of the Bedouins. A supernatural trick in a dingytribe wandering in dry places is not the sort of supernaturalismwe should expect to find; it is only the sort that we do find. These rocks of the desert, like the bones of a buried giant, do not seem to stick out where they ought to, but they stick out, and we fall over them. Whatever we think of St. George, most people would see a merefairy-tale in St. George and the Dragon. I dare say they are right;and I only use it here as a figure for the sake of argument. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that a man has come tothe conclusion that there probably was such a person as St. George, in spite of all the nonsense about dragons and the chimera with wingsand claws that has somehow interwreathed itself with his image. Perhaps he is a little biased by patriotism or other ethical aims;and thinks the saint a good social ideal. Perhaps he knows thatearly Christianity, so far from being a religion of pacifists, was largely a religion of soldiers. Anyhow he thinks St. Georgehimself a quite sufficiently solid and historical figure;and has little doubt that records or traces can be found of him. Now the point is this; suppose that man goes to the land ofthe legendary combat; and finds comparatively few or faint tracesof the personality of St. George. But suppose he _does_ find, on that very field of combat, the bones of a gigantic monster unlikeevery other creature except the legendary dragon. Or suppose he onlyfinds ancient Eastern sculptures and hieroglyphics representing maidens, being sacrificed to such a monster, and making it quite clear thateven within historic times one of those sacrificed was a princess. It is surely clear that he will be considerably impressed bythis confirmation, not of the part he did believe, but actuallyof the part he did not believe. He has not found what he expectedbut he has found what he wanted, and much more than he wanted. He has not found a single detail directly in support of St. George. But he had found a very considerable support of St. Georgeand the Dragon. It is needless to inform the reader, I trust, that I do not thinkthis particular case in the least likely; or that I am only using itfor the sake of lucidity. Even as it stands, it would not necessarilymake a man believe the traditional story, but it would make himguess that it was some sort of tradition of some sort of truth;that there was something in it, and much more in it than evenhe himself had imagined. And the point of it would be preciselythat his reason had not anticipated the extent of his revelation. He has proved the improbable, not the probable thing. Reason had already taught him the reasonable part; but facts hadtaught him the fantastic part. He will certainly conclude thatthe whole story is very much more valid than anybody has supposed. Now as I have already said, it is not in the least likely thatthis will happen touching this particular tale of Palestine. But this is precisely what really has happened touchingthe most sacred and tremendous of all the tales of Palestine. This is precisely what has happened touching that central figure, round which the monster and the champion are alike onlyornamental symbols; and by the right of whose tragedy evenSt. George's Cross does not belong to St. George. It is not likelyto be true of the desert duel between George and the Dragon;but it is already true of the desert duel between Jesus and the Devil. St. George is but a servant and the Dragon is but a symbol, but it is precisely about the central reality, the mystery of Christand His mastery of the powers of darkness, that this very paradoxhas proved itself a fact. Going down from Jerusalem to Jericho I was more than oncemoved by a flippant and possibly profane memory of the swinethat rushed down a steep place into the sea. I do not insist onthe personal parallel; for whatever my points of resemblance to a pigI am not a flying pig, a pig with wings of speed and precipitancy;and if I am possessed of a devil, it is not the blue devil of suicide. But the phrase came back into my mind because going down tothe Dead Sea does really involve rushing down a steep place. Indeed it gives a strange impression that the whole of Palestineis one single steep place. It is as if all other countries layflat under the sky, but this one country had been tilted sideways. This gigantic gesture of geography or geology, this sweepas of a universal landslide, is the sort of thing that is neverconveyed by any maps or books or even pictures. All the picturesof Palestine I have seen are descriptive details, groups of costumeor corners of architecture, at most views of famous places;they cannot give the bottomless vision of this long descent. We went in a little rocking Ford car down steep and jagged roadsamong ribbed and columned cliffs; but the roads below soon failedus altogether; and the car had to tumble like a tank over rockybanks and into empty river-beds, long before it came to the sinisterand discoloured landscapes of the Dead Sea. And the distance looksfar enough on the map, and seems long enough in the motor journey, to make a man feel he has come to another part of the world;yet so much is it all a single fall of land that even when he getsout beyond Jordan in the wild country of the Shereef he can stilllook back and see, small and faint as if in the clouds, the spireof the Russian church (I fancy) upon the hill of the Ascension. And though the story of the swine is attached in truth to another place, I was still haunted with its fanciful appropriateness to this one, because of the very steepness of this larger slope and the mysteryof that larger sea. I even had the fancy that one might fishfor them and find them in such a sea, turned into monsters;sea-swine or four-legged fishes, swollen and with evil eyes, grown over with sea-grass for bristles; the ghosts of Gadara. And then it came back to me, as a curiosity and almost a coincidence, that the same strange story had actually been selected as the textfor the central controversy of the Victorian Age between Christianityand criticism. The two champions were two of the greatest menof the nineteenth century; Huxley representing scientific scepticismand Gladstone scriptural orthodoxy. The scriptural championwas universally regarded as standing for the past, if not for thedead past; and the scientific champion as standing for the future, if not the final judgment of the world. And yet the futurehas been entirely different to anything that anybody expected;and the final judgment may yet reverse all the conceptions of theircontemporaries and even of themselves. The philosophical positionnow is in a very curious way the contrary of the position then. Gladstone had the worst of the argument, and has been proved right. Huxley had the best of the argument, and has been proved wrong. At any rate he has been ultimately proved wrong about the way the worldwas going, and the probable position of the next generation. What he thought indisputable is disputed; and what he thought deadis rather too much alive. Huxley was not only a man of genius in logic and rhetoric; he wasa man of a very manly and generous morality. Morally he deservesmuch more sympathy than many of the mystics who have supplanted him. But they have supplanted him. In the more mental fashionsof the day, most of what he thought would stand has fallen, and most of what he thought would fall is standing yet. In the Gadarene controversy with Gladstone, he announced itas his purpose to purge the Christian ideal, which he thoughtself-evidently sublime, of the Christian demonology, which he thoughtself-evidently ridiculous. And yet if we take any typical manof the next generation, we shall very probably find Huxley's sublimething scoffed at, and Huxley's ridiculous thing taken seriously. I imagine a very typical child of the age succeeding Huxley's maybe found in Mr. George Moore. He has one of the most critical, appreciative and atmospheric talents of the age. He has lived in mostof the sets of the age, and through most of the fashions of the age. He has held, at one time or another, most of the opinions of the age. Above all, he has not only thought for himself, but done itwith peculiar pomp and pride; he would consider himself the freestof all freethinkers. Let us take him as a type and a test of what hasreally happened to Huxley's analysis of the gold and the dross. Huxley quoted as the indestructible ideal the noble passage in Micah, beginning "He hath shewed thee, O man, that which is good";and asked scornfully whether anybody was ever likely to suggestthat justice was worthless or that mercy was unlovable, and whether anything would diminish the distance between ourselvesand the ideals that we reverence. And yet already, perhaps, Mr. George Moore was anticipating Nietzsche, sailing near, as he said, "the sunken rocks about the cave of Zarathustra. "He said, if I remember right, that Cromwell should be admiredfor his injustice. He implied that Christ should be condemned, not because he destroyed the swine, but because he delivered the sick. In short he found justice quite worthless and mercy quite unlovable;and as for humility and the distance between himself and his ideals, he seemed rather to suggest (at this time at least) that his somewhatvarying ideals were only interesting because they had belongedto himself. Some of this, it is true, was only in the _Confessionsof a Young Man_; but it is the whole point here that they were thenthe confessions of a young man, and that Huxley's in comparisonwere the confessions of an old man. The trend of the new time, in very varying degrees, was tending to undermine, not merelythe Christian demonology, not merely the Christian theology, not merely the Christian religion, but definitely the Christianethical ideal, which had seemed to the great agnostic as secureas the stars. But while the world was mocking the morality he had assumed, it was bringing back the mysticism he had mocked. The next phaseof Mr. George Moore himself, whom I have taken as a type of the time, was the serious and sympathetic consideration of Irish mysticism, as embodied in Mr. W. B. Yeats. I have myself heard Mr. Yeats, about that time, tell a story, to illustrate how concrete and evencomic is the reality of the supernatural, saying that he knewa farmer whom the fairies had dragged out of bed and beaten. Now suppose Mr. Yeats had told Mr. Moore, then moving in thisglamorous atmosphere, another story of the same sort. Suppose he had said that the farmer's pigs had fallen underthe displeasure of some magician of the sort he celebrates, who had conjured bad fairies into the quadrupeds, so that theywent in a wild dance down to the village pond. Would Mr. Moorehave thought that story any more incredible than the other?Would he have thought it worse than a thousand other things that amodern mystic may lawfully believe? Would he have risen to his feetand told Mr. Yeats that all was over between them? Not a bit of it. He would at least have listened with a serious, nay, a solemn face. He would think it a grim little grotesque of rustic diablerie, a quaint tale of goblins, neither less nor more improbablethan hundreds of psychic fantasies or farces for which there isreally a good deal of evidence. He would be ready to entertainthe idea if he found it anywhere except in the New Testament. As for the more vulgar and universal fashions that have followedafter the Celtic movement, they have left such trifles far behind. And they have been directed not by imaginative artistslike Mr. Yeats or even Mr. Moore, but by solid scientificstudents like Sir William Crookes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I find it easier to imagine an evil spirit agitating the legsof a pig than a good spirit agitating the legs of a table. But I will not here enter into the argument, since I am onlytrying to describe the atmosphere. Whatever has happened in morerecent years, what Huxley expected has certainly not happened. There has been a revolt against Christian morality, and where therehas not been a return of Christian mysticism, it has been a return ofthe mysticism without the Christianity. Mysticism itself has returned, with all its moons and twilights, its talismans and spells. Mysticism itself has returned, and brought with it seven devilsworse than itself. But the scientific coincidence is even more strict and close. It affects not only the general question of miracles, but the particular question of possession. This is the verylast element in the Christian story that would ever have beenselected by the enlightened Christian apologist. Gladstone woulddefend it, but he would not go out of his way to dwell on it. It is an excellent working model of what I mean by findingan unexpected support, and finding it in an unexpected quarter. It is not theological but psychological study that has brought usback into this dark underworld of the soul, where even identityseems to dissolve or divide, and men are not even themselves. I do not say that psychologists admit the discovery of demoniacs;and if they did they would doubtless call them something else, such as demono-maniacs. But they admit things which seem almostas near to a new supernaturalism, and things quite as incredibleto the old rationalism. Dual personality is not so very farfrom diabolic possession. And if the dogma of subconsciousnessallows of agnosticism, the agnosticism cuts both ways. A man cannot say there is a part of him of which he is quite unconscious, and only conscious that it is not in contact with the unknown. He cannot say there is a sealed chamber or cellar under his house, of which he knows nothing whatever; but that he is quite certain that itcannot have an underground passage leading anywhere else in the world. He cannot say he knows nothing whatever about its size or shapeor appearance, except that it certainly does not contain a relicof the finger-joint of St. Catherine of Alexandria, or that itcertainly is not haunted by the ghost of King Herod Agrippa. If there is any sort of legend or tradition or plausible probabilitywhich says that it is, he cannot call a thing impossible where he isnot only ignorant but even unconscious. It comes back thereforeto the same reality, that the old compact cosmos depended on acompact consciousness. If we are dealing with unknown quantities, we cannot deny their connection with other unknown quantities. If I have a self of which I can say nothing, how can I even saythat it is my own self? How can I even say that I always had it, or that it did not come from somewhere else? It is clear that weare in very deep waters, whether or no we have rushed down a steepplace to fall into them. It will be noted that what we really lack here is notthe supernatural but only the healthy supernatural. It is not the miracle, but only the miracle of healing. I warmly sympathise with those who think most of this rather morbid, and nearer the diabolic than the divine, but to call a thingdiabolic is hardly an argument against the existence of diabolism. It is still more clearly the case when we go outside the sphereof science into its penumbra in literature and conversation. There is a mass of fiction and fashionable talk of which it maytruly be said, that what we miss in it is not demons but the powerto cast them out. It combines the occult with the obscene;the sensuality of materialism with the insanity of spiritualism. In the story of Gadara we have left out nothing except the Redeemer, we have kept the devils and the swine. In other words, we have not found St. George; but we have foundthe Dragon. We have found in the desert, as I have said, the bones of the monster we did not believe in, more plainly thanthe footprints of the hero we did. We have found them not because weexpected to find them, for our progressive minds look to the promiseof something much brighter and even better; not because we wantedto find them, for our modern mood, as well as our human nature, is entirely in favour of more amiable and reassuring things;not because we thought it even possible to find them, for we reallythought it impossible so far as we ever thought of it at all. We have found them because they are _there_; and we are boundto come on them even by falling over them. It is Huxley'smethod that has upset Huxley's conclusion. As I have said, that conclusion itself is completely reversed. What he thoughtindisputable is disputed; and what he thought impossible is possible. Instead of Christian morals surviving in the form of humanitarian morals, Christian demonology has survived in the form of heathen demonology. But it has not survived by scholarly traditionalism in the styleof Gladstone, but rather by obstinate objective curiosity accordingto the advice of Huxley. We in the West have "followed our reasonas far as it would go, " and our reason has led us to things thatnearly all the rationalists would have thought wildly irrational. Science was supposed to bully us into being rationalists;but it is now supposed to be bullying us into being irrationalists. The science of Einstein might rather be called following ourunreason as far as it will go, seeing whether the brain will crackunder the conception that space is curved, or that parallelstraight lines always meet. And the science of Freud would make itessentially impossible to say how far our reason or unreason does go, or where it stops. For if a man is ignorant of his other self, how can he possibly know that the other self is ignorant?He can no longer say with pride that at least he knows thathe knows nothing. That is exactly what he does not know. The floor has fallen out of his mind and the abyss below maycontain subconscious certainties as well as subconscious doubts. He is too ignorant even to ignore; and he must confess himselfan agnostic about whether he is an agnostic. That is the coil or tangle, at least, which the dragon has reachedeven in the scientific regions of the West. I only describethe tangle; I do not delight in it. Like most people with a tastefor Catholic tradition, I am too much of a rationalist for that;for Catholics are almost the only people now defending reason. But I am not talking of the true relations of reason and mystery, but of the historical fact that mystery has invaded the peculiarrealms of reason; especially the European realms of the motorand the telephone. When we have a man like Mr. William Archer, lecturing mystically on dreams and psychoanalysis, and sayingit is clear that God did not make man a reasonable creature, those acquainted with the traditions and distinguished recordof that dry and capable Scot will consider the fact a prodigy. I confess it never occurred to me that Mr. Archer was of such stuffas dreams are made of; and if he is becoming a mystic in his old age(I use the phrase in a mystical and merely relative sense)we may take it that the occult oriental flood is rising fast, and reaching places that are not only high but dry. But the change is much more apparent to a man who has chancedto stray into those orient hills where those occult streamshave always risen, and especially in this land that liesbetween Asia, where the occult is almost the obvious, and Europe, where it is always returning with a fresher and younger vigour. The truth becomes strangely luminous in this wilderness betweentwo worlds, where the rocks stand out stark like the very bonesof the Dragon. As I went down that sloping wall or shoulder of the worldfrom the Holy City on the mountain to the buried Cities ofthe Plain, I seemed to see more and more clearly all this Westernevolution of Eastern mystery, and how on this one high place, as on a pivot, the whole purpose of mankind had swerved. I took up again the train of thought which I had trailed throughthe desert, as described in the last chapter, about the gods of Asiaand of the ancient dispensation, and I found it led me alongthese hills to a sort of vista or vision of the new dispensationand of Christendom. Considered objectively, and from the outside, the story is something such as has already been loosely outlined;the emergence in this immemorial and mysterious land of whatwas undoubtedly, when thus considered, one tribe among manytribes worshipping one god among many gods, but it is quiteas much an evident external fact that the god has become God. Still stated objectively, the story is that the tribe having thisreligion produced a new prophet, claiming to be more than a prophet. The old religion killed the new prophet; but the new prophet killedthe old religion. He died to destroy it, and it died in destroying him. Now it may be reaffirmed equally realistically that there was nothingnormal about the case or its consequences. The things that took partin that tragedy have never been the same since, and have never beenlike anything else in the world. The Church is not like other religions;its very crimes were unique. The Jews are not like other races;they remain as unique to everybody else as they are to themselves. The Roman Empire did not pass like other empires; it did not perishlike Babylon and Assyria. It went through a most extraordinaryremorse amounting to madness and resuscitation into sanity, which is equally strange in history whether it seems as ghastlyas a galvanised corpse or as glorious as a god risen from the dead. The very land and city are not like other lands and cities. The concentration and conflict in Jerusalem to-day, whether weregard them as a reconquest by Christendom or a conspiracy of Jewsor a part of the lingering quarrel with Moslems, are alike the effectof forces gathered and loosened in that one mysterious momentin the history of the city. They equally proclaim the paradoxof its insignificance and its importance. But above all the prophet was not and is not like other prophets;and the proof of it is to be found not primarily amongthose who believe in him, but among those who do not. He is not dead, even where he is denied. What is the use of a modernman saying that Christ is only a thing like Atys or Mithras, when the next moment he is reproaching Christianity for notfollowing Christ? He does not suddenly lose his temper and talkabout our most unmithraic conduct, as he does (very justly as a rule)about our most unchristian conduct. We do not find a group of ardentyoung agnostics, in the middle of a great war, tried as traitorsfor their extravagant interpretation of remarks attributed to Atys. It is improbable that Tolstoy wrote a book to prove that all modernills could be cured by literal obedience to all the orders of Adonis. We do not find wild Bolshevists calling themselves Mithraic Socialistsas many of them call themselves Christian Socialists. Leaving orthodoxyand even sanity entirely on one side, the very heresies and insanitiesof our time prove that after nearly two thousand years the issueis still living and the name is quite literally one to conjure with. Let the critics try to conjure with any of the other names. In the real centres of modern inquiry and mental activity, they will not move even a mystic with the name of Mithrasas they will move a materialist with the name of Jesus. There are men who deny God and accept Christ. But this lingering yet living power in the legend, even forthose to whom it is little more than a legend, has anotherrelevancy to the particular point here. Jesus of Nazareth, merely humanly considered, has thus become a hero of humanitarianism. Even the eighteenth-century deists in denying his divinity generallytook pains to exalt his humanity. Of the nineteenth-centuryrevolutionists it is really an understatement to say that they exaltedhim as a man; for indeed they rather exalted him as a superman. That is to say, many of them represented him as a man preachinga decisively superior and ever strange morality, not onlyin advance of his age but practically in advance of our age. They made of his mystical counsels of perfection a sort of Socialismor Pacifism or Communism, which they themselves still see ratheras something that ought to be or that will be; the extreme limitof universal love. I am not discussing here whether they areright or not; I say they have in fact found in the same figurea type of humanitarianism and the care for human happiness. Every one knows the striking and sometimes staggering utterancesthat do really support and illustrate this side of the teaching. Modern idealists are naturally moved by such things as the intenselypoetic paradox about the lilies of the field; which for them hasa joy in life and living things like that of Shelley or Whitman, combined with a return to simplicity beyond that of Tolstoy or Thoreau. Indeed I rather wonder that those, whose merely historic or humanisticview of the case would allow of such criticism without incongruity, have not made some study of the purely poetical or oratorical structureof such passages. Certainly there are few finer examples of the swiftarchitecture of style than that single fragment about the flowers;the almost idle opening of a chance reference to a wild flower, the sudden unfolding of the small purple blossom into pavilionsand palaces and the great name of the national history; and then witha turn of the hand like a gesture of scorn, the change to the grassthat to-day is and to-morrow is cast into the oven. Then follows, as so often in the Gospels, the "how much more" which is like acelestial flight of stairs, a ladder of imaginative logic. Indeed this_a fortiori_, and this power of thinking on three levels, is (I mayremark incidentally) a thing very much needed in modern discussion. Many minds apparently cannot stretch to three dimensions, or to thinking that a cube can go beyond a surface as a surfacegoes beyond a line; for instance, that the citizen is infinitelyabove all ranks, and yet the soul is infinitely above the citizen. But we are only concerned at the moment with the sides of thismany-sided mystery which happen to be really in sympathy withthe modern mood. Judged even by our modern tests of emancipatedart or ideal economics, it is admitted that Christ understood allthat is rather crudely embodied in Socialism or the Simple Life. I purposely insist first on this optimistic, I might almost say thispantheistic or even this pagan aspect of the Christian Gospels. For it is only when we understand that Christ, considered merelyas a prophet, can be and is a popular leader in the love of naturalthings, that we can feel that tremendous and tragic energy of histestimony to an ugly reality, the existence of unnatural things. Instead of taking a text as I have done, take a whole Gospel and readit steadily and honestly and straight through at a sitting, and youwill certainly have one impression, whether of a myth or of a man. It is that the exorcist towers above the poet and even the prophet;that the story between Cana and Calvary is one long war with demons. He understood better than a hundred poets the beauty ofthe flowers of the battle-field; but he came out to battle. And if most of his words mean anything they do mean that thereis at our very feet, like a chasm concealed among the flowers, an unfathomable evil. In short, I would here only hint delicately that perhapsthe mind which admittedly knew much of what we think we knowabout ethics and economics, knew a little more than we arebeginning to know about psychology and psychic phenomena. I remember reading, not without amusement, a severe and trenchantarticle in the _Hibbert Journal_, in which Christ's admissionof demonology was alone thought enough to dispose of his divinity. The one sentence of the article, which I cherish in my memorythrough all the changing years, ran thus: "If he was God, he knew there was no such thing as diabolical possession. "It did not seem to strike the _Hibbert_ critic that this lineof criticism raises the question, not of whether Christ is God, but of whether the critic in the _Hibbert Journal_ is God. About that mystery as about the other I am for the moment agnostic;but I should have thought that the meditations of Omniscienceon the problem of evil might be allowed, even by an agnostic, to be a little difficult to discover. Of Christ in the Gospelsand in modern life I will merely for the moment say this; that ifhe was God, as the critic put it, it seems possible that he knewthe next discovery in science, as well as the last, not to mention(what is more common in rationalistic culture) the last but three. And what will be the next discovery in psychological science nobodycan imagine; and we can only say that if it reveals demons and theirname is Legion, we can hardly be much surprised now. But at any ratethe days are over of Omniscience like that of the _Hibbert_ critic, who knows exactly what he would know if he were God Almighty. What is pain? What is evil? What did they mean by devils?What do we mean by madness? The rising generation, when askedby a venerable Victorian critic and catechist, "What does God know?"will hardly think it unreasonably flippant to answer, "God knows. " There was something already suggested about the steep scenerythrough which I went as I thought about these things; a senseof silent catastrophe and fundamental cleavage in the deepdivision of the cliffs and crags. They were all the moreprofoundly moving, because my sense of them was almost assubconscious as the subconsciousness about which I was reflecting. I had fallen again into the old habit of forgetting where I was going, and seeing things with one eye off, in a blind abstraction. I awoke from a sort of trance of absentmindedness in a landscapethat might well awaken anybody. It might awaken a man sleeping;but he would think he was still in a nightmare. It might wakethe dead, but they would probably think they were in hell. Halfway down the slope the hills had taken on a certain pallor which hadabout it something primitive, as if the colours were not yet created. There was only a kind of cold and wan blue in the level skies whichcontrasted with wild sky-line. Perhaps we are accustomed to the contrarycondition of the clouds moving and mutable and the hills solid and serene;but anyhow there seemed something of the making of a new world aboutthe quiet of the skies and the cold convulsion of the landscape. But if it was between chaos and creation, it was creation by Godor at least by the gods, something with an aim in its anarchy. It was very different in the final stage of the descent, where my mindwoke up from its meditations. One can only say that the whole landscapewas like a leper. It was of a wasting white and silver and grey, with mere dots of decadent vegetation like the green spots of a plague. In shape it not only rose into horns and crests like wavesor clouds, but I believe it actually alters like waves or clouds, visibly but with a loathsome slowness. The swamp is alive. And I found again a certain advantage in forgetfulness;for I saw all this incredible country before I even rememberedits name, or the ancient tradition about its nature. Then even the green plague-spots failed, and everything seemedto fall away into a universal blank under the staring sun, as I came, in the great spaces of the circle of a lifeless sea, into the silence of Sodom and Gomorrah. For these are the foundations of a fallen world, and a seabelow the seas on which men sail. Seas move like clouds andfishes float like birds above the level of the sunken land. And it is here that tradition has laid the tragedy of the mightyperversion of the imagination of man; the monstrous birth and deathof abominable things. I say such things in no mood of spiritual pride;such things are hideous not because they are distant but becausethey are near to us; in all our brains, certainly in mine, were buried things as bad as any buried under that bitter sea, and if He did not come to do battle with them, even in the darknessof the brain of man, I know not why He came. Certainly itwas not only to talk about flowers or to talk about Socialism. The more truly we can see life as a fairy-tale, the more clearly the taleresolves itself into war with the Dragon who is wasting fairyland. I will not enter on the theology behind the symbol; but Iam sure it was of this that all the symbols were symbolic. I remember distinguished men among the liberal theologians, who found it more difficult to believe in one devil than in many. They admitted in the New Testament an attestation to evil spirits, but not to a general enemy of mankind. As some are saidto want the drama of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark, they would have the drama of Hell without the Prince of Darkness. I say nothing of these things, save that the language of theGospel seems to me to go much more singly to a single issue. The voice that is heard there has such authority as speaks to an army;and the highest note of it is victory rather than peace. When the apostles were first sent forth with their faces to the fourcorners of the earth, and turned again to acclaim their master, he did not say in that hour of triumph, "All are aspects of oneharmonious whole" or "The universe evolves through progressto perfection" or "All things find their end in Nirvana"or "The dewdrop slips into the shining sea. " He looked up and said, "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. " Then I looked up and saw in the long jagged lines of road and rockand cleft something of the swiftness of such a thunderbolt. What I saw seemed not so much a scene as an act; as whenabruptly Michael barred the passage of the Lord of Pride. Below me all the empire of evil was splashed and scatteredupon the plain, like a wine-cup shattered into a star. Sodom lay like Satan, flat upon the floor of the world. And far awayand aloft, faint with height and distance, small but still visible, stood up the spire of the Ascension like the sword of the Archangel, lifted in salute after a stroke. CHAPTER X THE ENDLESS EMPIRE One of the adventures of travel consists, not so much in findingthat popular sayings are false, as that they mean more than they say. We cannot appreciate the full force of the phrase until we haveseen the fact. We make a picture of the things we do not knowout of the things we know; and suppose the traveller's taleto mean no more abroad than it would at home. If a man acquaintedonly with English churches is told about certain French churchesthat they are much frequented, he makes an English picture. He imagines a definite dense crowd of people in their bestclothes going all together at eleven o'clock, and all coming backtogether to lunch. He does not picture the peculiar impressionhe would gain on the spot; of chance people going in and out ofthe church all day, sometimes for quite short periods, as if itwere a sort of sacred inn. Or suppose a man knowing only Englishbeer-shops hears for the first time of a German beer-garden, he probably does not imagine the slow ritual of the place. He does not know that unless the drinker positively slams down the topof his beer-mug with a resounding noise and a decisive gesture, beer will go on flowing into it as from a natural fountain;the drinking of beer being regarded as the normal state of man, and the cessation of it a decisive and even dramatic departure. I do not give this example in contempt; heaven forbid. I have had so much to say of the inhuman side of Prussianised Germanythat I am glad to be able to pay a passing tribute to those moregenerous German traditions which we hope may revive and make Germanyonce more a part of Christendom. I merely give it as an instanceof the way in which things we have all heard of, like church-goingor beer-drinking, in foreign lands, mean much more, and somethingmuch more special, than we should infer from our own land. Now this is true of a phrase we have all heard of deserted citiesor temples in the Near East: "The Bedouins camp in the ruins. "When I have read a hundred times that Arabs camp in some deserted townor temple near the Nile or the Euphrates, I always thought of gipsiesnear some place like Stonehenge. They would make their own rude shelternear the stones, perhaps sheltering behind them to light a fire;and for the rest, generations of gipsies might camp there withoutmaking much difference. The thing I saw more than once in Egyptand Palestine was much more curious. It was as if the gipsies setto work to refurnish Stonehenge and make it a commodious residence. It was as if they spread a sort of giant umbrella over the circleof stones, and elaborately hung curtains between them, so as toturn the old Druid temple into a sort of patchwork pavilion. In one sense there is much more vandalism, and in another sensemuch more practicality; but it is a practicality that always stopsshort of the true creative independence of going off and buildinga house of their own. That is the attitude of the Arab; and it runsthrough all his history. Noble as is his masterpiece of the Mosqueof Omar, there is something about it of that patchwork pavilion. It was based on Christian work, it was built with fragments, it was content with things that fastidious architects call fictionsor even shams. I frequently saw old ruined houses of which there only remained two wallsof stone, to which the nomads had added two walls of canvas makingan exact cube in form with the most startling incongruity in colour. He needs the form and he does not mind the incongruity, nor doeshe mind the fact that somebody else has done the solid part andhe has only done the ramshackle part. You can say that he is noblysuperior to jealousy, or that he is without artistic ambition, or that he is too much of a nomad to mind living half in somebodyelse's house and half in his own. The real quality is probably toosubtle for any simple praise or blame; we can only say that thereis in the wandering Moslem a curious kind of limited common sense;which might even be called a short-sighted common sense. But however we define it, that is what can really be traced through Arabconquests and Arab culture in all its ingenuity and insufficiency. That is the note of these nomads in all the things in which theyhave succeeded and failed. In that sense they are constructiveand in that sense unconstructive; in that sense artistic and in thatsense inartistic; in that sense practical and in that sense unpractical;in that sense cunning and in that sense innocent. The curtains theywould hang round Stonehenge might be of beautifully selected colours. The banners they waved from Stonehenge might be defended with gloriouscourage and enthusiasm. The prayers they recited in Stonehengemight be essentially worthy of human dignity, and certainly a greatimprovement on its older associations of human sacrifice. All thisis true of Islam and the idolatries and negations are often replaced. But they would not have built Stonehenge; they would scarcely, so to speak, have troubled to lift a stone of Stonehenge. They would not have built Stonehenge; how much less Salisburyor Glastonbury or Lincoln. That is the element about the Arab influence which makes it, after its ages of supremacy and in a sense of success, remain in asubtle manner superficial. When a man first sees the Eastern deserts, he sees this influence as I first described it, very presentand powerful, almost omnipresent and omnipotent. But I fancy that to meand to others it is partly striking only because it is strange. Islam is so different to Christendom that to see it at all is atfirst like entering a new world. But, in my own case at any rate, as the strange colours became more customary, and especially as I sawmore of the established seats of history, the cities and the frameworkof the different states, I became conscious of something else. It was something underneath, undestroyed and even in a sense unaltered. It was something neither Moslem nor modern; not merely oriental and yetvery different from the new occidental nations from which I came. For a long time I could not put a name to this historical atmosphere. Then one day, standing in one of the Greek churches, one of those housesof gold full of hard highly coloured pictures, I fancied it came to me. It was the Empire. And certainly not the raid of Asiatic banditswe call the Turkish Empire. The thing which had caught my eyein that coloured interior was the carving of a two-headed eaglein such a position as to make it almost as symbolic as a cross. Every one has heard, of course, of the situation which this might wellsuggest, the suggestion that the Russian Church was far too much of anEstablished Church and the White Czar encroached upon the White Christ. But as a fact the eagle I saw was not borrowed from the Russian Empire;it would be truer to say that the Empire was borrowed from the eagle. The double eagle is the ancient emblem of the double empire of Romeand of Byzantium; the one head looking to the west and the other tothe east, as if it spread its wings from the sunrise to the sunset. Unless I am mistaken, it was only associated with Russia as lateas Peter the Great, though it had been the badge of Austriaas the representative of the Holy Roman Empire. And what Ifelt brooding over that shrine and that landscape was somethingolder not only than Turkey or Russia but than Austria itself. I began to understand a sort of evening light that lies overPalestine and Syria; a sense of smooth ruts of custom suchas are said to give a dignity to the civilisation of China. I even understood a sort of sleepiness about the splendid andhandsome Orthodox priests moving fully robed about the streets. They were not aristocrats but officials; still moving with the mightyroutine of some far-off official system. In so far as the eagle wasan emblem not of such imperial peace but of distant imperial wars, it was of wars that we in the West have hardly heard of;it was the emblem of official ovations. When Heracleius rode homewards from the rout of Ispahan Withthe captives dragged behind him and the eagles in the van. That is the rigid reality that still underlay the light masteryof the Arab rider; that is what a man sees, in the patchwork pavilion, when he grows used to the coloured canvas and looks at the wallsof stone. This also was far too great a thing for facile praiseor blame, a vast bureaucracy busy and yet intensely dignified, the most civilised thing ruling many other civilisations. It was an endless end of the world; for ever repeating its rich finality. And I myself was still walking in that long evening of the earth;and Caesar my lord was at Byzantium. But it is necessary to remember next that this empire was notalways at its evening. Byzantium was not always Byzantine. Nor was the seat of that power always in the city of Constantine, which was primarily a mere outpost of the city of Caesar. We must remember Rome as well as Byzantium; as indeednobody would remember Byzantium if it were not for Rome. The more I saw of a hundred little things the more my mind revolvedround that original idea which may be called the Mediterranean;and the fact that it became two empires, but remained one civilisation, just as it has become two churches, but remained one religion. In this little world there is a story attached to every word;and never more than when it is the wrong word. For instance, we may say that in certain cases the word Roman actually means Greek. The Greek Patriarch is sometimes called the Roman Patriarch;while the real Roman Patriarch, who actually comes from Rome, is onlycalled the Latin Patriarch, as if he came from any little town in Latium. The truth behind this confusion is the truth about five hundredvery vital years, which are concealed even from cultivated Englishmenby two vague falsehoods; the notion that the Roman Empire was merelydecadent and the notion that the Middle Ages were merely dark. As a fact, even the Dark Ages were not merely dark. And even the Byzantine Empire was not merely Byzantine. It seems a little unfair that we should take the very titleof decay from that Christian city, for surely it was yetmore stiff and sterile when it had become a Moslem city. I am not so exacting as to ask any one to popularise such a wordas "Constantinopolitan. " But it would surely be a better word forstiffness and sterility to call it Stamboulish. But for the Moslemsand other men of the Near East what counted about Byzantium wasthat it still inherited the huge weight of the name of Rome. Rome had come east and reared against them this Roman city, and though and priest or soldier who came out of it might bespeaking as a Greek, he was ruling as a Roman. Its critics inthese days of criticism may regard it as a corrupt civilisation. But its enemies in the day of battle only regarded it as civilisation. Saladin, the greatest of the Saracens, did not call Greek bishopsdegenerate dreamers or dingy outcasts, he called them, with asounder historical instinct, "The monks of the imperial race. "The survival of the word merely means that even when the imperialcity fell behind them, they did not surrender their claimto defy all Asia in the name of the Christian Emperor. That is but one example out of twenty, but that is why in thisdistant place to this day the Greeks who are separated from the seeof Rome sometimes bear the strange name of "The Romans. " Now that civilisation is our civilisation, and we never had any other. We have not inherited a Teutonic culture any more than a Druid culture;not half so much. The people who say that parliaments or picturesor gardens or roads or universities were made by the Teutonicrace from the north can be disposed of by the simple question:why did not the Teutonic race make them in the north?Why was not the Parthenon originally built in the neighbourhoodof Potsdam, or did ten Hansa towns compete to be the birthplaceof Homer? Perhaps they do by this time; but their local illusionis no longer largely shared. Anyhow it seems strange that the roadsof the Romans should be due to the inspiration of the Teutons;and that parliaments should begin in Spain because they camefrom Germany. If I looked about in these parts for a local emblemlike that of the eagle, I might very well find it in the lion. The lion is common enough, of course, in Christian art bothhagiological and heraldic. Besides the cavern of Bethlehem of which Ishall speak presently, is the cavern of St. Jerome, where he livedwith that real or legendary lion who was drawn by the delicatehumour of Carpaccio and a hundred other religious painters. That it should appear in Christian art is natural; that it shouldappear in Moslem art is much more singular, seeing that Moslemsare in theory forbidden so to carve images of living things. Some say the Persian Moslems are less particular; but whateverthe explanation, two lions of highly heraldic appearance are carvedover that Saracen gate which Christians call the gate of St. Stephen;and the best judges seem to agree that, like so much of the Saracenicshell of Zion, they were partly at least copied from the shieldsand crests of the Crusaders. And the lions graven over the gate of St. Stephen might well bethe text for a whole book on the subject. For if they indicate, however indirectly, the presence of the Latins of the twelfth century, they also indicate the earlier sources from which the Latin life haditself been drawn. The two lions are pacing, passant as the heraldswould say, in two opposite directions almost as if prowling to and fro. And this also might well be symbolic as well as heraldic. For if the Crusaders brought the lion southward in spite ofthe conventional fancy of Moslem decoration, it was only becausethe Romans had previously brought the lion northward to the coldseas and the savage forests. The image of the lion came from northto south, only because the idea of the lion had long ago comefrom south to north. The Christian had a symbolic lion he hadnever seen, and the Moslem had a real lion that he refused to draw. For we could deduce from the case of this single creaturethe fact that all our civilisation came from the Mediterranean, and the folly of pretending that it came from the North Sea. Those two heraldic shapes over the gate may be borrowed from the Normanor Angevin shield now quartered in the Royal Arms of England. They mayhave been copied, directly or indirectly, from that great Angevin Kingof England whose title credited him with the heart of a lion. They may have in some far-off fashion the same ancestry as the boastor jest of our own comic papers when they talk about the British Lion. But why are there lions, though of French or feudal origin, on the flag of England? There might as well be camels or crocodiles, for all the apparent connection with England or with France. Why was an English king described as having the heart of a lion, any morethan of a tiger? Why do your patriotic cartoons threaten the worldwith the wrath of the British Lion; it is really as strange as if theywarned it against stimulating the rage of the British rhinoceros. Why did not the French and English princes find in the wild boars, that were the objects of their hunting, the subjects of their heraldry?If the Normans were really the Northmen, the sea-wolves of Scandinavianpiracy, why did they not display three wolves on their shields?Why has not John Bull been content with the English bull, or the English bull-dog? The answer might be put somewhat defiantly by saying that the very nameof John Bull is foreign. The surname comes through France from Rome;and the Christian name comes through Rome from Palestine. If therehad really been any justification for the Teutonic generalisation, we should expect the surname to be "ox" and not "bull"; and we shouldexpect the hero standing as godfather to be Odin or Siegfried, and notthe prophet who lived on locusts in the wilderness of Palestine or themystic who mused with his burning eyes on the blue seas around Patmos. If our national hero is John Bull and not Olaf the Ox, it is ultimatelybecause that blue sea has run like a blue thread through all thetapestries of our traditions; or in other words because our culture, like that of France or Flanders, came originally from the Mediterranean. And if this is true of our use of the word "bull, " it is obviouslyeven truer of our use of the word "lion. " The later emblem is enoughto show that the culture came, not only from the Mediterranean, but from the southern as well as the northern side of the Mediterranean. In other words, the Roman Empire ran all round the great inland sea;the very name of which meant, not merely the sea in the middle ofthe land, but more especially the sea in the middle of all the landsthat mattered most to civilisation. One of these, and the onethat in the long run has mattered most of all, was Palestine. In this lies the deepest difference between a man like Richardthe Lion Heart and any of the countless modern English soldiersin Palestine who have been quite as lion-hearted as he. His superiority was not moral but intellectual; it consisted inknowing where he was and why he was there. It arose from the factthat in his time there remained a sort of memory of the Roman Empire, which some would have re-established as a Holy Roman Empire. Christendom was still almost one commonwealth; and it seemed to Richardquite natural to go from one edge of it that happened to be calledEngland to the opposite edge of it that happened to be called Palestine. We may think him right or wrong in the particular quarrel, we may think him innocent or unscrupulous in his incidental methods;but there is next to no doubt whatever that he did regardhimself not merely as conquering but as re-conquering a realm. He was not like a man attacking total strangers on a hithertoundiscovered island. He was not opening up a new country, or giving his name to a new continent, and he could boast noneof those ideals of imperial innovation which inspire the moreenlightened pioneers, who exterminate tribes or extinguishrepublics for the sake of a gold-mine or an oil-field. Some day, if our modern educational system is further expanded and enforced, the whole of the past of Palestine may be entirely forgotten;and a traveller in happier days may have all the fresher sentimentsof one stepping on a new and nameless soil. Disregarding any dimand lingering legends among the natives, he may then have the honourof calling Sinai by the name of Mount Higgins, or marking ona new map the site of Bethlehem with the name of Brownsville. But King Richard, adventurous as he was, could not experience the fullfreshness of this sort of adventure. He was not riding into Asia thusromantically and at random; indeed he was not riding into Asia at all. He was riding into Europa Irredenta. But that is to anticipate what happened later and must beconsidered later. I am primarily speaking of the Empire as a paganand political matter; and it is easy to see what was the meaning ofthe Crusade on the merely pagan and political side. In one sentence, it meant that Rome had to recover what Byzantium could not keep. But something further had happened as affecting Rome than anythingthat could be understood by a man standing as I have imaginedmyself standing, in the official area of Byzantium. When I havesaid that the Byzantian civilisation seemed still to be reigning, I meant a curious impression that, in these Eastern provinces, though the Empire had been more defeated it has been less disturbed. There is a greater clarity in that ancient air; and fewer clouds of realrevolution and novelty have come between them and their ancient sun. This may seem an enigma and a paradox; seeing that here a foreignreligion has successfully fought and ruled. But indeed the enigmais also the explanation. In the East the continuity of culturehas only been interrupted by negative things that Islam has done. In the West it has been interrupted by positive things thatChristendom itself has done. In the West the past of Christendomhas its perspective blocked up by its own creations; in the Eastit is a true perspective of interminable corridors, with roundByzantine arches and proud Byzantine pillars. That, I inclineto fancy, is the real difference that a man come from the westof Europe feels in the east of Europe, it is a gap or a void. It is the absence of the grotesque energy of Gothic, the absenceof the experiments of parliament and popular representation, the absence of medieval chivalry, the absence of modern nationality. In the East the civilisation lived on, or if you will, lingered on;in the West it died and was reborn. But for a long time, it shouldbe remembered, it must have seemed to the East merely that it died. The realms of Rome had disappeared in clouds of barbaric war, while the realms of Byzantium were still golden and gorgeous in the sun. The men of the East did not realise that their splendour was stiffeningand growing sterile, and even the early successes of Islam may nothave revealed to them that their rule was not only stiff but brittle. It was something else that was destined to reveal it. The Crusades meant many things; but in this matter they meant one thing, which was like a word carried to them on the great west wind. And the word was like that in an old Irish song: "The west is awake. "They heard in the distance the cries of unknown crowds and feltthe earth shaking with the march of mobs; and behind them camethe trampling of horses and the noise of harness and of horns of war;new kings calling out commands and hosts of young men full of hopecrying out in the old Roman tongue "Id Deus vult, " Rome was risenfrom the dead. Almost any traveller could select out of the countless thingsthat he has looked at the few things that he has seen. I mean the things that come to him with a curious clearness;so that he actually sees them to be what he knows them to be. I might almost say that he can believe in them although he has seen them. There can be no rule about this realisation; it seems to come inthe most random fashion; and the man to whom it comes can only speakfor himself without any attempt at a critical comparison with others. In this sense I may say that the Church of the Nativity atBethlehem contains something impossible to describe, yet drivingme beyond expression to a desperate attempt at description. The church is entered through a door so small that it it might fairlybe called a hole, in which many have seen, and I think truly, a symbol of some idea of humility. It is also said that the wallwas pierced in this way to prevent the appearance of a camelduring divine service, but even that explanation would only repeatthe same suggestion through the parable of the needle's eye. Personally I should guess that, in so far as the purpose was practical, it was meant to keep out much more dangerous animals than camels, as, for instance, Turks. For the whole church has clearly beenturned into a fortress, windows are bricked up and walls thickenedin some or all of its thousand years of religious war. In the blankspaces above the little doorway hung in old times that strangemosaic of the Magi which once saved the holy place from destruction, in the strange interlude between the decline of Rome and the riseof Mahomet. For when the Persians who had destroyed Jerusalem rodeout in triumph to the village of Bethlehem, they looked up and sawabove the door a picture in coloured stone, a picture of themselves. They were following a strange star and worshipping an unknown child. For a Christian artist, following some ancient Eastern traditioncontaining an eternal truth, had drawn the three wise men withthe long robes and high head-dresses of Persia. The worshippersof the sun had come westward for the worship of the star. But whether that part of the church were bare and bald as it isnow or coloured with the gold and purple images of the Persians, the inside of the church would always be by comparison abruptly dark. As familiarity turns the darkness to twilight, and the twilightto a grey daylight, the first impression is that of two rowsof towering pillars. They are of a dark red stone having muchof the appearance of a dark red marble; and they are crownedwith the acanthus in the manner of the Corinthian school. They were carved and set up at the command of Constantine;and beyond them, at the other end of the church beside the attar, is the dark stairway that descends under the canopies of rockto the stable where Christ was born. Of all the things I have seen the most convincing, and as itwere crushing, were these red columns of Constantine. In explanation of the sentiment there are a thousand things that wantsaying and cannot be said. Never have I felt so vividly the greatfact of our history; that the Christian religion is like a hugebridge across a boundless sea, which alone connects us with the menwho made the world, and yet have utterly vanished from the world. To put it curtly and very crudely on this point alone it waspossible to sympathise with a Roman and not merely to admire him. All his pagan remains are but sublime fossils; for we can never knowthe life that was in them. We know that here and there was a templeto Venus or there an altar to Vesta; but who knows or pretends to knowwhat he really felt about Venus or Vesta? Was a Vestal Virginlike a Christian Virgin, or something profoundly different?Was he quite serious about Venus, like a diabolist, or merely frivolousabout Venus, like a Christian? If the spirit was different from ourswe cannot hope to understand it, and if the spirit was like ours, the spirit was expressed in images that no longer express it. But it is here that he and I meet; and salute the same imagesin the end. In any case I can never recapture in words the waves ofsympathy with strange things that went through me in thattwilight of the tall pillars, like giants robed in purple, standing still and looking down into that dark hole in the ground. Here halted that imperial civilisation, when it had marched in triumphthrough the whole world; here in the evening of its days it cametrailing in all its panoply in the pathway of the three kings. For it came following not only a falling but a fallen star and onethat dived before them into a birthplace darker than a grave. And the lord of the laurels, clad in his sombre crimson, looked downinto that darkness, and then looked up, and saw that all the starsin his own sky were dead. They were deities no longer but onlya brilliant dust, scattered down the vain void of Lucretius. The stars were as stale as they were strong; they would never diefor they had never lived; they were cursed with an incurableimmortality that was but the extension of mortality; they werechained in the chains of causation and unchangeable as the dead. There are not many men in the modern world who do not know that mood, though it was not discovered by the moderns; it was the final andseemingly fixed mood of nearly all the ancients. Only above the blackhole of Bethlehem they had seen a star wandering like a lost spark;and it had done what the eternal suns and planets could not do. It had disappeared. There are some who resent the presence of such purple besidethe plain stable of the Nativity. But it seems strange that theyalways rebuke it as if it were a blind vulgarity like the redplush of a parvenu; a mere insensibility to a mere incongruity. For in fact the insensibility is in the critics and not the artists. It is an insensibility not to an accidental incongruity but to anartistic contrast. Indeed it is an insensibility of a somewhattiresome kind, which can often be noticed in those sceptics whomake a science of folk-lore. The mark of them is that they failto see the importance of finding the upshot or climax of a tale, even when it is a fairy-tale. Since the old devotional doctorsand designers were never tired of insisting on the sufferings ofthe holy poor to the point of squalor, and simultaneously insistingon the sumptuousness of the subject kings to the point of swagger, it would really seem not entirely improbable that they may have beenconscious of the contrast themselves. I confess this is an insensibility, not to say stupidity, in the sceptics and simplifiers, which Ifind very fatiguing. I do not mind a man not believing a story, but I confess I am bored stiff (if I may be allowed the expression)by a man who can tell a story without seeing the point ofthe story, considered as a story or even considered as a lie. And a man who sees the rags and the royal purple as a clumsyinconsistency is merely missing the meaning of a deliberate design. He is like a man who should hear the story of King Cophetua and the beggarmaid and say doubtfully that it was hard to recognise it as really _amariage de convenance_; a phrase which (I may remark in parenthesis butnot without passion) is not the French for "a marriage of convenience, "any more than _hors d'oeuvre_ is the French for "out of work";but may be more rightly rendered in English as "a suitable match. "But nobody thought the match of the king and the beggar maidconventionally a suitable match; and nobody would ever havethought the story worth telling if it had been. It is like sayingthat Diogenes, remaining in his tub after the offer of Alexander, must have been unaware of the opportunities of Greek architecture;or like saying that Nebuchadnezzar eating grass is clearly inconsistentwith court etiquette, or not to be found in any fashionable cookery book. I do not mind the learned sceptic saying it is a legend or a lie;but I weep for him when he cannot see the gist of it, I might evensay the joke of it. I do not object to his rejecting the storyas a tall story; but I find it deplorable when he cannot seethe point or end or upshot of the tall story, the very pinnacleor spire of that sublime tower. This dull type of doubt clouds the consideration of manysacred things as it does that of the shrine of Bethlehem. It is applied to the divine reality of Bethlehem itself, as when sceptics still sneer at the littleness, the localism, the provincial particularity and obscurity of that divine origin;as if Christians could be confounded and silenced by a contrastwhich Christians in ten thousand hymns, songs and sermons haveincessantly shouted and proclaimed. In this capital case, of course, the same principle holds. A man may think the tale is incredible;but it would never have been told at all if it had not been incongruous. But this particular case of the lesser contrast, that between the imperialpomp and the rustic poverty of the carpenter and the shepherds, is alone enough to illustrate the strange artistic fallacy involved. If it be the point that an emperor came to worship a carpenter, it is as artistically necessary to make the emperor imperialas to make the carpenter humble; if we wish to make plain to plainpeople that before this shrine kings are no better than shepherds, it is as necessary that the kings should have crowns as thatthe shepherds should have crooks. And if modern intellectualsdo not know it, it is because nobody has really been mad enougheven to try to make modern intellectualism popular. Now thisconception of pomp as a popular thing, this conception of a concessionto common human nature in colour and symbol, has a considerablebearing on many misunderstandings about the original enthusiasmthat spread from the cave of Bethlehem over the whole Roman Empire. It is a curious fact that the moderns have mostly rebukedhistoric Christianity, not for being narrow, but for being broad. They have rebuked it because it did prove itself the desire ofall nations, because it did satisfy the cravings of many creeds, because it did prove itself to idolaters as something as magicas their idols, or did prove itself to patriots something as lovableas their native land. In many other matters indeed, besides thispopular art, we may find examples of the same illogical prejudice. Nothing betrays more curiously the bias of historians againstthe Christian faith than the fact that they blame in Christiansthe very human indulgences that they have praised in heathens. The same arts and allegories, the same phraseologies and philosophies, which appear first as proofs of heathen health turn up lateras proofs of Christian corruption. It was noble of pagans tobe pagan, but it was unpardonable of Christians to be paganised. They never tire of telling us of the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome, but the Church was infamous because itsatisfied the Greek intellect and wielded the Roman power. Now on the first example of the attempt of theology to meetthe claims of philosophy I will not here dwell at length. I will only remark in passing that it is an utter fallacyto suggest, as for instance Mr. Wells suggests in his fascinating_Outline of History_, that the subtleties of theology werea mere falling away from the simplicities of religion. Religion may be better simple for those who find it simple;but there are bound to be many who in any case find it subtle, among those who think about it and especially those who doubt about it. To take an example, there is no saying which the humanitariansof a broad religion more commonly offer as a model of simplicitythan that most mystical affirmation "God is Love. " And there isno theological quarrel of the Councils of the Church which they, especially Mr. Wells, more commonly deride as bitter and barren thanthat at the Council of Nicea about the Co-eternity of the Divine Son. Yet the subtle statement is simply a metaphysical explanationof the simple statement; and it would be quite possible even tomake it a popular explanation, by saying that God could not lovewhen there was nothing to be loved. Now the Church Councilswere originally very popular, not to say riotous assemblies. So far from being undemocratic, they were rather too democratic;the real case against them was that they passed by uproarious votes, and not without violence, things that had ultimately to be consideredmore calmly by experts. But it may reasonably be suggested, I think, that the concentration of the Greek intellect on these things didgradually pass from a popular to a more professional or official thing;and that the traces of it have finally tended to fade from theofficial religion of the East. It was far otherwise with the morepoetical and therefore more practical religion of the West. It was far otherwise with that direct appeal to pathos and affectionin the highly coloured picture of the Shepherd and the King. In the West the world not only prolonged its life but recoveredits youth. That is the meaning of the movement I have describedas the awakening of the West and the resurrection of Rome. And the whole point of that movement, as I propose to suggest, was that it was a popular movement. It had returned with exactlythat strange and simple energy that belongs to the story of Bethlehem. Not in vain had Constantine come clad in purple to look down intothat dark cave at his feet; nor did the star mislead him when it seemedto end in the entrails of the earth. The men who followed him passed on, as it were, through the low and vaulted tunnel of the Dark Ages;but they had found the way, and the only way, out of that worldof death, and their journey ended in the land of the living. They came out into a world more wonderful than the eyes of menhave looked on before or after; they heard the hammers of hundredsof happy craftsmen working for once according to their own will, and saw St. Francis walking with his halo a cloud of birds. CHAPTER XI THE MEANING OF THE CRUSADE There are three examples of Western work on the great eastern slopeof the Mount of Olives; and they form a sort of triangle illustratingthe truth about the different influences of the West on the East. At the foot of the hill is the garden kept by the Franciscanson the alleged site of Gethsemane, and containing the hoary olivethat is supposed to be the terrible tree of the agony of Christ. Given the great age and slow growth of the olives, the traditionis not so unreasonable as some may suppose. But whether or not itis historically right, it is not artistically wrong. The instinct, if it was only an instinct, that made men fix upon this strangegrowth of grey and twisted wood, was a true imaginative instinct. One of the strange qualities of this strange Southern tree isits almost startling hardness; accidentally to strike the branchof an olive is like striking rock. With its stony surface, stunted stature, and strange holes and hollows, it is often morelike a grotto than a tree. Hence it does not seem so unnaturalthat it should be treated as a holy grotto; or that this strangevegetation should claim to stand for ever like a sculptured monument. Even the shimmering or shivering silver foliage of the livingolive might well have a legend like that of the aspen; as if ithad grown grey with fear from the apocalyptic paradox of a divinevision of death. A child from one of the villages said to me, in broken English, that it was the place where God said his prayers. I for one could not ask for a finer or more defiant statementof all that separates the Christian from the Moslem or the Jew;_credo quia impossibile_. Around this terrible spot the Franciscans have done something which willstrike many good and thoughtful people as quite fantastically inadequate;and which strikes me as fantastically but precisely right. They have laid out the garden simply as a garden, in a waythat is completely natural because it is completely artificial. They have made flower-beds in the shape of stars and moons, and coloured them with flowers like those in the backyard of a cottage. The combination of these bright patterns in the sunshinewith the awful shadow in the centre is certainly an incongruityin the sense of a contrast. But it is a poetical contrast, like that of birds building in a temple or flowers growing on a tomb. The best way of suggesting what I for one feel about it wouldbe something like this; suppose we imagine a company of children, such as those whom Christ blessed in Jerusalem, afterwards putpermanently in charge of a field full of his sorrow; it is probable that, if they could do anything with it, they would do something like this. They might cut it up into quaint shapes and dot it with reddaisies or yellow marigolds. I really do not know that thereis anything better that grown up people could do, since anythingthat the greatest of them could do must be, must look quite as small. "Shall I, the gnat that dances in Thy ray, dare to be reverent?"The Franciscans have not dared to be reverent; they have only daredto be cheerful. It may be too awful an adventure of the imaginationto imagine Christ in that garden. But there is not the smallestdifficulty about imagining St. Francis there; and that is somethingto say of an institution which is eight hundred years old. Immediately above this little garden, overshadowing and almostoverhanging it, is a gorgeous gilded building with golden domesand minarets glittering in the sun, and filling a splendid situationwith almost shameless splendour; the Russian church built overthe upper part of the garden, belonging to the Orthodox-Greeks. Here again many Western travellers will be troubled; and will thinkthat golden building much too like a fairy palace in a pantomime. But here again I shall differ from them, though perhaps less strongly. It may be that the pleasure is childish rather than childlike;but I can imagine a child clapping his hands at the mere sightof those great domes like bubbles of gold against the blue sky. It is a little like Aladdin's Palace, but it has a place in artas Aladdin has a place in literature; especially since it isoriental literature. Those wise missionaries in China who were notafraid to depict the Twelve Apostles in the costume of Chinamenmight have built such a church in a land of glittering mosques. And as it is said that the Russian has in him something of the childand something of the oriental, such a style may be quite sincere, and have even a certain simplicity in its splendour. It is genuine of its kind; it was built for those who like it;and those who do not like it can look at something else. This sortof thing may be called tawdry, but it is not what I call meretricious. What I call really meretricious can be found yet higher on the hill;towering to the sky and dominating all the valleys. The nature of the difference, I think, is worth noting. The German Hospice, which served as a sort of palace for theGerman Emperor, is a very big building with a very high tower, planned I believe with great efficiency, solidity and comfort, and fitted with a thousand things that mark its modernitycompared with the things around, with the quaint gardenof the Franciscans or the fantastic temple of the Russians. It is what I can only describe as a handsome building; rather asthe more vulgar of the Victorian wits used to talk about a fine woman. By calling it a handsome building I mean that from the top of its dizzytower to the bottom of its deepest foundations there is not one lineor one tint of beauty. This negative fact, however, would be nothing;it might be honestly ugly and utilitarian like a factory or a prison;but it is not. It is as pretentious as the gilded dome below it;and it is pretentious in a wicked way where the other is pretentiousin a good and innocent way. What annoys me about it is that itwas not built by children, or even by savages, but by professors;and the professors could profess the art and could not practise it. The architects knew everything about a Romanesque building excepthow to build it. We feel that they accumulated on that spotall the learning and organisation and information and wealth ofthe world, to do this one particular thing; and then did it wrong. They did it wrong, not through superstition, not through fanaticalexaggeration, not through provincial ignorance, but through pure, profound, internal, intellectual incompetence; that intellectualincompetence which so often goes with intellectual pride. I will mention only one matter out of a hundred. All the columnsin the Kaiser's Chapel are in one way very suitable to their place;every one of them has a swelled head. The column itself is slenderbut the capital is not only big but bulging; and it has the airof bulging _downwards_, as if pressing heavily on something tooslender to support it. This is false, not to any of the particularschools of architecture about which professors can read in libraries, but to the inmost instinctive idea of architecture itself. A Norman capital can be heavy because the Norman column is thick, and the whole thing expresses an elephantine massiveness and repose. And a Gothic column can be slender, because its strength is energy;and is expressed in its line, which shoots upwards like the life ofa tree, like the jet of a fountain or even like the rush of a rocket. But a slender thing beneath, obviously oppressed by a bloatedthing above, suggests weakness by one of those miraculous mistakesthat are as precisely wrong as masterpieces are precisely right. And to all this is added the intolerable intuition; that the Russiansand the Franciscans, even if we credit them with fantastic ignorance, are at least looking up at the sky; and we know how the learnedGermans would look down upon them, from their monstrous towerupon the hill. And this is as true of the moral as of the artistic elementsin the modern Jerusalem. To show that I am not unjustly partisan, I will say frankly that I see little to complain of in that commonsubject of complaint; the mosaic portrait of the Emperor on the ceilingof the chapel. It is but one among many figures; and it is not an unknownpractice to include a figure of the founder in such church decorations. The real example of that startling moral stupidity which markedthe barbaric imperialism can be found in another figure of which, curiously enough, considerably less notice seems to have been taken. It is the more remarkable because it is but an artistic shadow ofthe actual fact; and merely records in outline and relief the temporarymasquerade in which the man walked about in broad daylight. I mean the really astounding trick of dressing himself up as a Crusader. That was, under the circumstances, far more ludicrous and lunatica proceeding than if he had filled the whole ceiling with cherubheads with his own features, or festooned all the walls with oneornamental pattern of his moustaches. The German Emperor came to Jerusalem under the escort of the Turks, as the ally of the Turks, and solely because of the victoryand supremacy of the Turks. In other words, he came toJerusalem solely because the Crusaders had lost Jerusalem;he came there solely because the Crusaders had been routed, ruined, butchered before and after the disaster of Hattin:because the Cross had gone down in blood before the Crescent, under which alone he could ride in with safety. Under thosecircumstances to dress up as a Crusader, as if for a fancy dress ball, was a mixture of madness and vulgarity which literally stops the breath. There is no need whatever to blame him for being in alliance withthe Turks; hundreds of people have been in alliance with the Turks;the English especially have been far too much in alliance with them. But if any one wants to appreciate the true difference, distinct from allthe cant of newspaper nationality, between the English and the Germans(who were classed together by the same newspapers a little timebefore the war) let him take this single incident as a test. Lord Palmerston, for instance, was a firm friend of the Turks. Imagine Lord Palmerston appearing in chain mail and the shieldof a Red Cross Knight. It is obvious enough that Palmerston would have said that he caredno more for the Crusade than for the Siege of Troy; that his diplomacywas directed by practical patriotic considerations of the moment;and that he regarded the religious wars of the twelfth centuryas a rubbish heap of remote superstitions. In this he would bequite wrong, but quite intelligible and quite sincere; an Englisharistocrat of the nineteenth century inheriting from the Englisharistocrats of the eighteenth century; whose views were simplythose of Voltaire. And these things are something of an allegory. For the Voltairian version of the Crusades is still by farthe most reasonable of all merely hostile views of the Crusades. If they were not a creative movement of religion, then they weresimply a destructive movement of superstition; and whether we agreewith Voltaire in calling it superstition or with Villehardouin incalling it religion, at least both these very clear-headed Frenchmenwould agree that the motive did exist and did explain the facts. But just as there is a clumsy German building with statues that at oncepatronise and parody the Crusaders, so there is a clumsy German theorythat at once patronises and minimises the Crusades. According to thistheory the essential truth about a Crusade was that it was not a Crusade. It was something that the professors, in the old days before the war, used to call a Teutonic Folk-Wandering. Godfrey and St. Louiswere not, as Villehardouin would say, fighting for the truth;they were not even, as Voltaire would say, fighting for what theythought was the truth; this was only what they thought they thought, and they were really thinking of something entirely different. They were not moved either by piety or priestcraft, but by a newand unexpected nomadism. They were not inspired either by faithor fanaticism, but by an unusually aimless taste for foreign travel. This theory that the war of the two great religions could beexplained by "Wanderlust" was current about twenty years ago amongthe historical professors of Germany, and with many of their other views, was often accepted by the historical professors of England. It was swallowed by an earthquake, along with other rubbish, in the year 1914. Since then, so far as I know, the only person who has beenpatient enough to dig it up again is Mr. Ezra Pound. He is well known as an American poet; and he is, I believe, a man of great talent and information. His attempt to recoverthe old Teutonic theory of the Folk-Wandering of Peter the Hermitwas expressed, however, in prose; in an article in the _New Age_. I have no reason to doubt that he was to be counted among the mostloyal of our allies; but he is evidently one of those who, quite without being Pro-German, still manage to be German. The Teutonic theory was very Teutonic; like the German Hospiceon the hill it was put together with great care and knowledgeand it is rotten from top to bottom. I do not understand, for that matter, why that alliance which we enjoy with Mr. Poundshould not be treated in the same way as the other historical event;or why the war should not be an example of the Wanderlust. Surely the American Army in France must have drifted eastward merelythrough the same vague nomadic need as the Christian Army in Palestine. Surely Pershing as well as Peter the Hermit was merely a rather restlessgentleman who found his health improved by frequent change of scene. The Americans said, and perhaps thought, that they were fightingfor democracy; and the Crusaders said, and perhaps thought, that they were fighting for Christianity. But as we know whatthe Crusaders meant better than they did themselves, I cannotquite understand why we do not enjoy the same valuable omniscienceabout the Americans. Indeed I do not see why we should not enjoy it(for it would be very enjoyable) about any individual American. Surely it was this vague vagabond spirit that moved Mr. Pound, not only to come to England, but in a fashion to come to Fleet Street. A dim tribal tendency, vast and invisible as the wind, carried himand his article like an autumn leaf to alight on the _New Age_ doorstep. Or a blind aboriginal impulse, wholly without rational motive, led him one day to put on his hat, and go out with his articlein an envelope and put it in a pillar-box. It is vain to correctby cold logic the power of such primitive appetites; nature herselfwas behind the seemingly random thoughtlessness of the deed. And now that it is irrevocably done, he can look back on it and tracethe large lines of an awful law of averages; wherein it is ruledby a ruthless necessity that a certain number of such Americansshould write a certain number of such articles, as the leaves fallor the flowers return. In plain words, this sort of theory is a blasphemy againstthe intellectual dignity of man. It is a blunder as well asa blasphemy; for it goes miles out of its way to find a bestialexplanation when there is obviously a human explanation. It is as if a man told me that a dim survival of the instincts of aquadruped was the reason of my sitting on a chair with four legs. I answer that I do it because I foresee that there may be gravedisadvantages in sitting on a chair with one leg. Or it is as if Iwere told that I liked to swim in the sea, solely because some earlyforms of amphibian life came out of the sea on to the shore. I answer that I know why I swim in the sea; and it is becausethe divine gift of reason tells me that it would be unsatisfactoryto swim on the land. In short this sort of vague evolutionarytheorising simply amounts to finding an unconvincing explanationof something that needs no explanation. And the case is really quiteas simple with great political and religious movements by which manhas from time to time changed the world in this or that respectin which he happened to think it would be the better for a change. The Crusade was a religious movement, but it was also a perfectlyrational movement; one might almost say a rationalist movement. I could quite understand Mr. Pound saying that such a campaign fora creed was immoral; and indeed it often has been, and now perhapsgenerally is, quite horribly immoral. But when he implies that itis irrational he has selected exactly the thing which it is not. It is not enlightenment, on the contrary it is ignorance and insularity, which causes most of us to miss this fact. But it certainly is the factthat religious war is in itself much more rational than patriotic war. I for one have often defended and even encouraged patriotic war, and should always be ready to defend and encourage patriotic passion. But it cannot be denied that there is more of mere passion, of mere preference and prejudice, in short of mere personal accident, in fighting another nation than in fighting another faith. The Crusader is in every sense more rational than the modernconscript or professional soldier. He is more rational inhis object, which is the intelligent and intelligible objectof conversion; where the modern militarist has an object muchmore confused by momentary vanity and one-sided satisfaction. The Crusader wished to make Jerusalem a Christian town;but the Englishman does not wish to make Berlin an English town. He has only a healthy hatred of it as a Prussian town. The Moslem wished to make the Christian a Moslem; but eventhe Prussian did not wish to make the Frenchman a Prussian. He only wished to make the Frenchman admire a Prussian;and not only were the means he adopted somewhat ill-considered forthis purpose, but the purpose itself is looser and more irrational. The object of all war is peace; but the object of religiouswar is mental as well as material peace; it is agreement. In short religious war aims ultimately at equality, where nationalwar aims relatively at superiority. Conversion is the one sortof conquest in which the conquered must rejoice. In that sense alone it is foolish for us in the West to sneerat those who kill men when a foot is set in a holy place, when we ourselves kill hundreds of thousands when a foot is putacross a frontier. It is absurd for us to despise those who shedblood for a relic when we have shed rivers of blood for a rag. But above all the Crusade, or, for that matter, the Jehad, is by far the most philosophical sort of fighting, not onlyin its conception of ending the difference, but in its mere actof recognising the difference, as the deepest kind of difference. It is to reverse all reason to suggest that a man's politics matterand his religion does not matter. It is to say he is affectedby the town he lives in, but not by the world he lives in. It is to say that he is altered when he is a fellow-citizen walkingunder new lamp-posts, but not altered when he is another creature walkingunder strange stars. It is exactly as if we were to say that two peopleought to live in the same house, but it need not be in the same town. It is exactly as if we said that so long as the address includedYork it did not matter whether it was New York; or that so longas a man is in Essex we do not care whether he is in England. Christendom would have been entirely justified in the abstractin being alarmed or suspicious at the mere rise of a great powerthat was not Christian. Nobody nowadays would think it oddto express regret at the rise of a power because it was Militaristor Socialist or even Protectionist. But it is far more naturalto be conscious of a difference, not about the order of battle butthe battle of life; not about our definable enjoyment of possessions, but about our much more doubtful possession of enjoyment;not about the fiscal divisions between us and foreignersbut about the spiritual divisions even between us and friends. These are the things that differ profoundly with differing viewsof the ultimate nature of the universe. For the things of our countryare often distant; but the things of our cosmos are always near;we can shut our doors upon the wheeled traffic of our native town;but in our own inmost chamber we hear the sound that never ceases;that wheel which Dante and a popular proverb have daredto christen as the love that makes the world go round. For this is the great paradox of life; that there are not onlywheels within wheels, but the larger wheels within the smaller. When a whole community rests on one conception of life and deathand the origin of things, it is quite entitled to watch the riseof another community founded on another conception as the riseof something certain to be different and likely to be hostile. Indeed, as I have pointed out touching certain political theories, we already admit this truth in its small and questionable examples. We only deny the large and obvious examples. Christendom might quite reasonably have been alarmed if it had notbeen attacked. But as a matter of history it had been attacked. The Crusader would have been quite justified in suspecting the Moslemeven if the Moslem had merely been a new stranger; but as a matterof history he was already an old enemy. The critic of the Crusadetalks as if it had sought out some inoffensive tribe or temple in theinterior of Thibet, which was never discovered until it was invaded. They seem entirely to forget that long before the Crusaders had dreamedof riding to Jerusalem, the Moslems had almost ridden into Paris. They seem to forget that if the Crusaders nearly conquered Palestine, it was but a return upon the Moslems who had nearly conquered Europe. There was no need for them to argue by an appeal to reason, as Ihave argued above, that a religious division must make a difference;it had already made a difference. The difference stared themin the face in the startling transformation of Roman Barbaryand of Roman Spain. In short it was something which must happenin theory and which did happen in practice; all expectationsuggested that it would be so and all experience said it was so. Having thought it out theoretically and experienced it practically, they proceeded to deal with it equally practically. The first divisioninvolved every principle of the science of thought; and the lastdevelopments followed out every principle of the science of war. The Crusade was the counter-attack. It was the defensive army takingthe offensive in its turn, and driving back the enemy to his base. And it is this process, reasonable from its first axiom to its last act, that Mr. Pound actually selects as a sort of automatic wanderingof an animal. But a man so intelligent would not have made a mistakeso extraordinary but for another error which it is here very essentialto consider. To suggest that men engaged, rightly or wrongly, in so logical a military and political operation were only migratinglike birds or swarming like bees is as ridiculous as to say thatthe Prohibition campaign in America was only an animal reversiontowards lapping as the dog lappeth, or Rowland Hill's introductionof postage stamps an animal taste for licking as the cat licks. Why should we provide other people with a remote reason for theirown actions, when they themselves are ready to tell us the reason, and it is a perfectly reasonable reason? I have compared this pompous imposture of scientific history tothe pompous and clumsy building of the scientific Germans on the Mountof Olives, because it substitutes in the same way a modern stupidityfor the medieval simplicity. But just as the German Hospice afterall stands on a fine site, and might have been a fine building, so there is after all another truth, somewhat analogous, which the German historians of the Folk-Wanderings might possiblyhave meant, as distinct from all that they have actually said. There is indeed one respect in which the case of the Crusade doesdiffer very much from modern political cases like prohibitionor the penny post. I do not refer to such incidental peculiaritiesas the fact that Prohibition could only have succeeded throughthe enormous power of modern plutocracy, or that even the convenienceof the postage goes along with an extreme coercion by the police. It is a somewhat deeper difference that I mean; and it may possibly bewhat these critics mean. But the difference is not in the evolutionary, but rather the revolutionary spirit. The First Crusade was not a racial migration; it was something muchmore intellectual and dignified; a riot. In order to understand thisreligious war we must class it, not so much with the wars of historyas with the revolutions of history. As I shall try to show brieflyon a later page, it not only had all the peculiar good and the peculiarevil of things like the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution, but it was a more purely popular revolution than either of them. The truly modern mind will of course regard the contention that itwas popular as tantamount to a confession that it was animal. In these days when papers and speeches are full of words likedemocracy and self-determination, anything really resemblingthe movement of a mass of angry men is regarded as no better thana stampede of bulls or a scurry of rats. The new sociologistscall it the herd instinct, just as the old reactionaries called itthe many-headed beast. But both agree in implying that it is hardlyworth while to count how many head there are of such cattle. In face of such fashionable comparisons it will seem comparativelymild to talk of migration as it occurs among birds or insects. Nevertheless we may venture to state with some confidencethat both the sociologists and the reactionaries are wrong. It does not follow that human beings become less than human because theirideas appeal to more and more of humanity. Nor can we deduce that menare mindless solely from the fact that they are all of one mind. In plain fact the virtues of a mob cannot be found in a herdof bulls or a pack of wolves, any more than the crimes of a mobcan be committed by a flock of sheep or a shoal of herrings. Birds have never been known to besiege and capture an empty cageof an aviary, on a point of principle, merely because it had kept a fewother birds in captivity, as the mob besieged and captured the almostempty Bastille, merely because it was the fortress of a historic tyranny. And rats have never been known to die by thousands merely in orderto visit a particular trap in which a particular rat had perished, as the poor peasants of the First Crusade died in thousands for afar-off sight of the Sepulchre or a fragment of the true cross. In this sense indeed the Crusade was not rationalistic, if the ratis the only rationalist. But it will seem more truly rationalto point out that the inspiration of such a crowd is not in suchinstincts as we share with the animals, but precisely in such ideasas the animals never (with all their virtues) understand. What is peculiar about the First Crusade is that it was in quitea new and abnormal sense a popular movement. I might almost sayit was the only popular movement there ever was in the world. For it was not a thing which the populace followed; it was actuallya thing which the populace led. It was not only essentiallya revolution, but it was the only revolution I know of in whichthe masses began by acting alone, and practically without anysupport from any of the classes. When they had acted, the classescame in; and it is perfectly true, and indeed only natural, that the masses alone failed where the two together succeeded. But it was the uneducated who educated the educated. The case of the Crusade is emphatically not a case in which certainideas were first suggested by a few philosophers, and then preachedby demagogues to the democracy. This was to a great extent trueof the French Revolution; it was probably yet more true of theRussian Revolution; and we need not here pause upon the fine shadeof difference that Rousseau was right and Karl Marx was wrong. In the First Crusade it was the ordinary man who was right or wrong. He came out in a fury at the insult to his own little images orprivate prayers, as if he had come out to fight with his own domesticpoker or private carving-knife. He was not armed with new weaponsof wit and logic served round from the arsenal of an academy. There was any amount of wit and logic in the academies of the Middle Ages;but the typical leader of the Crusade was not Abelard or Aquinasbut Peter the Hermit, who can hardly be called even a popular leader, but rather a popular flag. And it was his army, or ratherhis enormous rabble, that first marched across the world to diefor the deliverance of Jerusalem. Historians say that in that huge host of thousands there were onlynine knights. To any one who knows even a little of medievalwar the fact seems astounding. It is indeed a long explodedfallacy to regard medievalism as identical with feudalism. There were countless democratic institutions, such as the guilds;sometimes as many as twenty guilds in one small town. But it is really true that the military organization of the Middle Ageswas almost entirely feudal; indeed we might rather say that feudalismwas the name of their military organisation. That so vast a militarymass should have attempted to move at all, with only nine of the naturalmilitary leaders, seems to me a prodigy of popular initiative. It is as if a parliament were elected at the next general election, in which only two men could afford to read a daily newspaper. This mob marched against the military discipline of the Moslemsand was massacred; or, might I so mystically express it, martyred. Many of the great kings and knights who followed in their tracksdid not so clearly deserve any haloes for the simplicity and purityof their motives. The canonisation of such a crowd might be impossible, and would certainly be resisted in modern opinion; chiefly because theyindulged their democratic violence on the way by killing various usurers;a course which naturally fills modern society with an anger vergingon alarm. A perversity leads me to weep rather more over the manyslaughtered peasants than over the few slaughtered usurers;but in any case the peasants certainly were not slaughtered in vain. The common conscience of all classes, in a time when all hada common creed, was aroused, and a new army followed of a verydifferent type of skill and training; led by most of the ablestcaptains and by some of the most chivalrous gentlemen of the age. For curiously enough, the host contained more than one culturedgentleman who was as simple a Christian as any peasant, and as recklessly ready to be butchered or tortured for the merename of Christ. It is a tag of the materialists that the truth about historyrubs away the romance of history. It is dear to the modern mindbecause it is depressing; but it does not happen to be true. Nothing emerges more clearly from a study that is truly realistic, than the curious fact that romantic people were really romantic. It is rather the historical novels that will lead a modernman vaguely to expect to find the leader of the new knights, Godfrey de Bouillon, to have been merely a brutal baron. The historical facts are all in favour of his having been muchmore like a knight of the Round Table. In fact he was a farbetter man than most of the knights of the Round Table, in whosecharacters the fabulist, knowing that he was writing a fable, was tactful enough to introduce a larger admixture of vice. Truth isnot only stranger than fiction, but often saintlier than fiction. For truth is real, while fiction is bound to be realistic. Curiously enough Godfrey seems to have been heroic even in thoseadmirable accidents which are generally and perhaps rightly regardedas the trappings of fiction. Thus he was of heroic stature, a handsome red-bearded man of great personal strength and daring;and he was himself the first man over the wall of Jerusalem, like any boy hero in a boy's adventure story. But he was also, the realist will be surprised to hear, a perfectly honest man, and a perfectly genuine practiser of the theoretical magnanimityof knighthood. Everything about him suggests it; from his firstconversion from the imperial to the papal (and popular) cause, to hisgreat refusal of the kinghood of the city he had taken; "I willnot wear a crown of gold where my Master wore a crown of thorns. "He was a just ruler, and the laws he made were full of the plainestpublic spirit. But even if we dismiss all that was writtenof him by Christian chroniclers because they might be his friends(which would be a pathetic and exaggerated compliment to the harmoniousunity of Crusaders and of Christians) he would still remainsufficiently assoiled and crowned with the words of his enemies. For a Saracen chronicler wrote of him, with a fine simplicity, that if all truth and honour had otherwise withered off the earth, there would still remain enough of them so long as Duke Godfrey was alive. Allied with Godfrey were Tancred the Italian, Raymond of Toulousewith the southern French and Robert of Normandy, the adventurousson of the Conqueror, with the Normans and the English. But it would be an error, I think, and one tending to make the wholesubsequent story a thing not so much misunderstood as unintelligible, to suppose that the whole crusading movement had been suddenlyand unnaturally stiffened with the highest chivalric discipline. Unless I am much mistaken, a great mass of that armywas still very much of a mob. It is probable _a priori_, since the great popular movement was still profoundly popular. It is supported by a thousand things in the story of the campaign;the extraordinary emotionalism that made throngs of men weep andwail together, the importance of the demagogue, Peter the Hermit, in spite of his unmilitary character, and the wide differences betweenthe designs of the leaders and the actions of the rank and file. It was a crowd of rude and simple men that cast themselveson the sacred dust at the first sight of the little mountaintown which they had tramped for two thousand miles to see. Tancred saw it first from the slope by the village of Bethlehem, which had opened its gates willingly to his hundred Italian knights;for Bethlehem then as now was an island of Christendom in the seaof Islam. Meanwhile Godfrey came up the road from Jaffa, and crossing the mountain ridge, saw also with his living eyeshis vision of the world's desire. But the poorest men about himprobably felt the same as he; all ranks knelt together in the dust, and the whole story is one wave of numberless and nameless men. It was a mob that had risen like a man for the faith. It was a mob that had truly been tortured like a man for the faith. It was already transfigured by pain as well as passion. Those that know war in those deserts through the summer months, even with modern supplies and appliances and modern maps and calculations, know that it could only be described as a hell full of heroes. What it must have been to those little local serfs and peasants fromthe Northern villages, who had never dreamed in nightmares of suchlandscapes or such a sun, who knew not how men lived at all in sucha furnace and could neither guess the alleviations nor get them, is beyond the imagination of man. They arrived dying with thirst, dropping with weariness, lamenting the loss of the dead that rottedalong their road; they arrived shrivelled to rags or already ravingwith fever and they did what they had come to do. Above all, it is clear that they had the vices as well as the virtuesof a mob. The shocking massacre in which they indulged in the suddenrelaxation of success is quite obviously a massacre by a mob. It is all the more profoundly revolutionary because it must havebeen for the most part a French mob. It was of the same orderas the Massacre of September, and it is but a part of the same truththat the First Crusade was as revolutionary as the French Revolution. It was of the same order as the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, which was also a piece of purely popular fanaticism, directedagainst what was also regarded as an anti-national aristocracy. It is practically self-evident that the Christian commanders wereopposed to it, and tried to stop it. Tancred promised their livesto the Moslems in the mosque, but the mob clearly disregarded him. Raymond of Toulouse himself saved those in the Tower of David, and managed to send them safely with their property to Ascalon. But revolution with all its evil as well as its good was looseand raging in the streets of the Holy City. And in nothing do wesee that spirit of revolution more clearly than in the sightof all those peasants and serfs and vassals, in that one wildmoment in revolt, not only against the conquered lords of Islam, but even against the conquering lords of Christendom. The whole strain of the siege indeed had been one of high and evenhorrible excitement. Those who tell us to-day about the psychologyof the crowd will agree that men who have so suffered and so succeededare not normal; that their brains are in a dreadful balance which mayturn either way. They entered the city at last in a mood in which theymight all have become monks; and instead they all became murderers. A brilliant general, who played a decisive part in our own recentPalestinian campaign, told me with a sort of grim humour that he hardlywondered at the story; for he himself had entered Jerusalem in a sortof fury of disappointment; "We went through such a hell to get there, and now it's spoilt for all of us. " Such is the heavy irony thathangs over our human nature, making it enter the Holy City as if itwere the Heavenly City, and more than any earthly city can be. But the struggle which led to the scaling of Jerusalem in theFirst Crusade was something much wilder and more incalculable thananything that can be conceived in modern war. We can hardly wonderthat the crusading crowd saw the town in front of them as a sortof tower full of demons, and the hills around them as an enchantedand accursed land. For in one very real sense it really was so;for all the elements and expedients were alike unknown qualities. All their enemies' methods were secrets sprung upon them. All their own methods were new things made out of nothing. They wondered alike what would be done on the other side and whatcould be done on their own side; every movement against themwas a stab out of the darkness and every movement they madewas a leap in the dark. First, on the one side, we have Tancredtrying to take the whole fortified city by climbing up a singleslender ladder, as if a man tried to lasso the peak of a mountain. Then we have the flinging from the turrets of a strangeand frightful fiery rain, as if water itself had caught fire. It was afterwards known as the Greek Fire and was probably petroleum;but to those who had never seen (or felt) it before it may well haveseemed the flaming oil of witchcraft. Then Godfrey and the wiserof the warriors set about to build wooden siege-towers and foundthey had next to no wood to build them. There was scarcely anythingin that rocky waste but the dwarf trees of olive; a poetic fantasywoven about that war in after ages described them as hinderedeven in their wood-cutting by the demons of that weird place. And indeed the fancy had an essential truth, for the very natureof the land fought against them; and each of those dwarf trees, hard and hollow and twisted, may well have seemed like a grinning goblin. It is said that they found timbers by accident in a cavern;they tore down the beams from ruined houses; at last they got into touchwith some craftsmen from Genoa who went to work more successfully;skinning the cattle, who had died in heaps, and covering the timbers. They built three high towers on rollers, and men and beasts draggedthem heavily against the high towers of the city. The catapultsof the city answered them, the cataracts of devouring fire came down;the wooden towers swayed and tottered, and two of them suddenly stuckmotionless and useless. And as the darkness fell a great flaremust have told them that the third and last was in flames. All that night Godfrey was toiling to retrieve the disaster. He took down the whole tower from where it stood and raisedit again on the high ground to the north of the city which isnow marked by the pine tree that grows outside Herod's gate. And all the time he toiled, it was said, sinister sorcerers satupon the battlements, working unknown marvels for the undoingof the labour of man. If the great knight had a touch of suchsymbolism on his own side, he might have seen in his own strifewith the solid timber something of the craft that had surroundedthe birth of his creed, and the sacred trade of the carpenter. And indeed the very pattern of all carpentry is cruciform, and thereis something more than an accident in the allegory. The transverseposition of the timber does indeed involve many of those mathematicalthat are analogous to moral truths and almost every structuralshape has the shadow of the mystic rood, as the three dimensionshave a shadow of the Trinity. Here is the true mystery of equality;since the longer beam might lengthen itself to infinity, and neverbe nearer to the symbolic shape without the help of the shorter. Here is that war and wedding between two contrary forces, resisting andsupporting each other; the meeting-place of contraries which we, by a sort of pietistic pun, still call the crux of the question. Here is our angular and defiant answer to the self-devouring circleof Asia. It may be improbable, though it is far from impossible(for the age was philosophical enough) that a man like Godfreythus extended the mystical to the metaphysical; but the writerof a real romance about him would be well within his rights in makinghim see the symbolism of his own tower, a tower rising abovehim through the clouds of night as if taking hold on the heavenor showing its network of beams black against the daybreak;scaling the skies and open to all the winds, a ladder and a labyrinth, repeating till it was lost in the twilight the pattern of the signof the cross. When dawn was come all those starving peasants may well have stoodbefore the high impregnable walls in the broad daylight of despair. Even their nightmares during the night, of unearthly necromancerslooking down at them from the battlements and with signs and spellsparalysing all their potential toils, may well have been a sortof pessimistic consolation, anticipating and accounting for failure. The Holy City had become for them a fortress full of fiends, when Godfreyde Bouillon again set himself sword in hand upon the wooden tower and gavethe order once more to drag it tottering towards the towers on eitherside of the postern gate. So they crawled again across the fossefull of the slain, dragging their huge house of timber behind them, and all the blast and din of war broke again about their heads. A hail of bolts hammered such shields as covered them for a canopy, stones and rocks fell on them and crushed them like flies inthe mire, and from the engines of the Greek Fire all the torrentsof their torment came down on them like red rivers of hell. For indeed the souls of those peasants must have been sickenedwith something of the topsy-turvydom felt by too many peasants of ourown time under the frightful flying batteries of scientific war;a blasphemy of inverted battle in which hell itself has occupied heaven. Something of the vapours vomited by such cruel chemistry mayhave mingled with the dust of battle, and darkened such lightas showed where shattering rocks were rending a roof of shields, to men bowed and blinded as they are by such labour of draggingand such a hailstorm of death. They may have heard throughall the racket of nameless noises the high minaret criesof Moslem triumph rising shriller like a wind in shrill pipes, and known little else of what was happening above or beyond them. It was most likely that they laboured and strove in that lower darkness, not knowing that high over their heads, and up above the cloudof battle, the tower of timber and the tower of stone had touchedand met in mid-heaven; and great Godfrey, alone and alive, had leapt upon the wall of Jerusalem. CHAPTER XII THE FALL OF CHIVALRY On the back of this book is the name of the New Jerusalem and onthe first page of it a phrase about the necessity of going backto the old even to find the new, as a man retraces his stepsto a sign-post. The common sense of that process is indeed mostmysteriously misunderstood. Any suggestion that progress has atany time taken the wrong turning is always answered by the argumentthat men idealise the past, and make a myth of the Age of Gold. If my progressive guide has led me into a morass or a man-trapby turning to the left by the red pillar-box, instead of tothe right by the blue palings of the inn called the Rising Sun, my progressive guide always proceeds to soothe me by talkingabout the myth of an Age of Gold. He says I am idealisingthe right turning. He says the blue palings are not so blueas they are painted. He says they are only blue with distance. He assures me there are spots on the sun, even on the rising sun. Sometimes he tells me I am wrong in my fixed conviction that the bluewas of solid sapphires, or the sun of solid gold. In short he assuresme I am wrong in supposing that the right turning was right in everypossible respect; as if I had ever supposed anything of the sort. I want to go back to that particular place, not because it wasall my fancy paints it, or because it was the best place my fancycan paint; but because it was a many thousand times better placethan the man-trap in which he and his like have landed me. But above all I want to go back to it, not because I know it wasthe right place but because I think it was the right turning. And the right turning might possibly have led me to the right place;whereas the progressive guide has quite certainly led me tothe wrong one. Now it is quite true that there is less general human testimonyto the notion of a New Jerusalem in the future than to the notionof a Golden Age in the past. But neither of those ideas, whether orno they are illusions, are any answer to the question of a plainman in the plain position of this parable; a man who has to findsome guidance in the past if he is to get any good in the future. What he positively knows, in any case, is the complete collapseof the present. Now that is the exact truth about the thing so oftenrebuked as a romantic and unreal return of modern men to medieval things. They suppose they have taken the wrong turning, because they knowthey are in the wrong place. To know that, it is necessary not toidealise the medieval world, but merely to realise the modern world. It is not so much that they suppose the medieval world was abovethe average as that they feel sure the modern world is below the average. They do not start either with the idea that man is meant to livein a New Jerusalem of pearl and sapphire in the future, or that a manwas meant to live in a picturesque and richly-painted tavern of the past;but with a strong inward and personal persuasion that a man wasnot meant to live in a man-trap. For there is and will be more and more a turn of total changein all our talk and writing about history. Everything in the pastwas praised if it had led up to the present, and blamed if itwould have led up to anything else. In short everybody has beensearching the past for the secret of our success. Very sooneverybody may be searching the past for the secret of our failure. They may be talking in such terms as they use after a motor smashor a bankruptcy; where was the blunder? They may be writing such booksas generals write after a military defeat; whose was the fault?The failure will be assumed even in being explained. For industrialism is no longer a vulgar success. On the contrary, it is now too tragic even to be vulgar. Under the cloud of doom the modern city has taken on somethingof the dignity of Babel or Babylon. Whether we call it the nemesisof Capitalism or the nightmare of Bolshevism makes no difference;the rich grumble as much as the poor; every one is discontented, and nonemore than those who are chiefly discontented with the discontent. About that discord we are in perfect harmony; about that disease weall think alike, whatever we think of the diagnosis or the cure. By whatever process in the past we might have come to theright place, practical facts in the present and future willprove more and more that we have come to the wrong place. And for many a premonition will grow more and more of a probability;that we may or may not await another century or another worldto see the New Jerusalem rebuilt and shining on our fields;but in the flesh we shall see Babylon fall. But there is another way in which that metaphor of the forked roadwill make the position plain. Medieval society was not the right place;it was only the right turning. It was only the right road;or perhaps only the beginning of the right road. The medieval agewas very far from being the age in which everything went right. It would be nearer the truth I mean to call it the age in whicheverything went wrong. It was the moment when things might havedeveloped well, and did develop badly. Or rather, to be yetmore exact, it was the moment when they were developing well, and yet they were driven to develop badly. This was the historyof all the medieval states and of none more than medieval Jerusalem;indeed there were signs of some serious idea of making it the modelmedieval state. Of this notion of Jerusalem as the New Jerusalem, of the Utopian aspect of the adventure of the Latin Kingdom, something may be said in a moment. But meanwhile there was a moreimportant part played by Jerusalem, I think, in all that greatprogress and reaction which has left us the problem of modern Europe. And the suggestion of it is bound up with the former suggestion, about the difference between the goal and the right road thatmight have led to it. It is bound up with that quality of thecivilisation in question, that it was potential rather than perfect;and there is no need to idealise it in order to regret it. This peculiar part played by Jerusalem I mention merely as a suggestion;I might almost say a suspicion. Anyhow, it is something of a guess;but I for one have found it a guide. Medievalism died, but it died young. It was at once energeticand incomplete when it died, or very shortly before it died. This is not a matter of sympathy or antipathy, but of appreciationof an interesting historic comparison with other historic cases. When the Roman Empire finally failed we cannot of course saythat it had done all it was meant to do, for that is dogmatism. We cannot even say it had done all that it might have done, for that is guesswork. But we can say that it had donecertain definite things and was conscious of having done them;that it had long and even literally rested on its laurels. But suppose that Rome had fallen when she had only half defeated Carthage, or when she had only half conquered Gaul, or even when the city wasChristian but most of the provinces still heathen. Then we shouldhave said, not merely that Rome had not done what she might have done, but that she had not done what she was actually doing. And that isvery much the truth in the matter of the medieval civilisation. It was not merely that the medievals left undone what they mighthave done, but they left undone what they were doing. This potentialpromise is proved not only in their successes but in their failures. It is shown, for instance, in the very defects of their art. All the crafts of which Gothic architecture formed the frame-workwere developed, not only less than they should have been, but less than they would have been. There is no sort of reasonwhy their sculpture should not have become as perfect astheir architecture; there is no sort of reason why their senseof form should not have been as finished as their sense of colour. A statue like the St. George of Donatello would have stoodmore appropriately under a Gothic than under a Classic arch. The niches were already made for the statues. The same thing is true, of course, not only about the state of the crafts but about the statusof the craftsman. The best proof that the system of the guildshad an undeveloped good in it is that the most advanced modern menare now going back five hundred years to get the good out of it. The best proof that a rich house was brought to ruin is that ourvery pioneers are now digging in the ruins to find the riches. That the new guildsmen add a great deal that never belongedto the old guildsmen is not only a truth, but is part ofthe truth I maintain here. The new guildsmen add what the oldguildsmen would have added if they had not died young. When we renew a frustrated thing we do not renew the frustration. But if there are some things in the new that were not in the old, there were certainly some things in the old that are not yetvisible in the new; such as individual humour in the handiwork. The point here, however, is not merely that the worker worked wellbut that he was working better; not merely that his mind was freebut that it was growing freer. All this popular power and humour wasincreasing everywhere, when something touched it and it withered away. The frost had struck it in the spring. Some people complain that the working man of our own day doesnot show an individual interest in his work. But it will be wellto realise that they would be much more annoyed with him if he did. The medieval workman took so individual an interest in his workthat he would call up devils entirely on his own account, carving them in corners according to his own taste and fancy. He would even reproduce the priests who were his patrons and make themas ugly as devils; carving anti-clerical caricatures on the very seatsand stalls of the clerics. If a modern householder, on entering hisown bathroom, found that the plumber had twisted the taps into the imagesof two horned and grinning fiends, he would be faintly surprised. If the householder, on returning at evening to his house, found the door-knocker distorted into a repulsive likenessof himself, his surprise might even be tinged with disapproval. It may be just as well that builders and bricklayers do notgratuitously attach gargoyles to our smaller residential villas. But well or ill, it is certainly true that this feature of aflexible popular fancy has never reappeared in any school ofarchitecture or any state of society since the medieval decline. The great classical buildings of the Renascence were swept as bareof it as any villa in Balham. But those who best appreciate thisloss to popular art will be the first to agree that at its best itretained a touch of the barbaric as well as the popular. While we canadmire these matters of the grotesque, we can admit that their workwas sometimes unintentionally as well as intentionally grotesque. Some of the carving did remain so rude that the angels were almostas ugly as the devils. But this is the very point upon which Iwould here insist; the mystery of why men who were so obviouslyonly beginning should have so suddenly stopped. Men with medieval sympathies are sometimes accused, absurdly enough, of trying to prove that the medieval period was perfect. In truth the whole case for it is that it was imperfect. It was imperfect as an unripe fruit or a growing child is imperfect. Indeed it was imperfect in that very particular fashion which mostmodern thinkers generally praise, more than they ever praise maturity. It was something now much more popular than an age of perfection;it was an age of progress. It was perhaps the one real age of progressin all history. Men have seldom moved with such rapidity and suchunity from barbarism to civilisation as they did from the end ofthe Dark Ages to the times of the universities and the parliaments, the cathedrals and the guilds. Up to a certain point we may saythat everything, at whatever stage of improvement, was fullof the promise of improvement. Then something began to go wrong, almost equally rapidly, and the glory of this great cultureis not so much in what it did as in what it might have done. It recalls one of these typical medieval speculations, full ofthe very fantasy of free will, in which the schoolmen tried to fancythe fate of every herb or animal if Adam had not eaten the apple. It remains, in a cant historical phrase, one of the greatmight-have-beens of history. I have said that it died young; but perhaps it would be truer to say thatit suddenly grew old. Like Godfrey and many of its great champions inJerusalem, it was overtaken in the prime of life by a mysterious malady. The more a man reads of history the less easy he will find it to explainthat secret and rapid decay of medieval civilisation from within. Only a few generations separated the world that worshipped St. Francisfrom the world that burned Joan of Arc. One would think theremight be no more than a date and a number between the white mysteryof Louis the Ninth and the black mystery of Louis the Eleventh. This is the very real historical mystery; the more realistic is our studyof medieval things, the more puzzled we shall be about the peculiarcreeping paralysis which affected things so virile and so full of hope. There was a growth of moral morbidity as well as social inefficiency, especially in the governing classes; for even to the end the guildsmenand the peasants remained much more vigorous. How it ended we all know;personally I should say that they got the Reformation and deserved it. But it matters nothing to the truth here whether the Reformationwas a just revolt and revenge or an unjust culmination and conquest. It is common ground to Catholics and Protestants of intelligencethat evils preceded and produced the schism; and that evilswere produced by it and have pursued it down to our own day. We know it if only in the one example, that the schism begatthe Thirty Years' War, and the Thirty Years' War begat theSeven Years' War, and the Seven Years' War begat the Great War, which has passed like a pestilence through our own homes. After the schism Prussia could relapse into heathenry and erectan ethical system external to the whole culture of Christendom. But it can still be reasonably asked what begat the schism; and it canstill be reasonably answered; something that went wrong with medievalism. But what was it that went wrong? When I looked for the last time on the towers of Zion I had afixed fancy that I knew what it was. It is a thing that cannotbe proved or disproved; it must sound merely an ignorant guess. But I believe myself that it died of disappointment. I believe the whole medieval society failed, because the heartwent out of it with the loss of Jerusalem. Let it be observedthat I do not say the loss of the war, or even the Crusade. For the war against Islam was not lost. The Moslem was overthrownin the real battle-field, which was Spain; he was menaced in Africa;his imperial power was already stricken and beginning slowly to decline. I do not mean the political calculations about a Mediterranean war. I do not even mean the Papal conceptions about the Holy War. I mean the purely popular picture of the Holy City. For while the aristocratic thing was a view, the vulgar thing wasa vision; something with which all stories stop, something wherethe rainbow ends, something over the hills and far away. In Spain they had been victorious; but their castle was not evena castle in Spain. It was a castle east of the sun and westof the moon, and the fairy prince could find it no more. Indeed that idle image out of the nursery books fits it very exactly. For its mystery was and is in standing in the middle, or as theysaid in the very centre of the earth. It is east of the sunof Europe, which fills the world with a daylight of sanity, and ripens real and growing things. It is west of the moon of Asia, mysterious and archaic with its cold volcanoes, silver mirrorfor poets and a most fatal magnet for lunatics. Anyhow the fall of Jerusalem, and in that sense the failure ofthe Crusades, had a widespread effect, as I should myself suggest, for the reason I have myself suggested. Because it had been apopular movement, it was a popular disappointment; and because it hadbeen a popular movement, its ideal was an image; a particular picturein the imagination. For poor men are almost always particularists;and nobody has ever seen such a thing as a mob of pantheists. I have seen in some of that lost literature of the old guilds, which is now everywhere coming to light, a list of the stageproperties required for some village play, one of those popularplays acted by the medieval trades unions, for which the guildof the shipwrights would build Noah's Ark or the guild of the barbersprovide golden wigs for the haloes of the Twelve Apostles. The list of those crude pieces of stage furniture had a curious colourof poetry about it, like the impromptu apparatus of a nursery charade;a cloud, an idol with a club, and notably among the rest, the wallsand towers of Jerusalem. I can imagine them patiently painted and gildedas a special feature, like the two tubs of Mr. Vincent Crummles. But I can also imagine that towards the end of the Middle Ages, the master of the revels might begin to look at those towersof wood and pasteboard with a sort of pain, and perhaps put themaway in a corner, as a child will tire of a toy especially if itis associated with a disappointment or a dismal misunderstanding. There is noticeable in some of the later popular poems adisposition to sulk about the Crusades. But though the popularfeeling had been largely poetical, the same thing did in itsdegree occur in the political realm that was purely practical. The Moslem had been checked, but he had not been checked enough. The whole story of what was called the Eastern Question, and three-quarters of the wars of the modern world, were dueto the fact that he was not checked enough. The only thing to do with unconquerable things is to conquer them. That alone will cure them of invincibility; or what is worse, their ownvision of invincibility. That was the conviction of those of us whowould not accept what we considered a premature peace with Prussia. That is why we would not listen either to the Tory Pro-Germanismof Lord Lansdowne or the Socialist Pro-Germanism of Mr. Macdonald. If a lunatic believes in his luck so fixedly as to feel sure becannot be caught, he will not only believe in it still, but believein it more and more, until the actual instant when he is caught. The longer the chase, the more certain he will be of escaping;the more narrow the escapes, the more certain will be the escape. And indeed if he does escape it will seem a miracle, and almosta divine intervention, not only to the pursued but to the pursuers. The evil thing will chiefly appear unconquerable to those who tryto conquer it. It will seem after all to have a secret of success;and those who failed against it will hide in their heartsa secret of failure. It was that secret of failure, I fancy, that slowly withered from within the high hopes of the Middle Ages. Christianity and chivalry had measured their force against Mahound, and Mahound had not fallen; the shadow of his horned helmet, the crest of the Crescent, still lay across their sunnier lands;the Horns of Hattin. The streams of life that flowed to guildsand schools and orders of knighthood and brotherhoods of friarswere strangely changed and chilled. So, if the peace had leftPrussianism secure even in Prussia, I believe that all the liberalideals of the Latins, and all the liberties of the English, and the whole theory of a democratic experiment in America, would have begun to die of a deep and even subconscious despair. A vote, a jury, a newspaper, would not be as they are, things of which it is hard to make the right use, or any use;they would be things of which nobody would even try to make any use. A vote would actually look like a vassal's cry of "haro, "a jury would look like a joust; many would no more read headlinesthan blazon heraldic coats. For these medieval things look deadand dusty because of a defeat, which was none the less a defeatbecause it was more than half a victory. A curious cloud of confusion rests on the details of that defeat. The Christian captains who acted in it were certainly men on a differentmoral level from the good Duke Godfrey; their characters were bycomparison mixed and even mysterious. Perhaps the two determiningpersonalities were Raymond of Tripoli, a skilful soldier whom hisenemies seemed to have accused of being much too skilful a diplomatist;and Renaud of Chatillon, a violent adventurer whom his enemiesseem to have accused of being little better than a bandit. And it is the irony of the incident that Raymond got into troublefor making a dubious peace with the Saracens, while Renaud gotinto trouble by making an equally dubious war on the Saracens. Renaud exacted from Moslem travellers on a certain road whathe regarded as a sort of feudal toll or tax, and they regardedas a brigand ransom; and when they did not pay he attacked them. This was regarded as a breach of the truce; but probably it wouldhave been easier to regard Renaud as waging the war of a robber, if many had not regarded Raymond as having made the truce of a traitor. Probably Raymond was not a traitor, since the military advice he gaveup to the very instant of catastrophe was entirely loyal and sound, and worthy of so wise a veteran. And very likely Renaud was notmerely a robber, especially in his own eyes; and there seemsto be a much better case for him than many modern writers allow. But the very fact of such charges being bandied among the factionsshows a certain fall from the first days under the headship ofthe house of Bouillon. No slanderer ever suggested that Godfreywas a traitor; no enemy ever asserted that Godfrey was only a thief. It is fairly clear that there had been a degeneration; but most peoplehardly realise sufficiently that there had been a very great thingfrom which to degenerate. The first Crusades had really had some notion of Jerusalem as aNew Jerusalem. I mean they had really had a vision of the place beingnot only a promised land but a Utopia or even an Earthly Paradise. The outstanding fact and feature which is seldom seized is this:that the social experiment in Palestine was rather in advance ofthe social experiments in the rest of Christendom. Having to beginat the beginning, they really began with what they considered the bestideas of their time; like any group of Socialists founding an idealCommonwealth in a modern colony. A specialist on this period, Colonel Conder of the Palestine Exploration, has written that the coreof the Code was founded on the recommendations of Godfrey himselfin his "Letters of the Sepulchre"; and he observes concerning it:"The basis of these laws was found in Justinian's code, and theypresented features as yet quite unknown in Europe, especially in theircareful provision of justice for the bourgeois and the peasant, and for the trading communes whose fleets were so necessary to the king. Not only were free men judged by juries of their equals, but the sameapplied to those who were technically serfs and actually aborigines. "The original arrangements of the Native Court seem to me singularlyliberal, even by modern standards of the treatment of natives. That in many such medieval codes citizens were still called serfs isno more final than the fact that in many modern capitalist newspapersserfs are still called citizens. The whole point about the villeinwas that he was a tenant at least as permanent as a peasant. He "went with the land"; and there are a good many hopeless trampsstarving in streets, or sleeping in ditches, who might not be sorryif they could go with a little land. It would not be very muchworse than homelessness and hunger to go with a good kitchen gardenof which you could always eat most of the beans and turnips;or to go with a good cornfield of which you could take a considerableproportion of the corn. There has been many a modern man would have beennone the worse for "going" about burdened with such a green island, or dragging the chains of such a tangle of green living things. As a fact, of course, this system throughout Christendom was alreadyevolving rapidly into a pure peasant proprietorship; and it will belong before industrialism evolves by itself into anything so equalor so free. Above all, there appears notably that universal markof the medieval movement; the voluntary liberation of slaves. But we may willingly allow that something of the earlier successof all this was due to the personal qualities of the first knightsfresh from the West; and especially to the personal justiceand moderation of Godfrey and some of his immediate kindred. Godfrey died young; his successors had mostly short periods of power, largely through the prevalence of malaria and the absence of medicine. Royal marriages with the more oriental tradition of the Armenianprinces brought in new elements of luxury and cynicism;and by the time of the disputed truce of Raymond of Tripoli, the crown had descended to a man named Guy of Lusignan who seemsto have been regarded as a somewhat unsatisfactory character. He had quarrelled with Raymond, who was ruler of Galilee, and acurious and rather incomprehensible concession made by the latter, that the Saracens should ride in arms but in peace round his land, led to alleged Moslem insults to Nazareth, and the outbreak of the furiousTemplar, Gerard of Bideford, of which mention has been made already. But the most serious threat to them and their New Jerusalemwas the emergence among the Moslems of a man of military genius, and the fact that all that land lay now under the shadow of the ambitionand ardour of Saladin. With the breach of the truce, or even the tale of it, the commondanger of Christians was apparent; and Raymond of Tripoli repairedto the royal headquarters to consult with his late enemy the king;but he seems to have been almost openly treated as a traitor. Gerard of Bideford, the fanatic who was Grand Master of the Templars, forced the king's hand against the advice of the wiser soldier, who had pointed out the peril of perishing of thirst in the waterlesswastes between them and the enemy. Into those wastes they advanced, and they were already weary and unfit for warfare by the timethey came in sight of the strange hills that will be rememberedfor ever under the name of the Horns of Hattin. On those hills, a few hours later, the last knights of an army of which half hadfallen gathered in a final defiance and despair round the relicthey carried in their midst, a fragment of the True Cross. In that hour fell, as I have fancied, more hopes than they themselvescould number, and the glory departed from the Middle Ages. There fell with them all that New Jerusalem which was the symbolof a new world, all those great and growing promises and possibilitiesof Christendom of which this vision was the centre, all that "justicefor the bourgeois and the peasant, and for the trading communes, "all the guilds that gained their charters by fighting for the Cross, all the hopes of a happier transformation of the Roman Law weddedto charity and to chivalry. There was the first slip and the greatswerving of our fate; and in that wilderness we lost all the thingswe should have loved, and shall need so long a labour to find again. Raymond of Tripoli had hewn his way through the enemy and riddenaway to Tyre. The king, with a few of the remaining nobles, including Renaud de Chatillon, were brought before Saladin in his tent. There occurred a scene strangely typical of the mingled strainsin the creed or the culture that triumphed on that day;the stately Eastern courtesy and hospitality; the wild Easternhatred and self-will. Saladin welcomed the king and gracefullygave him a cup of sherbet, which he passed to Renaud. "It is thou and not I who hast given him to drink, " said the Saracen, preserving the precise letter of the punctilio of hospitality. Then he suddenly flung himself raving and reviling upon Renaudde Chatillon, and killed the prisoner with his own hands. Outside, two hundred Hospitallers and Templars were beheaded onthe field of battle; by one account I have read because Saladindisliked them, and by another because they were Christian priests. There is a strong bias against the Christians and in favour ofthe Moslems and the Jews in most of the Victorian historical works, especially historical novels. And most people of modern, or rather of very recent times got all their notions of historyfrom dipping into historical novels. In those romances the Jew isalways the oppressed where in reality he was often the oppressor. In those romances the Arab is always credited with oriental dignityand courtesy and never with oriental crookedness and cruelty. The same injustice is introduced into history, which by meansof selection and omission can be made as fictitious as any fiction. Twenty historians mention the way in which the maddened Christianmob murdered the Moslems after the capture of Jerusalem, for one whomentions that the Moslem commander commanded in cold blood the murderof some two hundred of his most famous and valiant enemies afterthe victory of Hattin. The former cannot be shown to have been the actof Tancred, while the latter was quite certainly the act of Saladin. Yet Tancred is described as at best a doubtful character, while Saladin is represented as a Bayard without fear or blame. Both of them doubtless were ordinary faulty fighting men, but theyare not judged by an equal balance. It may seem a paradox that thereshould be this prejudice in Western history in favour of Eastern heroes. But the cause is clear enough; it is the remains of the revolt among manyEuropeans against their own old religious organisation, which naturallymade them hunt through all ages for its crimes and its victims. It was natural that Voltaire should sympathise more with a Brahminhe had never seen than with a Jesuit with whom he was engaged in aviolent controversy; and should similarly feel more dislike of a Catholicwho was his enemy than of a Moslem who was the enemy of his enemy. In this atmosphere of natural and even pardonable prejudice arosethe habit of contrasting the intolerance of the Crusaders withthe toleration shown by the Moslems. Now as there are two sidesto everything, it would undoubtedly be quite possible to tellthe tale of the Crusades, correctly enough in detail, and in sucha way as entirely to justify the Moslems and condemn the Crusaders. But any such real record of the Moslem case would have verylittle to do with any questions of tolerance or intolerance, or any modern ideas about religious liberty and equality. As the modern world does not know what it means itself by religiousliberty and equality, as the moderns have not thought out any logicaltheory of toleration at all (for their vague generalisations canalways be upset by twenty tests from Thugs to Christian Science)it would obviously be unreasonable to expect the modernsto understand the much clearer philosophy of the Moslems. But some rough suggestion of what was really involved may be foundconvenient in this case. Islam was not originally a movement directed against Christianity at all. It did not face westwards, so to speak; it faced eastwards towardsthe idolatries of Asia. But Mahomet believed that these idolscould be fought more successfully with a simpler kind of creed;one might almost say with a simpler kind of Christianity. For he included many things which we in the West commonly suppose notonly to be peculiar to Christianity but to be peculiar to Catholicism. Many things have been rejected by Protestantism that are notrejected by Mahometanism. Thus the Moslems believe in Purgatory, and they give at least a sort of dignity to the Mother of Christ. About such things as these they have little of the bitterness that ranklesin the Jews and is said sometimes to become hideously vitriolic. While Iwas in Palestine a distinguished Moslem said to a Christian resident:"We also, as well as you, honour the Mother of Christ. Never do we speak of her but we call her the Lady Miriam. I dare not tell you what the Jews call her. " The real mistake of the Moslems is something much more modern in itsapplication than any particular or passing persecution of Christiansas such. It lay in the very fact that they did think they had asimpler and saner sort of Christianity, as do many modern Christians. They thought it could be made universal merely by beingmade uninteresting. Now a man preaching what he thinks is a platitudeis far more intolerant than a man preaching what he admits is a paradox. It was exactly because it seemed self-evident, to Moslems asto Bolshevists, that their simple creed was suited to everybody, that they wished in that particular sweeping fashion to impose iton everybody. It was because Islam was broad that Moslems were narrow. And because it was not a hard religion it was a heavy rule. Because it was without a self-correcting complexity, it allowedof those simple and masculine but mostly rather dangerousappetites that show themselves in a chieftain or a lord. As it had the simplest sort of religion, monotheism, so it hadthe simplest sort of government, monarchy. There was exactlythe same direct spirit in its despotism as in its deism. The Code, the Common Law, the give and take of chartersand chivalric vows, did not grow in that golden desert. The great sun was in the sky and the great Saladin was in his tent, and he must be obeyed unless he were assassinated. Those whocomplain of our creeds as elaborate often forget that the elaborateWestern creeds have produced the elaborate Western constitutions;and that they are elaborate because they are emancipated. And the real moral of the relations of the two great religions issomething much more subtle and sincere than any mere atrocity talesagainst Turks. It is the same as the moral of the Christian refusalof a Pagan Pantheon in which Christ should rank with Ammon and Apollo. Twice the Christian Church refused what seemed like a handsomeoffer of a large latitudinarian sort; once to include Christ as agod and once to include him as a prophet; once by the admissionof all idols and once by the abandonment of all idols. Twice the Church took the risk and twice the Church survived aloneand succeeded alone, filling the world with her own children;and leaving her rivals in a desert, where the idols were deadand the iconoclasts were dying. But all this history has been hidden by a prejudice moregeneral than the particular case of Saracens and Crusaders. The modern, or rather the Victorian prejudice against Crusadersis positive and not relative; and it would still desire tocondemn Tancred if it could not acquit Saladin. Indeed it isa prejudice not so much against Crusaders as against Christians. It will not give to these heroes of religious war the fair measureit gives to the heroes of ordinary patriotic and imperial war. There never was a nobler hero than Nelson, or one more nationalor more normal. Yet Nelson quite certainly did do what Tancredalmost certainly did not do; break his own word by giving up his ownbrave enemies to execution. If the cause of Nelson in other timescomes to be treated as the creed of Tancred has often in recenttimes been treated, this incident alone will be held sufficientto prove not only that Nelson was a liar and a scoundrel, but thathe did not love England at all, did not love Lady Hamilton at all, that he sailed in English ships only to pocket the prize moneyof French ships, and would as willingly have sailed in French shipsfor the prize money of English ships. That is the sort of dull dustof gold that has been shaken like the drifting dust of the desertover the swords and the relics, the crosses and the claspedhands of the men who marched to Jerusalem or died at Hattin. In these medieval pilgrims every inconsistency is a hypocrisy; while inthe more modern patriots even an infamy is only an inconsistency. I have rounded off the story here with the ruin at Hattin becausethe whole reaction against the pilgrimage had its origin there;and because it was this at least that finally lost Jerusalem. Elsewhere in Palestine, to say nothing of Africa and Spain, splendid counter-strokes were still being delivered from the West, not the least being the splendid rescue by Richard of England. But I still think that with the mere name of that tiny town uponthe hills the note of the whole human revolution had been struck, was changed and was silent. All the other names were only the namesof Eastern towns; but that was nearer to a man than his neighbours;a village inside his village, a house inside his house. There is a hill above Bethlehem of a strange shape, with a flat topwhich makes it look oddly like an island, habitable though uninhabited, when all Moab heaves about it and beyond it as with the curvesand colours of a sea. Its stability suggests in some strangefashion what may often be felt in these lands with the longestrecord of culture; that there may be not only a civilisationbut even a chivalry older than history. Perhaps the table-landwith its round top has a romantic reminiscence of a round table. Perhaps it is only a fantastic effect of evening, for it is feltmost when the low skies are swimming with the colours of sunset, and in the shadows the shattered rocks about its base take onthe shapes of titanic paladins fighting and falling around it. I only know that the mere shape of the hill and vista of the landscapesuggested such visions and it was only afterwards that I heardthe local legend, which says it is here that some of the Christianknights made their last stand after they lost Jerusalem and whichnames this height The Mountain of the Latins. They fell, and the ages rolled on them the rocks of scorn;they were buried in jests and buffooneries. As the Renascenceexpanded into the rationalism of recent centuries, nothing seemedso ridiculous as to butcher and bleed in a distant desert not onlyfor a tomb, but an empty tomb. The last legend of them witheredunder the wit of Cervantes, though he himself had fought in the lastCrusade at Lepanto. They were kicked about like dead donkeysby the cool vivacity of Voltaire; who went off, very symbolically, to dance attendance on the new drill-sergeant of the Prussians. They were dissected like strange beasts by the serene disgustof Gibbon, more serene than the similar horror with whichhe regarded the similar violence of the French Revolution. By our own time even the flippancy has become a platitude. They have long been the butt of every penny-a-liner who can talk of ahelmet as a tin pot, of every caricaturist on a comic paper who can drawa fat man falling off a bucking horse; of every pushing professionalpolitician who can talk about the superstitions of the Middle Ages. Great men and small have agreed to contemn them; they were renouncedby their children and refuted by their biographers; they were exposed, they were exploded, they were ridiculed and they were right. They were proved wrong, and they were right. They were judgedfinally and forgotten, and they were right. Centuries aftertheir fall the full experience and development of politicaldiscovery has shown beyond question that they were right. For there is a very simple test of the truth; that the verything which was dismissed, as a dream of the ages of faith, we have been forced to turn into a fact in the ages of fact. It is now more certain than it ever was before that Europe mustrescue some lordship, or overlordship, of these old Roman provinces. Whether it is wise for England alone to claim Palestine, whether itwould be better if the Entente could do so, I think a serious question. But in some form they are reverting for the Roman Empire. Every opportunity has been given for any other empire that couldbe its equal, and especially for the great dream of a missionfor Imperial Islam. If ever a human being had a run for his money, it was the Sultan of the Moslems riding on his Arab steed. His empire expanded over and beyond the great Greek empire of Byzantium;a last charge of the chivalry of Poland barely stopped it at the verygates of Vienna. He was free to unfold everything that was in him, and he unfolded the death that was in him. He reigned and he couldnot rule; he was successful and he did not succeed. His baffledand retreating enemies left him standing, and he could not stand. He fell finally with that other half-heathen power in the North, with which he had made an alliance against the remains of Romanand Byzantine culture. He fell because barbarism cannot stand;because even when it succeeds it rather falls on its foes andcrushes them. And after all these things, after all these ages, with a wearier philosophy, with a heavier heart, we have been forcedto do again the very thing that the Crusaders were derided for doing. What Western men failed to do for the faith, other Western menhave been forced to do even without the faith. The sons of Tancredare again in Tripoli. The heirs of Raymond are again in Syria. And men from the Midlands or the Northumbrian towns went againthrough a furnace of thirst and fever and furious fighting, to gain the same water-courses and invest the same cities as of old. They trod the hills of Galilee and the Horns of Hattin threw no shadowon their souls; they crossed dark and disastrous fields whose famehad been hidden from them, and avenged the fathers they had forgotten. And the most cynical of modern diplomatists, making their settlementby the most sceptical of modern philosophies, can find no practicalor even temporary solution for this sacred land, except to bring itagain under the crown of Coeur de Lion and the cross of St. George. There came in through the crooked entry beside the great gapin the wall a tall soldier, dismounting and walking and wearingonly the dust-hued habit of modern war. There went no trumpetbefore him, neither did he enter by the Golden Gate; but the silenceof the deserts was full of a phantom acclamation, as when from faraway a wind brings in a whisper the cheering of many thousand men. For in that hour a long-lost cry found fulfilment, and somethingcounted irrational returned in the reason of things. And at last even the wise understood, and at last even the learnedwere enlightened on a need truly and indeed international, which a mobin a darker age had known by the light of nature; something thatcould be denied and delayed and evaded, but not escaped for ever. _Id Deus vult_. CHAPTER XIII THE PROBLEM OF ZIONISM There is an attitude for which my friends and I were for a long periodrebuked and even reviled; and of which at the present period we areless likely than ever to repent. It was always called Anti-Semitism;but it was always much more true to call it Zionism. At any rateit was much nearer to the nature of the thing to call it Zionism, whether or no it can find its geographical concentration in Zion. The substance of this heresy was exceedingly simple. It consistedentirely in saying that Jews are Jews; and as a logical consequencethat they are not Russians or Roumanians or Italians or Frenchmenor Englishmen. During the war the newspapers commonly referred to themas Russians; but the ritual wore so singularly thin that I rememberone newspaper paragraph saying that the Russians in the East Endcomplained of the food regulations, because their religion forbadethem to eat pork. My own brief contact with the Greek priestsof the Orthodox Church in Jerusalem did not permit me to discoverany trace of this detail of their discipline; and even the Russianpilgrims were said to be equally negligent in the matter. The point for the moment, however, is that if I was violently opposedto anything, it was not to Jews, but to that sort of remark about Jews;or rather to the silly and craven fear of making it a remark about Jews. But my friends and I had in some general sense a policy in the matter;and it was in substance the desire to give Jews the dignityand status of a separate nation. We desired that in some fashion, and so far as possible, Jews should be represented by Jews, should livein a society of Jews, should be judged by Jews and ruled by Jews. I am an Anti-Semite if that is Anti-Semitism. It would seem morerational to call it Semitism. Of this attitude, I repeat, I am now less likely than ever to repent. I have lived to see the thing that was dismissed as a fad discussedeverywhere as a fact; and one of the most menacing facts of the age. I have lived to see people who accused me of Anti-Semitismbecome far more Anti-Semitic than I am or ever was. I have heard people talking with real injustice about the Jews, who once seemed to think it an injustice to talk about themat all. But, above all, I have seen with my own eyes wild mobsmarching through a great city, raving not only against Jews, but against the English for identifying themselves with the Jews. I have seen the whole prestige of England brought into peril, merely by the trick of talking about two nations as if they were one. I have seen an Englishman arriving in Jerusalem with somebody he hadbeen taught to regard as his fellow countryman and political colleague, and received as if he had come arm-in-arm with a flaming dragon. So do our frosty fictions fare when they come under that burning sun. Twice in my life, and twice lately, I have seen a piece of Englishpedantry bring us within an inch of an enormous English peril. The first was when all the Victorian historians and philosophershad told us that our German cousin was a cousin germanand even germane; something naturally near and sympathetic. That also was an identification; that also was an assimilation;that also was a union of hearts. For the second time in a fewshort years, English politicians and journalists have discoveredthe dreadful revenge of reality. To pretend that something is what itis not is business that can easily be fashionable and sometimes popular. But the thing we have agreed to regard as what it is not will alwaysabruptly punish and pulverise us, merely by being what it is. For years we were told that the Germans were a sort of Englishmanbecause they were Teutons; but it was all the worse for us when wefound out what Teutons really were. For years we were told that Jewswere a sort of Englishman because they were British subjects. It is all the worse for us now we have to regard them, not subjectively as subjects, but objectively as objects;as objects of a fierce hatred among the Moslems and the Greeks. We are in the absurd position of introducing to these peoplea new friend whom they instantly recognise as an old enemy. It is an absurd position because it is a false position; but itis merely the penalty of falsehood. Whether this Eastern anger is reasonable or not may be discussedin a moment; but what is utterly unreasonable is not the anger butthe astonishment; at least it is our astonishment at their astonishment. We might believe ourselves in the view that a Jew is an Englishman;but there was no reason why they should regard him asan Englishman, since they already recognised him as a Jew. This is the whole present problem of the Jew in Palestine;and it must be solved either by the logic of Zionism or the logicof purely English supremacy and, impartiality; and not by whatseems to everybody in Palestine a monstrous muddle of the two. But of course it is not only the peril in Palestine that has madethe realisation of the Jewish problem, which once suffered allthe dangers of a fad, suffer the opposite dangers of a fashion. The same journalists who politely describe Jews as Russians arenow very impolitely describing certain Russians who are Jews. Many who had no particular objection to Jews as Capitalistshave a very great objection to them as Bolshevists. Those whohad an innocent unconsciousness of the nationality of Eckstein, even when he called himself Eckstein, have managed to discoverthe nationality of Braunstein, even, when he calls, himself Trotsky. And much of this peril also might easily have been lessened, by the simple proposal to call men and things by their own names. I will confess, however, that I have no very full sympathy withthe new Anti-Semitism which is merely Anti-Socialism. There are good, honourable and magnanimous Jews of every type and rank, there are manyto whom I am greatly attached among my own friends in my own rank;but if I have to make a general choice on a general chance amongdifferent types of Jews, I have much more sympathy with the Jewwho is revolutionary than the Jew who is plutocratic. In other words, I have much more sympathy for the Israelite we are beginning to reject, than for the Israelite we have already accepted. I have more respectfor him when he leads some sort of revolt, however narrow and anarchic, against the oppression of the poor, than when he is safe at the headof a great money-lending business oppressing the poor himself. It is not the poor aliens, but the rich aliens I wish we had excluded. I myself wholly reject Bolshevism, not because its actionsare violent, but because its very thought is materialistic and mean. And if this preference is true even of Bolshevism, it is ten timestruer of Zionism. It really seems to me rather hard that the fullstorm of fury should have burst about the Jews, at the very momentwhen some of them at least have felt the call of a far cleaner ideal;and that when we have tolerated their tricks with our country, we should turn on them precisely when they seek in sincerityfor their own. But in order to judge this Jewish possibility, we must understandmore fully the nature of the Jewish problem. We must consider itfrom the start, because there are still many who do not know thatthere is a Jewish problem. That problem has its proof, of course, in the history of the Jew, and the fact that he came from the East. A Jew will sometimes complain of the injustice of describinghim as a man of the East; but in truth another very realinjustice may be involved in treating him as a man of the West. Very often even the joke against the Jew is rather a joke againstthose who have made the joke; that is, a joke against what theyhave made out of the Jew. This is true especially, for instance, of many points of religion and ritual. Thus we cannot help feeling, for instance, that there is something a little grotesque aboutthe Hebrew habit of putting on a top-hat as an act of worship. It is vaguely mixed up with another line of humour, about anotherclass of Jew, who wears a large number of hats; and who must nottherefore be credited with an extreme or extravagant religious zeal, leading him to pile up a pagoda of hats towards heaven. To Western eyes, in Western conditions, there really is somethinginevitably fantastic about this formality of the synagogue. But we ought to remember that we have made the Western conditionswhich startle the Western eyes. It seems odd to wear a modern top-hatas if it were a mitre or a biretta; it seems quainter still when the hatis worn even for the momentary purpose of saying grace before lunch. It seems quaintest of all when, at some Jewish luncheon parties, a tray of hats is actually handed round, and each guest helpshimself to a hat as a sort of _hors d'oeuvre_. All this couldeasily be turned into a joke; but we ought to realise that the jokeis against ourselves. It is not merely we who make fun of it, but we who have made it funny. For, after all, nobody canpretend that this particular type of head-dress is a part of thatuncouth imagery "setting painting and sculpture at defiance"which Renan remarked in the tradition of Hebrew civilisation. Nobody can say that a top-hat was among the strange symbolic utensilsdedicated to the obscure service of the Ark; nobody can supposethat a top-hat descended from heaven among the wings and wheelsof the flying visions of the Prophets. For this wild vision the Westis entirely responsible. Europe has created the Tower of Giotto;but it has also created the topper. We of the West must bearthe burden, as best we may, both of the responsibility and of the hat. It is solely the special type and shape of hat that makes the Hebrewritual seem ridiculous. Performed in the old original Hebrewfashion it is not ridiculous, but rather if anything sublime. For the original fashion was an oriental fashion; and the Jewsare orientals; and the mark of all such orientals is the wearingof long and loose draperies. To throw those loose draperiesover the head is decidedly a dignified and even poetic gesture. One can imagine something like justice done to its majestyand mystery in one of the great dark drawings of William Blake. It may be true, and personally I think it is true, that the Hebrewcovering of the head signifies a certain stress on the fear of God, which is the beginning of wisdom, while the Christian uncoveringof the head suggests rather the love of God that is the end of wisdom. But this has nothing to do with the taste and dignity of the ceremony;and to do justice to these we must treat the Jew as an oriental;we must even dress him as an oriental. I have only taken this as one working example out of many thatwould point to the same conclusion. A number of points uponwhich the unfortunate alien is blamed would be much improvedif he were, not less of an alien, but rather more of an alien. They arise from his being too like us, and too little like himself. It is obviously the case, for instance, touching that vivid vulgarityin clothes, and especially the colours of clothes, with which a certainsort of Jews brighten the landscape or seascape at Margate or manyholiday resorts. When we see a foreign gentleman on Brighton Pierwearing yellow spats, a magenta waistcoat, and an emerald green tie, we feel that he has somehow missed certain fine shades of socialsensibility and fitness. It might considerably surprise the companyon Brighton Pier, if he were to reply by solemnly unwinding hisgreen necktie from round his neck, and winding it round his head. Yet the reply would be the right one; and would be equally logicaland artistic. As soon as the green tie had become a green turban, it might look as appropriate and even attractive as the green turbanof any pilgrim of Mecca or any descendant of Mahomet, who walkswith a stately air through the streets of Jaffa or Jerusalem. The bright colours that make the Margate Jews hideous are no brighterthan those that make the Moslem crowd picturesque. They are only wornin the wrong place, in the wrong way, and in conjunction with a typeand cut of clothing that is meant to be more sober and restrained. Little can really be urged against him, in that respect, except that his artistic instinct is rather for colour than form, especially of the kind that we ourselves have labelled good form. This is a mere symbol, but it is so suitable a symbol that I haveoften offered it symbolically as a solution of the Jewish problem. I have felt disposed to say: let all liberal legislation stand, let all literal and legal civic equality stand; let a Jew occupy anypolitical or social position which he can gain in open competition;let us not listen for a moment to any suggestions of reactionaryrestrictions or racial privilege. Let a Jew be Lord Chief justice, if his exceptional veracity and reliability have clearly markedhim out for that post. Let a Jew be Archbishop of Canterbury, if our national religion has attained to that receptivebreadth that would render such a transition unobjectionableand even unconscious. But let there be one single-clause bill;one simple and sweeping law about Jews, and no other. Be it enacted, by the King's Most Excellent Majesty, by and withthe advice of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and the Commons inParliament assembled, that every Jew must be dressed like an Arab. Let him sit on the Woolsack, but let him sit there dressed as an Arab. Let him preach in St. Paul's Cathedral, but let him preach theredressed as an Arab. It is not my point at present to dwell onthe pleasing if flippant fancy of how much this would transformthe political scene; of the dapper figure of Sir Herbert Samuelswathed as a Bedouin, or Sir Alfred Mond gaining a yet greatergrandeur from the gorgeous and trailing robes of the East. If my image is quaint my intention is quite serious; and the pointof it is not personal to any particular Jew. The point appliesto any Jew, and to our own recovery of healthier relations with him. The point is that we should know where we are; and he would knowwhere he is, which is in a foreign land. This is but a parenthesis and a parable, but it brings us tothe concrete controversial matter which is the Jewish problem. Only a few years ago it was regarded as a mark of a blood-thirstydisposition to admit that the Jewish problem was a problem, or even that the Jew was a Jew. Through much misunderstanding certainfriends of mine and myself have persisted in disregarding the silencethus imposed; but facts have fought for us more effectively than words. By this time nobody is more conscious of the Jewish problemthan the most intelligent and idealistic of the Jews. The follyof the fashion by which Jews often concealed their Jewish names, must surely be manifest by this time even to those who concealed them. To mention but one example of the way in which this fictionfalsified the relations of everybody and everything, it is enoughto note that it involved the Jews themselves in a quite newand quite needless unpopularity in the first years of the war. A poor little Jewish tailor, who called himself by a German name merelybecause he lived for a short time in a German town, was instantlymobbed in Whitechapel for his share in the invasion of Belgium. He was cross-examined about why he had damaged the tower of Rheims;and talked to as if he had killed Nurse Cavell with his own pairof shears. It was very unjust; quite as unjust as it would be to askBethmann-Hollweg why he had stabbed Eglon or hewn Agag in pieces. But it was partly at least the fault of the Jew himself, and of the whole of that futile and unworthy policy which had ledhim to call himself Bernstein when his name was Benjamin. In such cases the Jews are accused of all sorts of faultsthey have not got; but there are faults that they have got. Some of the charges against them, as in the cases I have quotedconcerning religious ritual and artistic taste, are due merelyto the false light in which they are regarded. Other faultsmay also be due to the false position in which they are placed. But the faults exist; and nothing was ever more dangerous to everybodyconcerned than the recent fashion of denying or ignoring them. It was done simply by the snobbish habit of suppressing the experienceand evidence of the majority of people, and especially of the majorityof poor people. It was done by confining the controversy to a smallworld of wealth and refinement, remote from all the real facts involved. For the rich are the most ignorant people on earth, and the bestthat can be said for them, in cases like these, is that theirignorance often reaches the point of innocence. I will take a typical case, which sums up the whole of thisabsurd fashion. There was a controversy in the columnsof an important daily paper, some time ago, on the subjectof the character of Shylock in Shakespeare. Actors and authorsof distinction, including some of the most brilliant of living Jews, argued the matter from the most varied points of view. Some said that Shakespeare was prevented by the prejudicesof his time from having a complete sympathy with Shylock. Some said that Shakespeare was only restrained by fear of the powersof his time from expressing his complete sympathy with Shylock. Some wondered how or why Shakespeare had got hold of such a queerstory as that of the pound of flesh, and what it could possibly haveto do with so dignified and intellectual a character as Shylock. In short, some wondered why a man of genius should be so muchof an Anti-Semite, and some stoutly declared that he musthave been a Pro-Semite. But all of them in a sense admittedthat they were puzzled as to what the play was about. The correspondence filled column after column and went on for weeks. And from one end of that correspondence to the other, no humanbeing even so much as mentioned the word "usury. " It is exactlyas if twenty clever critics were set down to talk for a month aboutthe play of Macbeth, and were all strictly forbidden to mentionthe word "murder. " The play called _The Merchant of Venice_ happens to be about usury, and its story is a medieval satire on usury. It is the fashionto say that it is a clumsy and grotesque story; but as a fact itis an exceedingly good story. It is a perfect and pointed storyfor its purpose, which is to convey the moral of the story. And themoral is that the logic of usury is in its nature at war with life, and might logically end in breaking into the bloody house of life. In other words, if a creditor can always claim a man's tools or aman's home, he might quite as justly claim one of his arms or legs. This principle was not only embodied in medieval satires but in verysound medieval laws, which set a limit on the usurer who was tryingto take away a man's livelihood, as the usurer in the play is tryingto take away a man's life. And if anybody thinks that usury cannever go to lengths wicked enough to be worthy of so wild an image, then that person either knows nothing about it or knows too much. He is either one of the innocent rich who have never been the victimsof money-lenders, or else one of the more powerful and influentialrich who are money-lenders themselves. All this, I say, is a fact that must be faced, but there is another sideto the case, and it is this that the genius of Shakespeare discovered. What he did do, and what the medieval satirist did not do, was to attemptto understand Shylock; in the true sense to sympathise with Shylockthe money-lender, as he sympathised with Macbeth the murderer. It was not to deny that the man was an usurer, but to assertthat the usurer was a man. And the Elizabethan dramatist doesmake him a man, where the medieval satirist made him a monster. Shakespeare not only makes him a man but a perfectlysincere and self-respecting man. But the point is this:that he is a sincere man who sincerely believes in usury. He is a self-respecting man who does not despise himselffor being a usurer. In one word, he regards usury as normal. In that word is the whole problem of the popular impression of the Jews. What Shakespeare suggested about the Jew in a subtle and sympathetic way, millions of plain men everywhere would suggest about him in arough and ready way. Regarding the Jew in relation to his ideasabout interest, they think either that he is simply immoral;or that if he is moral, then he has a different morality. There is a great deal more to be said about how far this is true, and about what are its causes and excuses if it is true. But it is an old story, surely, that the worst of all cures isto deny the disease. To recognise the reality of the Jewish problem is very vital foreverybody and especially vital for Jews. To pretend that there is noproblem is to precipitate the expression of a rational impatience, which unfortunately can only express itself in the rather irrationalform of Anti-Semitism. In the controversies of Palestine and Syria, for instance, it is very common to hear the answer that the Jew is noworse than the Armenian. The Armenian also is said to be unpopularas a money-lender and a mercantile upstart; yet the Armenian figuresas a martyr for the Christian faith and a victim of the Moslem fury. But this is one of those arguments which really carry their own answer. It is like the sceptical saying that man is only an animal, which of itself provokes the retort, "What an animal!"The very similarity only emphasises the contrast. Is it seriouslysuggested that we can substitute the Armenian for the Jew inthe study of a world-wide problem like that of the Jews? Could wetalk of the competition of Armenians among Welsh shop-keepers, or of the crowd of Armenians on Brighton Parade? Can Armenian usurybe a common topic of talk in a camp in California and in a clubin Piccadilly? Does Shakespeare show us a tragic Armenian toweringover the great Venice of the Renascence? Does Dickens show usa realistic Armenian teaching in the thieves' kitchens of the slums?When we meet Mr. Vernon Vavasour, that brilliant financier, do wespeculate on the probability of his really having an Armenian nameto match his Armenian nose? Is it true, in short, that all sortsof people, from the peasants of Poland to the peasants of Portugal, can agree more or less upon the special subject of Armenia? Obviously itis not in the least true; obviously the Armenian question is onlya local question of certain Christians, who may be more avariciousthan other Christians. But it is the truth about the Jews. It is only half the truth, and one which by itself would be very unjustto the Jews. But it is the truth, and we must realise it as sharplyand clearly as we can. The truth is that it is rather strangethat the Jews should be so anxious for international agreements. For one of the few really international agreements is a suspicionof the Jews. A more practical comparison would be one between the Jewsand gipsies; for the latter at least cover several countries, and can be tested by the impressions of very different districts. And in some preliminary respects the comparison is really useful. Both races are in different ways landless, and therefore indifferent ways lawless. For the fundamental laws are land laws. In both cases a reasonable man will see reasons for unpopularity, without wishing to indulge any task for persecution. In both cases he will probably recognise the reality of a racial fault, while admitting that it may be largely a racial misfortune. That is to say, the drifting and detached condition may be largelythe cause of Jewish usury or gipsy pilfering; but it is not common senseto contradict the general experience of gipsy pilfering or Jewish usury. The comparison helps us to clear away some of the cloudy evasionsby which modern men have tried to escape from that experience. It is absurd to say that people are only prejudiced against the moneymethods of the Jews because the medieval church has left behind a hatredof their religion. We might as well say that people only protectthe chickens from the gipsies because the medieval church undoubtedlycondemned fortune-telling. It is unreasonable for a Jew to complainthat Shakespeare makes Shylock and not Antonio the ruthless money-lender;or that Dickens makes Fagin and not Sikes the receiver of stolen goods. It is as if a gipsy were to complain when a novelist describes a childas stolen by the gipsies, and not by the curate or the mothers' meeting. It is to complain of facts and probabilities. There may be good gipsies;there may be good qualities which specially belong to them as gipsies;many students of the strange race have, for instance, praised acertain dignity and self-respect among the women of the Romany. But no student ever praised them for an exaggerated respectfor private property, and the whole argument about gipsy theft canbe roughly repeated about Hebrew usury. Above all, there is oneother respect in which the comparison is even more to the point. It is the essential fact of the whole business, that the Jews do notbecome national merely by becoming a political part of any nation. We might as well say that the gipsies had villas in Clapham, when their caravans stood on Clapham Common. But, of course, even this comparison between the two wandering peoplesfails in the presence of the greater problem. Here again even the attemptat a parallel leaves the primary thing more unique. The gipsies donot become municipal merely by passing through a number of parishes, and it would seem equally obvious that a Jew need not become Englishmerely by passing through England on his way from Germany to America. But the gipsy not only is not municipal, but he is not called municipal. His caravan is not immediately painted outside with the number and nameof 123 Laburnam Road, Clapham. The municipal authorities generallynotice the wheels attached to the new cottage, and therefore do notfall into the error. The gipsy may halt in a particular parish, but he is not as a rule immediately made a parish councillor. The cases in which a travelling tinker has been suddenly madethe mayor of an important industrial town must be comparatively rare. And if the poor vagabonds of the Romany blood are bullied by mayorsand magistrates, kicked off the land by landlords, pursued by policemenand generally knocked about from pillar to post, nobody raisesan outcry that _they_ are the victims of religious persecution;nobody summons meetings in public halls, collects subscriptionsor sends petitions to parliament; nobody threatens anybody elsewith the organised indignation of the gipsies all over the world. The case of the Jew in the nation is very different fromthat of the tinker in the town. The moral elements that canbe appealed to are of a very different style and scale. No gipsies are millionaires. In short, the Jewish problem differs from anything like the gipsyproblem in two highly practical respects. First, the Jews alreadyexercise colossal cosmopolitan financial power. And second, the modern societies they live in also grant them vital forms of nationalpolitical power. Here the vagrant is already as rich as a miserand the vagrant is actually made a mayor. As will be seen shortly, there is a Jewish side of the story which leads really to the sameending of the story; but the truth stated here is quite independentof any sympathetic or unsympathetic view of the race in question. It is a question of fact, which a sensible Jew can afford to recognise, and which the most sensible Jews do very definitely recognise. It is really irrational for anybody to pretend that the Jewsare only a curious sect of Englishmen, like the Plymouth Brothersor the Seventh Day Baptists, in the face of such a simple factas the family of Rothschild. Nobody can pretend that suchan English sect can establish five brothers, or even cousins, in the five great capitals of Europe. Nobody can pretend that theSeventh Day Baptists are the seven grandchildren of one grandfather, scattered systematically among the warring nations of the earth. Nobody thinks the Plymouth Brothers are literally brothers, or that they are likely to be quite as powerful in Paris or inPetrograd as in Plymouth. The Jewish problem can be stated very simply after all. It is normal for the nation to contain the family. With the Jews the family is generally divided among the nations. This may not appear to matter to those who do not believe in nations, those who really think there ought not to be any nations. But I literally fail to understand anybody who does believe in patriotismthinking that this state of affairs can be consistent with it. It is in its nature intolerable, from a national standpoint, that a man admittedly powerful in one nation should be boundto a man equally powerful in another nation, by ties more privateand personal even than nationality. Even when the purpose is notany sort of treachery, the very position is a sort of treason. Given the passionately patriotic peoples of the west of Europe especially, the state of things cannot conceivably be satisfactory to a patriot. But least of all can it conceivably be satisfactory to a Jewish patriot;by which I do not mean a sham Englishman or a sham Frenchman, but a man who is sincerely patriotic for the historic and highlycivilised nation of the Jews. For what may be criticised here as Anti-Semitism is only the negativeside of Zionism. For the sake of convenience I have begun by statingit in terms of the universal popular impression which some calla popular prejudice. But such a truth of differentiation is equallytrue on both its different sides. Suppose somebody proposes to mix upEngland and America, under some absurd name like the Anglo-Saxon Empire. One man may say, "Why should the jolly English inns and villagesbe swamped by these priggish provincial Yankees?" Another may say, "Why should the real democracy of a young country be tied to yoursnobbish old squirarchy?" But both these views are only versionsof the same view of a great American: "God never made one peoplegood enough to rule another. " The primary point about Zionism is that, whether it is right or wrong, it does offer a real and reasonable answer both to Anti-Semitismand to the charge of Anti-Semitism. The usual phrases aboutreligious persecution and racial hatred are not reasonable answers, or answers at all. These Jews do not deny that they are Jews;they do not deny that Jews may be unpopular; they do not deny that theremay be other than superstitious reasons for their unpopularity. They are not obliged to maintain that when a Piccadilly dandy talksabout being in the hands of the Jews he is moved by the theologicalfanaticism that prevails in Piccadilly; or that when a silly youth onDerby Day says he was done by a dirty Jew, he is merely conforming to thatChristian orthodoxy which is one of the strict traditions of the Turf. They are not, like some other Jews, forced to pay so extravaganta compliment to the Christian religion as to suppose it the rulingmotive of half the discontented talk in clubs and public-houses, of nearly every business man who suspects a foreign financier, or nearly every working man who grumbles against the localpawn-broker. Religious mania, unfortunately, is not so common. The Zionists do not need to deny any of these things;what they offer is not a denial but a diagnosis and a remedy. Whether their diagnosis is correct, whether their remedyis practicable, we will try to consider later, with somethinglike a fair summary of what is to be said on both sides. But their theory, on the face of it, is perfectly reasonable. It is the theory that any abnormal qualities in the Jews are dueto the abnormal position of the Jews. They are traders ratherthan producers because they have no land of their own fromwhich to produce, and they are cosmopolitans rather than patriotsbecause they have no country of their own for which to be patriotic. They can no more become farmers while they are vagrant than theycould have built the Temple of Solomon while they were buildingthe Pyramids of Egypt. They can no more feel the full streamof nationalism while they wander in the desert of nomadism thanthey could bathe in the waters of Jordan while they were weepingby the waters of Babylon. For exile is the worst kind of bondage. In insisting upon that at least the Zionists have insisted upona profound truth, with many applications to many other moral issues. It is true that for any one whose heart is set on a particularhome or shrine, to be locked out is to be locked in. The narrowest possible prison for him is the whole world. It will be well to notice briefly, however, how the principleapplies to the two Anti-Semitic arguments already considered. The first is the charge of usury and unproductive loans, the secondthe charge either of treason or of unpatriotic detachment. The charge of usury is regarded, not unreasonably, as onlya specially dangerous development of the general charge ofuncreative commerce and the refusal of creative manual exercise;the unproductive loan is only a minor form of the unproductive labour. It is certainly true that the latter complaint is, if possible, commoner than the former, especially in comparatively simplecommunities like those of Palestine. A very honest Moslem Arabsaid to me, with a singular blend of simplicity and humour, "A Jewdoes not work; but he grows rich. You never see a Jew working;and yet they grow rich. What I want to know is, why do we notall do the same? Why do we not also do this and become rich?"This is, I need hardly say, an over-simplification. Jews oftenwork hard at some things, especially intellectual things. But the same experience which tells us that we have known many industriousJewish scholars, Jewish lawyers, Jewish doctors, Jewish pianists, chess-players and so on, is an experience which cuts both ways. The same experience, if carefully consulted, will probably tell usthat we have not known personally many patient Jewish ploughmen, many laborious Jewish blacksmiths, many active Jewish hedgersand ditchers, or even many energetic Jewish hunters and fishermen. In short, the popular impression is tolerably true to life, as popular impressions very often are; though it is not fashionableto say so in these days of democracy and self-determination. Jewsdo not generally work on the land, or in any of the handicraftsthat are akin to the land; but the Zionists reply that this isbecause it can never really be their own land. That is Zionism, and that has really a practical place in the past and future of Zion. Patriotism is not merely dying for the nation. It is dyingwith the nation. It is regarding the fatherland not merelyas a real resting-place like an inn, but as a final resting-place, like a house or even a grave. Even the most Jingo of the Jewsdo not feel like this about their adopted country; and I doubtif the most intelligent of the Jews would pretend that they did. Even if we can bring ourselves to believe that Disraeli livedfor England, we cannot think that he would have died with her. If England had sunk in the Atlantic he would not have sunk with her, but easily floated over to America to stand for the Presidency. Even if we are profoundly convinced that Mr. Beit or Mr. Ecksteinhad patriotic tears in his eyes when he obtained a gold concessionfrom Queen Victoria, we cannot believe that in her absence he wouldhave refused a similar concession from the German Emperor. When the Jew in France or in England says he is a good patriothe only means that he is a good citizen, and he would put itmore truly if he said he was a good exile. Sometimes indeedhe is an abominably bad citizen, and a most exasperating andexecrable exile, but I am not talking of that side of the case. I am assuming that a man like Disraeli did really make a romanceof England, that a man like Dernburg did really make a romanceof Germany, and it is still true that though it was a romance, they would not have allowed it to be a tragedy. They would haveseen that the story had a happy ending, especially for themselves. These Jews would not have died with any Christian nation. But the Jews did die with Jerusalem. That is the first andlast great truth in Zionism. Jerusalem was destroyed and Jewswere destroyed with it, men who cared no longer to live becausethe city of their faith had fallen. It may be questioned whetherall the Zionists have all the sublime insanity of the Zealots. But at least it is not nonsense to suggest that the Zionistsmight feel like this about Zion. It is nonsense to suggestthat they would ever feel like this about Dublin or Moscow. And so far at least the truth both in Semitism and Anti-Semitismis included in Zionism. It is a commonplace that the infamous are more famous than the famous. Byron noted, with his own misanthropic moral, that we think moreof Nero the monster who killed his mother than of Nero the nobleRoman who defeated Hannibal. The name of Julian more often suggestsJulian the Apostate than Julian the Saint; though the latter crownedhis canonisation with the sacred glory of being the patron saintof inn-keepers. But the best example of this unjust historicalhabit is the most famous of all and the most infamous of all. If there is one proper noun which has become a common noun, if there is one name which has been generalised till it means a thing, it is certainly the name of Judas. We should hesitate perhaps to callit a Christian name, except in the more evasive form of Jude. And even that, as the name of a more faithful apostle, is anotherillustration of the same injustice; for, by comparison with the other, Jude the faithful might almost be called Jude the obscure. The critic who said, whether innocently or ironically, "What wickedmen these early Christians were!" was certainly more successfulin innocence than in irony; for he seems to have been innocent orignorant of the whole idea of the Christian communion. Judas Iscariotwas one of the very earliest of all possible early Christians. And the whole point about him was that his hand was in the same dish;the traitor is always a friend, or he could never be a foe. But the point for the moment is merely that the name is knowneverywhere merely as the name of a traitor. The name of Judas nearlyalways means Judas Iscariot; it hardly ever means Judas Maccabeus. And if you shout out "Judas" to a politician in the thick of a politicaltumult, you will have some difficulty in soothing him afterwards, with the assurance that you had merely traced in him somethingof that splendid zeal and valour which dragged down the tyrannyof Antiochus, in the day of the great deliverance of Israel. Those two possible uses of the name of Judas would give us yet anothercompact embodiment of the case for Zionism. Numberless internationalJews have gained the bad name of Judas, and some have certainlyearned it. If you have gained or earned the good name of Judas, it can quite fairly and intelligently be affirmed that this was notthe fault of the Jews, but of the peculiar position of the Jews. A man can betray like Judas Iscariot in another man's house;but a man cannot fight like Judas Maccabeus for another man's temple. There is no more truly rousing revolutionary story amid all the storiesof mankind, there is no more perfect type of the element of chivalryin rebellion, than that magnificent tale of the Maccabee who stabbedfrom underneath the elephant of Antiochus and died under the fallof that huge and living castle. But it would be unreasonable to askMr. Montagu to stick a knife into the elephant on which Lord Curzon, let us say, was riding in all the pomp of Asiatic imperialism. For Mr. Montagu would not be liberating his own land; and thereforehe naturally prefers to interest himself either in operations in silveror in somewhat slower and less efficient methods of liberation. In short, whatever we may think of the financial or social servicessuch as were rendered to England in the affair of Marconi, or to Francein the affair of Panama, it must be admitted that these exhibita humbler and more humdrum type of civic duty, and do not remindus of the more reckless virtues of the Maccabees or the Zealots. A man may be a good citizen of anywhere, but he cannot be a nationalhero of nowhere; and for this particular type of patriotic passionit is necessary to have a _patria_. The Zionists therefore aremaintaining a perfectly reasonable proposition, both about the chargeof usury and the charge of treason, if they claim that both couldbe cured by the return to a national soil as promised in Zionism. Unfortunately they are not always reasonable about their ownreasonable proposition. Some of them have a most unlucky habitof ignoring, and therefore implicitly denying, the very evilthat they are wisely trying to cure. I have already remarkedthis irritating innocence in the first of the two questions;the criticism that sees everything in Shylock except the point of him, or the point of his knife. How in the politics of Palestine at thismoment this first question is in every sense the primary question. Palestine has hardly as yet a patriotism to be betrayed; but itcertainly has a peasantry to be oppressed, and especially to beoppressed as so many peasantries have been with usury and forestalling. The Syrians and Arabs and all the agricultural and pastoral populationsof Palestine are, rightly or wrongly, alarmed and angered at the adventof the Jews to power; for the perfectly practical and simplereason of the reputation which the Jews have all over the world. It is really ridiculous in people so intelligent as the Jews, and especially so intelligent as the Zionists, to ignore so enormousand elementary a fact as that reputation and its natural results. It may or may not in this case be unjust; but in any case itis not unnatural. It may be the result of persecution, but itis one that has definitely resulted. It may be the consequenceof a misunderstanding; but it is a misunderstanding that must itselfbe understood. Rightly or wrongly, certain people in Palestinefear the coming of the Jews as they fear the coming of the locusts;they regard them as parasites that feed on a community by athousand methods of financial intrigue and economic exploitation. I could understand the Jews indignantly denying this, or eagerlydisproving it, or best of all, explaining what is true in it whileexposing what is untrue. What is strange, I might almost say weird, about the attitude of some quite intelligent and sincere Zionists, is that they talk, write and apparently think as if there were nosuch thing in the world. I will give one curious example from one of the best and mostbrilliant of the Zionists. Dr. Weizmann is a man of large mindand human sympathies; and it is difficult to believe that any onewith so fine a sense of humanity can be entirely empty of anythinglike a sense of humour. Yet, in the middle of a very temperateand magnanimous address on "Zionist Policy, " he can actuallysay a thing like this, "The Arabs need us with our knowledge, and our experience and our money. If they do not have us theywill fall into the hands of others, they will fall among sharks. "One is tempted for the moment to doubt whether any one elsein the world could have said that, except the Jew with his strangemixture of brilliancy and blindness, of subtlety and simplicity. It is much as if President Wilson were to say, "Unless America dealswith Mexico, it will be dealt with by some modern commercial power, that has trust-magnates and hustling millionaires. " But wouldPresident Wilson say it? It is as if the German Chancellor had said, "We must rush to the rescue of the poor Belgians, or they may be putunder some system with a rigid militarism and a bullying bureaucracy. "But would even a German Chancellor put it exactly like that?Would anybody put it in the exact order of words and structure ofsentence in which Dr. Weizmann has put it? Would even the Turks say, "The Armenians need us with our order and our discipline and our arms. If they do not have us they will fall into the hands of others, they willperhaps be in danger of massacres. " I suspect that a Turk would seethe joke, even if it were as grim a joke as the massacres themselves. If the Zionists wish to quiet the fears of the Arabs, surely thefirst thing to do is to discover what the Arabs are afraid of. And very little investigation will reveal the simple truth that theyare very much afraid of sharks; and that in their book of symbolicor heraldic zoology it is the Jew who is adorned with the dorsal finand the crescent of cruel teeth. This may be a fairy-tale abouta fabulous animal; but it is one which all sorts of races believe, and certainly one which these races believe. But the case is yet more curious than that. These simple tribesare afraid, not only of the dorsal fin and dental arrangementswhich Dr. Weizmann may say (with some justice) that he has not got;they are also afraid of the other things which he says he has got. They may be in error, at the first superficial glance, in mistaking a respectable professor for a shark. But they can hardly be mistaken in attributing to the respectableprofessor what he himself considers as his claims to respect. And as the imagery about the shark may be too metaphoricalor almost mythological, there is not the smallest difficulty instating in plain words what the Arabs fear in the Jews. They fear, in exact terms, their knowledge and their experience and their money. The Arabs fear exactly the three things which he says they need. Only the Arabs would call it a knowledge of financial trickeryand an experience of political intrigue, and the power givenby hoards of money not only of their own but of other peoples. About Dr. Weizmann and the true Zionists this is self-evidently unjust;but about Jewish influence of the more visible and vulgar kindit has to be proved to be unjust. Feeling as I do the forceof the real case for Zionism, I venture most earnestlyto implore the Jews to disprove it, and not to dismiss it. But above all I implore them not to be content with assuring us againand again of their knowledge and their experience and their money. That is what people dread like a pestilence or an earthquake;their knowledge and their experience and their money. It is needless for Dr. Weizmann to tell us that he does not desireto enter Palestine like a Junker or drive thousands of Arabs forciblyout of the land; nobody supposes that Dr. Weizmann looks like a Junker;and nobody among the enemies of the Jews says that they have driventheir foes in that fashion since the wars with the Canaanites. But for the Jews to reassure us by insisting on their own economicculture or commercial education is exactly like the Junkersreassuring us by insisting on the unquestioned supremacy oftheir Kaiser or the unquestioned obedience of their soldiers. Men bar themselves in their houses, or even hide themselvesin their cellars, when such virtues are abroad in the land. In short the fear of the Jews in Palestine, reasonable or unreasonable, is a thing that must be answered by reason. It is idle for the unpopularthing to answer with boasts, especially boasts of the very qualitythat makes it unpopular. But I think it could be answered by reason, or at any rate tested by reason; and the tests by consideration. The principle is still as stated above; that the tests mustnot merely insist on the virtues the Jews do show, but ratherdeal with the particular virtues which they are generally accusedof not showing. It is necessary to understand this more thoroughlythan it is generally understood, and especially better than itis usually stated in the language of fashionable controversy. For the question involves the whole success or failure of Zionism. Many of the Zionists know it; but I rather doubt whether most ofthe Anti-Zionists know that they know it. And some of the phrasesof the Zionists, such as those that I have noted, too often tendto produce the impression that they ignore when they are not ignorant. They are not ignorant; and they do not ignore in practice;even when an intellectual habit makes them seem to ignore in theory. Nobody who has seen a Jewish rural settlement, such as Rishon, can doubt that some Jews are sincerely filled with the visionof sitting under their own vine and fig-tree, and even with itsaccompanying lesson that it is first necessary to grow the fig-treeand the vine. The true test of Zionism may seem a topsy-turvy test. It will not succeed by the number of successes, but ratherby the number of failures, or what the world (and certainlynot least the Jewish world) has generally called failures. It will be tested, not by whether Jews can climb to the topof the ladder, but by whether Jews can remain at the bottom;not by whether they have a hundred arts of becoming important, but by whether they have any skill in the art of remaining insignificant. It is often noted that the intelligent Israelite can rise to positionsof power and trust outside Israel, like Witte in Russia or Rufus Isaacsin England. It is generally bad, I think, for their adopted country;but in any case it is no good for the particular problem of theirown country. Palestine cannot have a population of Prime Ministersand Chief Justices; and if those they rule and judge are not Jews, then we have not established a commonwealth but only an oligarchy. It is said again that the ancient Jews turned their enemiesinto hewers of wood and drawers of water. The modern Jews haveto turn themselves into hewers of wood and drawers of water. If they cannot do that, they cannot turn themselves into citizens, but only into a kind of alien bureaucrats, of all kindsthe most perilous and the most imperilled. Hence a Jewishstate will not be a success when the Jews in it are successful, or even when the Jews in it are statesmen. It will be a successwhen the Jews in it are scavengers, when the Jews in it are sweeps, when they are dockers and ditchers and porters and hodmen. When the Zionist can point proudly to a Jewish navvy who has _not_risen in the world, an under-gardener who is not now taking his easeas an upper-gardener, a yokel who is still a yokel, or even a villageidiot at least sufficiently idiotic to remain in his village, then indeed the world will come to blow the trumpets and liftup the heads of the everlasting gates; for God will have turnedthe captivity of Zion. Zionists of whose sincerity I am personally convinced, and of whose intelligence anybody would be convinced, have toldme that there really is, in places like Rishon, something like abeginning of this spirit; the love of the peasant for his land. One lady, even in expressing her conviction of it, called it "thisvery un-Jewish characteristic. " She was perfectly well aware both ofthe need of it in the Jewish land, and the lack of it in the Jewish race. In short she was well aware of the truth of that seemingly topsy-turvytest I have suggested; that of whether men are worthy to be drudges. When a humorous and humane Jew thus accepts the test, and honestlyexpects the Jewish people to pass it, then I think the claimis very serious indeed, and one not lightly to be set aside. I do certainly think it a very serious responsibility under thecircumstances to set it altogether aside. It is our whole complaintagainst the Jew that he does not till the soil or toil with the spade;it is very hard on him to refuse him if he really says, "Give mea soil and I will till it; give me a spade and I will use it. "It is our whole reason for distrusting him that he cannot really loveany of the lands in which he wanders; it seems rather indefensible to bedeaf to him if he really says, "Give me a land and I will love it. "I would certainly give him a land or some instalment of the land, (in what general sense I will try to suggest a little later) so longas his conduct on it was watched and tested according to the principlesI have suggested. If he asks for the spade he must use the spade, and not merely employ the spade, in the sense of hiring half a hundredmen to use spades. If he asks for the soil he must till the soil;that is he must belong to the soil and not merely make the soilbelong to him. He must have the simplicity, and what many wouldcall the stupidity of the peasant. He must not only call a spadea spade, but regard it as a spade and not as a speculation. By some true conversion the urban and modern man must be notonly on the soil, but of the soil, and free from our urban trickof inventing the word dirt for the dust to which we shall return. He must be washed in mud, that he may be clean. How far this can really happen it is very hard for anybody, especially a casual visitor, to discover in the present crisis. It is admitted that there is much Arab and Syrian labour employed;and this in itself would leave all the danger of the Jewas a mere capitalist. The Jews explain it, however, by sayingthat the Arabs will work for a lower wage, and that this isnecessarily a great temptation to the struggling colonists. In this they may be acting naturally as colonists, but it is nonethe less clear that they are not yet acting literally as labourers. It may not be their fault that they are not proving themselves tobe peasants; but it is none the less clear that this situation in itselfdoes not prove them to be peasants. So far as that is concerned, it still remains to be decided finally whether a Jew will be anagricultural labourer, if he is a decently paid agricultural labourer. On the other hand, the leaders of these local experiments, if they have not yet shown the higher materialism of peasants, most certainly do not show the lower materialism of capitalists. There can be no doubt of the patriotic and even poetic spirit in whichmany of them hope to make their ancient wilderness blossom like the rose. They at least would still stand among the great prophets of Israel, and none the less though they prophesied in vain. I have tried to state fairly the case for Zionism, for the reasonalready stated; that I think it intellectually unjust that any attemptof the Jews to regularise their position should merely be rejectedas one of their irregularities. But I do not disguise the enormousdifficulties of doing it in the particular conditions Of Palestine. In fact the greatest of the real difficulties of Zionism is that ithas to take place in Zion. There are other difficulties, however, which when they are not specially the fault of Zionists arevery much the fault of Jews. The worst is the general impressionof a business pressure from the more brutal and businesslike typeof Jew, which arouses very violent and very just indignation. When I was in Jerusalem it was openly said that Jewish financiershad complained of the low rate of interest at which loans were madeby the government to the peasantry, and even that the governmenthad yielded to them. If this were true it was a heavier reproachto the government even than to the Jews. But the general truthis that such a state of feeling seems to make the simple and solidpatriotism of a Palestinian Jewish nation practically impossible, and forces us to consider some alternative or some compromise. The most sensible statement of a compromise I heard among the Zionistswas suggested to me by Dr. Weizmann, who is a man not only highlyintelligent but ardent and sympathetic. And the phrase he usedgives the key to my own rough conception of a possible solution, though he himself would probably, not accept that solution. Dr. Weizmann suggested, if I understood him rightly, that he didnot think Palestine could be a single and simple national territoryquite in the sense of France; but he did not see why it should notbe a commonwealth of cantons after the manner of Switzerland. Some of these could be Jewish cantons, others Arab cantons, and so on according to the type of population. This is in itselfmore reasonable than much that is suggested on the same side;but the point of it for my own purpose is more particular. This idea, whether it correctly represents Dr. Weizmann's meaningor no, clearly involves the abandonment of the solidarityof Palestine, and tolerates the idea of groups of Jews beingseparated from each other by populations of a different type. Now if once this notion be considered admissible, it seems to mecapable of considerable extension. It seems possible that theremight be not only Jewish cantons in Palestine but Jewish cantonsoutside Palestine, Jewish colonies in suitable and selectedplaces in adjacent parts or in many other parts of the world. They might be affiliated to some official centre in Palestine, or even in Jerusalem, where there would naturally be at least somegreat religious headquarters of the scattered race and religion. The nature of that religious centre it must be for Jews to decide;but I think if I were a Jew I would build the Temple withoutbothering about the site of the Temple. That they shouldhave the old site, of course, is not to be thought of;it would raise a Holy War from Morocco to the marches of China. But seeing that some of the greatest of the deeds of Israel were done, and some of the most glorious of the songs of Israel sung, when their only temple was a box carried about in the desert, I cannot think that the mere moving of the situation of the placeof sacrifice need even mean so much to that historic traditionas it would to many others. That the Jews should have some highplace of dignity and ritual in Palestine, such as a great buildinglike the Mosque of Omar, is certainly right and reasonable;for upon no theory can their historic connection be dismissed. I think it is sophistry to say, as do some Anti-Semites, that the Jews have no more right there than the Jebusites. If there are Jebusites they are Jebusites without knowing it. I think it sufficiently answered in the fine phrase of an English priest, in many ways more Anti-Semitic than I: "The people that remembershas a right. " The very worst of the Jews, as well as the very best, do in some sense remember. They are hated and persecuted andfrightened into false names and double lives; but they remember. They lie, they swindle, they betray, they oppress; but they remember. The more we happen to hate such elements among the Hebrews the morewe admire the manly and magnificent elements among the more vagueand vagrant tribes of Palestine, the more we must admit that paradox. The unheroic have the heroic memory; and the heroic peoplehave no memory. But whatever the Jewish nation might wish to do about a national shrineor other supreme centre, the suggestion for the moment is that somethinglike a Jewish territorial scheme might really be attempted, if we permitthe Jews to be scattered no longer as individuals but as groups. It seems possible that by some such extension of the definition of Zionismwe might ultimately overcome even the greatest difficulty of Zionism, the difficulty of resettling a sufficient number of so large a raceon so small a land. For if the advantage of the ideal to the Jewsis to gain the promised land, the advantage to the Gentiles is to getrid of the Jewish problem, and I do not see why we should obtainall their advantage and none of our own. Therefore I would leaveas few Jews as possible in other established nations, and to theseI would give a special position best described as privilege;some sort of self-governing enclave with special laws and exemptions;for instance, I would certainly excuse them from conscription, which I think a gross injustice in their case. [Footnote: Of coursethe privileged exile would also lose the rights of a native. ]A Jew might be treated as respectfully as a foreign ambassador, but a foreign ambassador is a foreigner. Finally, I would givethe same privileged position to all Jews everywhere, as an alternativepolicy to Zionism, if Zionism failed by the test I have named;the only true and the only tolerable test; if the Jews had notso much failed as peasants as succeeded as capitalists. There is one word to be added; it will be noted that inevitablyand even against some of my own desires, the argument has returnedto that recurrent conclusion, which was found in the Roman Empireand the Crusades. The European can do justice to the Jew;but it must be the European who does it. Such a possibilityas I have thrown out, and any other possibility that any one canthink of, becomes at once impossible without some idea of a generalsuzerainty of Christendom over the lands of the Moslem and the Jew. Personally, I think it would be better if it were a generalsuzerainty of Christendom, rather than a particular supremacyof England. And I feel this, not from a desire to restrainthe English power, but rather from a desire to defend it. I think there is not a little danger to England in the diplomaticsituation involved; but that is a diplomatic question that itis neither within my power or duty to discuss adequately. But if I think it would be wiser for France and England togetherto hold Syria and Palestine together rather than separately, that only completes and clinches the conclusion that has haunted me, with almost uncanny recurrence, since I first saw Jerusalemsitting on the hill like a turreted town in England or in France;and for one moment the dark dome of it was again the Templum Domini, and the tower on it was the Tower of Tancred. Anyhow with the failure of Zionism would fall the lastand best attempt at a rationalistic theory of the Jew. We should be left facing a mystery which no other rationalism hasever come so near to providing within rational cause and cure. Whatever we do, we shall not return to that insular innocence andcomfortable unconsciousness of Christendom, in which the Victorianagnostics could suppose that the Semitic problem was a briefmedieval insanity. In this as in greater things, even if we lostour faith we could not recover our agnosticism. We can neverrecover agnosticism, any more than any other kind of ignorance. We know that there is a Jewish problem; we only hope that thereis a Jewish solution. If there is not, there is no other. We cannot believe again that the Jew is an Englishman with certaintheological theories, any more than we can believe again any other partof the optimistic materialism whose temple is the Albert Memorial. A scheme of guilds may be attempted and may be a failure;but never again can we respect mere Capitalism for its success. An attack may be made on political corruption, and it may be a failure;but never again can we believe that our politics are not corrupt. And so Zionism may be attempted and may be a failure;but never again can we ourselves be at ease in Zion. Or rather, I should say, if the Jew cannot be at ease in Zion wecan never again persuade ourselves that he is at ease out of Zion. We can only salute as it passes that restless and mysterious figure, knowing at last that there must be in him something mystical as wellas mysterious; that whether in the sense of the sorrows of Christor of the sorrows of Cain, he must pass by, for he belongs to God. CONCLUSION To have worn a large scallop shell in my hat in the streets of Londonmight have been deemed ostentatious, to say nothing of carrying a stafflike a long pole; and wearing sandals might have proclaimed ratherthat I had not come from Jerusalem but from Letchworth, which someidentify with the New Jerusalem descending out of heaven from God. Lacking such attributes, I passed through South England as onewho might have come from Ramsgate or from anywhere; and the onlysymbol left to me of my pilgrimage was a cheap ring of metalcoloured like copper and brass. For on it was written in Greekcharacters the word "Jerusalem, " and though it may be less valuablethan a brass nail, I do not think you can buy it in the Strand. All those enormous and everlasting things, all those gates of bronzeand mosaics of purple and peacock colouring, all those chapels of goldand columns of crimson marble, had all shrivelled up and dwindleddown to that one small thread of red metal round my finger. I could not help having a feeling, like Aladdin, that if Irubbed the ring perhaps all those towers would rise again. And there was a sort of feeling of truth in the fancy after all. We talk of the changeless East; but in one sense the impressionof it is really rather changing, with its wandering tribes and itsshifting sands, in which the genii of the East might well buildthe palace or the paradise of a day. As I saw the low and solidEnglish cottages rising around me amid damp delightful thicketsunder rainy skies, I felt that in a deeper sense it is ratherwe who build for permanence or at least for a sort of peace. It is something more than comfort; a relative and reasonable contentment. And there came back on me like a boomerang a rather indescribablethought which had circled round my head through most of my journey;that Christendom is like a gigantic bronze come out of the furnaceof the Near East; that in Asia is only the fire and in Europethe form. The nearest to what I mean was suggested in thatvery striking book _Form and Colour_, by Mr. March Philips. When I spoke of the idols of Asia, many moderns may well have murmuredagainst such a description of the ideals of Buddha or Mrs. Besant. To which I can only reply that I do know a little about the ideals, and I think I prefer the idols. I have far more sympathy withthe enthusiasm for a nice green or yellow idol, with nine armsand three heads, than with the philosophy ultimately representedby the snake devouring his tail; the awful sceptical argumentin a circle by which everything begins and ends in the mind. I would far rather be a fetish worshipper and have a little fun, than be an oriental pessimist expected always to smile like an optimist. Now it seems to me that the fighting Christian creed is the onething that has been in that mystical circle and broken out of it, and become something real as well. It has gone westward by a sortof centrifugal force, like a stone from a sling; and so madethe revolving Eastern mind, as the Franciscan said in Jerusalem, do something at last. Anyhow, although I carried none of the trappings of a pilgrim I feltstrongly disposed to take the privileges of one. I wanted to beentertained at the firesides of total strangers, in the medieval manner, and to tell them interminable tales of my travels. I wanted to lingerin Dover, and try it on the citizens of that town. I nearly gotout of the train at several wayside stations, where I saw secludedcottages which might be brightened by a little news from the Holy Land. For it seemed to me that all my fellow-countrymen must be my friends;all these English places had come much closer together after travelsthat seemed in comparison as vast as the spaces between the stars. The hop-fields of Kent seemed to me like outlying parts of my ownkitchen garden; and London itself to be really situated at London End. London was perhaps the largest of the suburbs of Beaconsfield. By the time I came to Beaconsfield itself, dusk was droppingover the beechwoods and the white cross-roads. The distance seemedto grow deeper and richer with darkness as I went up the longlanes towards my home; and in that distance, as I drew nearer, I heard the barking of a dog.